5 Illinois universities spend thousands on Flock contracts, new report finds
The short version: FOX 32 Chicago reports five Illinois public universities quietly signed Flock Safety contracts worth thousands, expanding campus surveillance with little public debate.
Our Take
Credit to FOX 32 Chicago for digging into campus budgets and finding that nearly half of Illinois' public universities have cut checks to Flock Safety. Campuses are a perfect test case for how surveillance creep happens: administrators pitch it as a safety upgrade, a line item gets approved, and suddenly every car entering a quad is logged in a database that students, parents, and faculty never voted on.
Universities love to frame these deals as routine security spending, but ALPR contracts are never just cameras. They're data-sharing agreements, often with vague retention rules and the potential to feed plate scans into regional or national networks far beyond campus police. Students who think they're walking into a lecture hall are instead walking through a surveillance checkpoint, and most have no idea their movements are being archived for 30 days or longer, or who else can query that data.
If you're on one of these campuses or just want to know what's watching your commute, check our camera map to see what's already been documented nearby. And if your school board or city council hasn't had a public conversation about why it's paying for this, our take-action page has tools to help you start one.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of FOX 32 Chicago, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.