ICE Orders $2M Boston Dynamics Robot Dogs for Deportations

Our Take

Credit to Flock Off for connecting dots that too many outlets leave separate: the same appetite for automated, data-driven enforcement that put Flock Safety cameras on thousands of street corners is the appetite driving agencies toward robotic patrol units. Whether or not every detail of a given procurement story pans out, the trajectory is clear. Public safety budgets are increasingly being spent on hardware that watches, tracks, and flags people without a warrant, a judge, or even a human officer making the first call.

This matters because ALPR networks don't exist in a vacuum. The plate reads, timestamps, and location data that Flock's cameras generate can be queried by federal agencies, including ICE, often with little transparency about who's pulling the data and why. A robot that can patrol a neighborhood is unsettling on its own, but a robot plus a plate-reader network plus a federal data pipeline is a much bigger civil liberties problem than any single device.

We built our map because most people have no idea how dense this coverage already is in their own town. If you want to see what's watching your street, check the map, and if you're ready to push back on your city council or police department, our take-action page has concrete steps you can take this week.