Are Flock Safety AI Cameras Tracking Your Car 👀

Our Take

Credit to USA Unhinged for putting a number on the scale of this thing: 6,000-plus communities running Flock Safety cameras is not a niche pilot program, it's a de facto national tracking grid built without a single vote in Congress. That's the part these mainstream explainer videos tend to gloss over — this isn't one police department buying a tool, it's a private company stitching together a coast-to-coast surveillance network one city council meeting at a time.

The 'crime-solving tool vs. privacy nightmare' framing the video poses is the right question, but it's a false binary in practice. Nobody disputes that a plate reader can help close a case. The problem is retention, sharing, and access — data that sits for months, gets queried by out-of-state agencies, and can be pulled for reasons that have nothing to do with the crime it was pitched on, from immigration status to reproductive healthcare travel. That's the mission creep watchdogs have been flagging for years, and it doesn't show up in a 60-second AI-narrated recap.

If a video like this makes you wonder whether your own street has one of these cameras, don't just wonder — check our camera map to see what's confirmed near you, and if you want to push back at the local level, our take-action page has the tools to start.