FLOCK CAMERAS Have Made it to MONTANA-And They Are WATCHING YOU
The short version: A Montana creator flags Flock cameras landing in Kalispell—and the fact one's already been vandalized shows locals are noticing before officials explain anything.
Our Take
Credit to the channel Living in Montana for catching this early: Flock Safety's automated license plate readers have now spread to Kalispell, and at least one camera has already been vandalized. That's not an endorsement of property destruction — it's a signal. When people start tampering with a piece of government-adjacent infrastructure before most residents even know it exists, that's a sign the rollout happened with zero real community input, zero public hearing, and zero honest conversation about who gets access to the data these things collect.
Montana likes to think of itself as a place where nobody's watching you drive down Main Street. That illusion is gone the moment one of these poles goes up. Every plate that passes gets logged with a timestamp and GPS location, stored in a database that local police don't fully control and that can be queried by other agencies — including, in some documented cases around the country, federal immigration enforcement — without the city council or the public ever voting on it. 'Nobody's watching you' and 'a camera is reading and storing every car that passes' are two very different promises, and small-town Montana just inherited the second one.
If you live near Kalispell or anywhere else in the state, check our camera map to see what's already been spotted near you, and if you want to push back before this becomes normalized infrastructure instead of a controversy, our take-action page has steps for raising it at the next city council meeting.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Living in Montana, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.