Minneapolis City Council needs go get Flock out of the city
The short version: LibertyForMpls calls out Minneapolis City Council for expanding Flock ALPR coverage with little public debate, and we think residents should be asking harder questions.
Our Take
LibertyForMpls is raising an alarm that should sound familiar to anyone tracking Flock Safety's spread across American cities: a council quietly green-lighting more cameras while the public conversation about what that data actually does lags far behind the hardware rollout. Minneapolis isn't unique here — this is the standard playbook. A small pilot becomes a permanent fixture, then an expansion, each time with the same reassurances about solving crime, and each time with less scrutiny than the last vote.
What makes ALPR expansion different from a lot of other city spending fights is the permanence of the infrastructure once it's in the ground. Every plate scanned becomes a timestamped, geotagged record of where a car was and when, stored and searchable, often shared with other agencies and jurisdictions far outside city limits. That's not a crime-solving tool in the abstract — it's a movement ledger on every driver, regardless of suspicion. Council members approving 'a few more cameras' rarely frame the vote that way, but that's the practical effect.
Credit to LibertyForMpls for putting a local spotlight on a council that keeps saying yes without much public pushback. If you want to see how dense Flock's network already is in your part of Minneapolis — or anywhere else — check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for your council to have this debate on its own timeline, our take-action page has concrete steps for showing up before the next vote.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of LibertyForMpls, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.