Brendan Keefe: Must See: Flock Safety Calls Police on Reporter Brendan — Part 3/7

Our Take

Credit to Brendan Keefe and the Daily Beltway team for sticking with this story through seven parts. The core incident here is almost comic if it weren't so telling: a company that built its entire business on watching cars move through public space called the cops because someone was watching them install a camera on, you guessed it, a public road. Three Milton, Georgia officers rolled up on a reporter with a press badge, and in the end everyone involved had to admit there was nothing to see — except that Flock Safety doesn't like being looked at.

That double standard is the whole ballgame with ALPR surveillance. Flock's pitch to towns and police departments is that constant tracking of every plate, every driver, every trip is just the cost of modern safety. But when a journalist tries to document how that infrastructure actually gets bolted onto a pole near your house, the company reaches for 911 and locks him out of its own law enforcement conference. If the technology and the rollout process were as benign as the sales deck claims, there'd be no reason to treat a camera on public right-of-way like classified material.

This is exactly why independent tracking of these installations matters — because the company running the largest private ALPR network in the country clearly isn't eager to have outsiders counting its cameras either. Check our map to see what's already been logged near you, and if you want to push back on secretive rollouts in your own town, our take-action page has concrete steps.