Flock Cameras Face Public Wrath For Police Abuse And Civil Liberty Violations

Our Take

Justin (JustinFREAKIN) is riffing on a story we've been watching closely: Wesley Jackson, accused of taking a saw to a Flock ALPR in West Virginia, got an outpouring of internet support in the form of thousands of tongue-in-cheek fake alibis on a local news station's Facebook post. It's absurd, it's funny, and it's also a genuine data point. When 29,000 people rush to "defend" a guy accused of destroying a surveillance camera, that's not random internet chaos — that's a community telling you exactly how it feels about being tracked everywhere it drives.

We're not endorsing vandalism, and neither is Justin — the video is comedy, not a how-to. But the underlying sentiment matters. Flock has spent years selling itself to city councils as a quiet, uncontroversial public-safety upgrade, install a camera, catch some bad guys, no big deal. What's happening in the comments of a small-town news post is proof that plenty of ordinary people don't buy that pitch anymore. They see a private company building a nationwide vehicle-tracking database with little oversight, and they're responding with mockery because the alternative, angry political organizing, hasn't caught up yet in a lot of these towns.

That's exactly why documentation and pressure matter more than viral jokes. If you want to know whether there's a Flock camera on your route, check the map, and if you want to push back on these systems where you live, our take-action page has the tools to do it the boring, effective way — not with a hacksaw, but with public records requests and city council meetings.