Flock security cameras in Kenner prove highly effective in solving murder of Lawrence Herr

Our Take

WGNO-TV's report gives Flock Safety exactly the kind of story it wants told: a tragic murder, a quick resolution, cameras as the hero. We're not disputing that the footage helped investigators in the Lawrence Herr case — local reporters did their job laying out what happened. But "it helped solve a crime" is doing a lot of work in these segments, and it always leaves out the tradeoff: to catch the rare case, every driver in Kenner gets logged, tracked, and stored in a database, every day, whether they're suspected of anything or not.

That's the pitch police departments and Flock's marketing team make in every city that adopts this technology — a single dramatic case study standing in for a cost-benefit analysis that never actually happens in public. No hearing on retention periods, no debate over who else can query the data, no accounting for how often these systems misidentify plates or get used for reasons that have nothing to do with solving murders. A solved case is a headline. A permanent surveillance grid is a policy decision, and residents of Kenner never really got to vote on it.

Credit to WGNO-TV/ABC26/WNOL38 for covering the case, but we'd encourage viewers to ask their own city council the questions the segment doesn't: how many cameras, how long is data kept, who has access, and what oversight actually exists. Check our map to see what's already watching your streets, and hit up take action if you want to push back.