Missouri Department of Public Safety issues new guidelines for Flock cameras, license plate readers

Our Take

Credit to KMBC 9 for flagging this one: Missouri's Department of Public Safety has put out new guidance for agencies running Flock cameras, including a 30-day cap on how long license plate data can be held. On paper, that's progress — a lot of states have no retention limit at all, and some Flock deployments default to keeping scans for a year or more.

But read the fine print. "Guidelines" from a state agency are not the same as a statute passed by the legislature. There's no indication yet of who audits compliance, what happens when a department blows past 30 days, or whether out-of-state data sharing through Flock's network gets reined in at all. Voluntary privacy safeguards tend to work great in press releases and a lot less great when nobody's checking the logs six months later.

Missouri residents deserve to know whether their local police department is even running these cameras, and whether it's actually following the new rules. That starts with transparency, not trust. Check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push for real enforceable limits instead of guidance that can be ignored, our take-action page has steps for getting involved locally.