The loneliest job: Meet a defender of Flock surveillance cameras

Our Take

Credit to 12 News for the framing here: a local official who has to explain, on camera, why he's comfortable putting his constituents under automated watch — while the opposition around him is bipartisan. That word "loneliest" is doing a lot of work. When defending a surveillance program becomes the awkward outlier position, that tells you something about where public sentiment actually sits once people learn what these cameras do.

Councilman Terry's defense will sound familiar to anyone who's followed this fight: it's framed as a tool for solving crimes, not a permanent record of everywhere you drive. But that's exactly the sales pitch Flock gives every city council before the footage retention windows, data-sharing agreements, and mission-creep set in. Bipartisan skepticism isn't happening because people don't want criminals caught — it's happening because Republicans worried about government overreach and Democrats worried about civil liberties are independently arriving at the same conclusion: a network of cameras logging every plate, every trip, indefinitely, is a surveillance infrastructure first and a crime-solving tool second.

If Goodyear is running Flock cameras, they're already on our map — go check what's tracking your own commute. And if you want to make your city council's job a little less lonely on the other side of this debate, our take-action page has the tools to push back before the next contract renewal.