Flock Safety helps stop crime in Illinois

Our Take

This clip, credited to Flock Safety itself and originally aired on WCIA, is exactly what you'd expect: a corporate highlight reel dressed up as local news. Flock knows how to pick its moments — a recovered stolen car, a solved case, a grateful police chief. What you won't hear is any mention of how many plates get scanned, how long that data sits in a database, who else can query it, or what happens when the system gets it wrong.

That's the pattern with nearly every Flock press push: isolated success stories stand in for actual policy scrutiny. There's no discussion of retention periods, no mention of the growing patchwork of agencies sharing access across state lines, and no acknowledgment that Illinois residents are being tracked block by block without ever being asked. A network built to catch a handful of criminals ends up logging the movements of everyone else who happens to drive past a camera.

Before any city council takes Flock's marketing at face value, it's worth checking what's actually been installed in your own backyard on the map, and if you want to push back on unchecked expansion, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting involved locally.