A Michigan police chief wrote that Flock was a permissible use of forfeiture money. It is.

Our Take

Magnetic Norse digs into a story that should make anyone paying attention to ALPR expansion uneasy: Waterford Township residents voted down a police tax by a decisive margin, and the local police chief responded by funding a network of Flock cameras through civil asset forfeiture money instead. As the video notes, this is almost certainly legal. That's exactly the problem.

Forfeiture funds exist in a strange legal gray zone—money and property seized from people, often without a criminal conviction, that police departments can then spend with minimal public oversight. When a community explicitly rejects new police funding at the ballot box and the department simply routes around that decision using cash nobody voted on, you don't get accountability. You get surveillance infrastructure installed against the expressed will of the people who have to live under it.

This is the pattern DeFlock The USA keeps documenting: license plate readers spreading not through open budget debates but through side doors—grants, forfeiture accounts, quiet council votes. Check our camera map to see if Flock has already landed in your area, and if you want to push back before your own town becomes the next Waterford, our take-action page has concrete steps for organizing against it.