Flock cameras. Surveillance or investigation? #police #flock #lawyer #1984 #law

Our Take

Attorney John Collins frames the Flock debate as a either/or question: are these cameras surveillance, or are they investigation? We'd push back on the premise. Flock's entire pitch to police departments is that mass, always-on plate scanning makes investigation easier — which means the 'investigation' only exists because the surveillance came first. You can't cleanly separate the two when every car on every street gets logged, timestamped, and searchable regardless of whether anyone's suspected of anything.

That's the sleight of hand baked into Flock's marketing and, frankly, into a lot of police department press releases: call it a tool, not a dragnet. But a database that stores months of everyone's movements isn't a targeted investigative technique, it's a permanent record built on the off chance it might someday be useful. Lawyers like Collins raising these questions publicly is valuable, because the legal system is still catching up to what blanket ALPR coverage actually means for the Fourth Amendment and for basic privacy.

We'd encourage viewers to go a step further than the video does and find out how much of this is happening in their own backyard. Check our camera map to see if Flock has already moved into your town, and if you want to push back on unchecked deployment, our take-action page has concrete steps for engaging your local council or police oversight board.