City spent $2 million on Flock cameras. Now it's writing the rules.

Our Take

Credit to WSAZ NewsChannel 3 for catching what's become a familiar pattern in the Flock Safety playbook: buy first, govern later. A city council approves a seven-figure surveillance contract, cameras go up on street corners, and only afterward does anyone sit down to write the policy that's supposed to limit how the data gets used, who can access it, and how long it's kept. That's not oversight — that's a rubber stamp with a retroactive paper trail.

When the rules get written after the hardware is already humming and feeding plate scans into a nationwide network, residents lose the leverage that actually matters: the chance to say no, or to demand real limits, before the system is locked in. Vendors like Flock know this. Once a city has sunk $2 million into cameras, officials are far more inclined to write permissive policy that justifies the purchase than restrictive policy that admits a mistake.

This is exactly why community pressure has to come before the ribbon-cutting, not after. Check our map to see if your city already has Flock gear installed, and if you want to push back before your council writes its own version of this after-the-fact rulebook, our take-action page has the tools to get started.