Flock Safety License Plate Camera Salesman Unaware of 4th Amendment (09-20-2021)
The short version: A 2021 Urbana council clip shows a Flock Safety rep stumbling over basic Fourth Amendment questions about blanket ALPR surveillance, per Check CU.
Our Take
This clip, dug up by the folks at Check CU, is a good reminder that Flock's sales pitch to city councils rarely holds up under basic scrutiny. When residents and council members in Urbana pressed on whether scooping up location data on every driver, guilty or not, squares with the Fourth Amendment, the company's own representative didn't have a real answer. That's not a gotcha moment, it's the whole business model: sell first, worry about constitutional questions later.
This is exactly why local government presentations deserve more skepticism, not less. Flock and similar vendors are counting on city councils to treat ALPR networks as a routine procurement decision, like buying new squad cars, instead of a mass surveillance system that tracks the movements of everyone who drives through town whether or not they're suspected of anything. When the person selling the system can't explain how it complies with constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure, that should be disqualifying, not a footnote.
Four years on, this same dynamic keeps playing out in council chambers across the country. Check out our camera map to see if these systems have landed in your community, and hit up our take-action page if you want to push back before the vote happens, not after.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Check CU, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.