Greenville Police On Mitigating Bias With Technology
The short version: Flock's own promo video has Greenville, SC police praising their LPR pilot as 'bias-mitigating,' but the only data behind that claim comes from the vendor itself.
Our Take
Notice who's doing the talking here: this isn't an independent audit, it's a marketing video produced by Flock Safety itself, featuring a police department using Flock's own framework to evaluate Flock's own product. When Chief Thompson and company say the pilot "mitigated bias," that's a conclusion reached inside a closed loop — no outside researchers, no public dataset, no adversarial review. That's not evidence, that's a testimonial with better production values.
Bias claims around ALPR deployment deserve way more scrutiny than a glossy sales reel can offer. These systems log the movements of everyone who drives past a camera, not just suspects, and the question of who gets flagged, stopped, or investigated downstream is exactly the kind of thing that needs transparent, third-party data — arrest rates by neighborhood, demographic breakdowns of hits, false-positive rates — not a department's internal "Strategic Planning and Analysis" unit grading its own homework in partnership with the vendor.
We give Flock credit for at least gesturing at the bias conversation, since plenty of departments don't bother. But until these claims are backed by public, auditable numbers instead of in-house praise, we're filing this under corporate messaging, not accountability. Check our map to see if Greenville-style camera networks have crept into your town, and visit take action if you want to push your local council for real transparency instead of vendor talking points.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.