400% Higher Success Rate: The Tool Changing Quincy’s Crime Fight
The short version: Flock's own promotional video touts Quincy PD's '4x' hit-and-run clearance rate, but the vendor-produced stats come with no independent data to check them against.
Our Take
This one comes straight from Flock Safety's own channel, featuring Quincy Police Chief Mark Kennedy praising the company's license plate readers as a "game changer" for solving shootings, stabbings, and hit-and-runs. It's worth remembering what this video actually is: a marketing reel, not an independent audit. The "400% higher success rate" claim is Flock's framing of Flock's product, with no methodology, no raw numbers, and no outside verification offered to the public.
That matters because these success-story videos are the primary way Flock sells city councils and police departments on blanketing their towns with always-on plate cameras. Nobody doubts that dragnet surveillance can occasionally help close a case — but that's true of almost any mass surveillance tool. The real question communities should be asking is what it costs everyone else: every driver in Quincy gets logged, timestamped, and stored in a database regardless of whether they're suspected of anything, and that data can end up shared with other agencies far beyond the original case.
Chief Kennedy and Quincy PD deserve credit for being transparent that they use the tech — plenty of departments aren't. But a single vendor-supplied statistic shouldn't be the end of the conversation in any town considering this system. Check our camera map to see if Flock has already landed near you, and visit take action if you want to push your local council for real oversight before they sign the contract.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.