Police "FLOCK" Camera Surveillance & Misuse

Our Take

Mak-Tube's short news clip does what a lot of local reporting hasn't bothered to do yet: it puts the words "police," "Flock," and "misuse" in the same sentence. That pairing should be the headline more often. These camera networks were sold to city councils as a tool for finding stolen cars, not as a backdoor log of everywhere a resident drives, who they see, or what church, clinic, or protest they attend. Once that data exists, the "misuse" isn't a bug — it's the predictable outcome of building a system with almost no guardrails.

Short-form videos like this one matter because they reach people who will never read a 40-page audit report or sit through a city council meeting. But a 60-second clip can only gesture at the scale of the problem: thousands of these cameras are already bolted to utility poles and intersection signs across the country, quietly building location histories on ordinary people who've never been charged with anything. We've mapped as many of them as we can find — check our camera map to see what's watching your own neighborhood.

Credit to Mak-Tube for putting this in front of a short-video audience that might otherwise never hear the word "Flock." If the clip left you wanting more than a soundbite, that's the point — head to our take-action page and push your local officials for real transparency and audit logs before you take their word that nothing's being misused.