Flock cameras were installed behind the scenes, Tennessee official says

Our Take

Fox Business sat down with Knox County commissioners Larsen Jay and Andy Fox to hash out a story that's become a familiar pattern across the country: Flock Safety cameras showing up on local roads before the people footing the bill, and living under the lenses, ever got a real say. When elected officials themselves are describing a surveillance rollout as something that happened "behind the scenes," that's not a glitch in the process — that's the business model. Flock's pitch to small departments and counties is speed and convenience, and that speed is exactly what cuts the public out of the conversation.

This matters because license plate readers aren't just catching the occasional stolen car — they're building a searchable, retained record of where everyone drives, every day, whether or not they're suspected of anything. Once that infrastructure is installed quietly, it's politically much harder to question, defund, or remove, even if commissioners later have second thoughts. Tennessee joins a long list of places where local leaders are only now asking the questions that should have come before the contracts were signed.

If you want to see whether this kind of quiet install has happened near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for your own commissioners to find out after the fact, our take-action resources can help you get ahead of it. Credit to Fox Business for putting local officials on record — the more these conversations happen in public, the harder it gets to install first and ask questions never.