COVID relief money allegedly spent on Flock cameras
The short version: Reno residents and The Nevadan are asking tough questions about whether COVID relief dollars quietly bankrolled a Flock Safety ALPR contract.
Our Take
If the reporting from The Nevadan holds up, this is a textbook example of how surveillance infrastructure gets funded: not through a transparent public safety debate, but through pots of money nobody's watching closely. COVID relief funds were meant to keep people housed, fed, and employed through a crisis — not to wire up a city with automated license plate readers that track every car that passes. When emergency dollars get repurposed for permanent surveillance hardware, the public loses twice: once on oversight, and again on the actual spending decision.
Reno's growing opposition isn't an isolated NIMBY complaint — it's part of a national pattern where Flock contracts get pushed through city councils and procurement offices with minimal public input, then get normalized before residents even know the cameras are up. Once that network exists, the data flows to other agencies, gets retained, and gets searched in ways that have nothing to do with the original pitch. Funding source aside, the core question never changes: who approved this, who's auditing it, and who benefits from a city full of plate-reading cameras.
Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and if your city council is quietly approving contracts like Reno's, head to our take-action page for ways to push back before the cameras go up.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Nevadan, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.