Safety or Surveillance: The Debate Over Flock Cameras

Our Take

Michael Smerconish is doing what cable and radio hosts do best: framing a complicated surveillance rollout as a tidy two-sided debate. Safety or privacy, pick a lane. But that framing lets Flock Safety and the police departments buying its cameras off the hook. The real story isn't whether ALPRs can help solve a hit-and-run — sure, sometimes they can. It's that thousands of these cameras now log every plate that passes, whether or not anyone's suspected of anything, and that data gets shared across a nationwide network most drivers have no idea exists.

That's the part these mainstream segments always skip. Once a camera captures your plate, timestamp, and location, it doesn't just help solve the one crime being discussed on air — it becomes a permanent breadcrumb trail. Multiply that by every intersection, every city that signs a Flock contract, and every agency that can query the system, and you've built a de facto mass tracking network with far less oversight than the debate format suggests.

We give Smerconish credit for putting the topic in front of a wider audience than most privacy reporting reaches. But "safety or surveillance" isn't really the choice — you can want safer streets and still object to warrantless, dragnet tracking of everyone's movements. If you want to see how far this network already stretches in your area, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch the debate happen, our take-action guide has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.