Watertown police investigate Flock camera theft
The short version: A Flock camera went missing in Watertown, and police want it back — proof these surveillance boxes are both controversial and vulnerable.
Our Take
WISN 12 News reports that Watertown police are investigating the theft of a Flock Safety camera, one of the automated license plate readers that have been popping up on poles across Wisconsin and the rest of the country with little public debate. We don't know yet who took it or why, and we're not going to guess. But the fact that a city is treating a missing surveillance box as a priority crime worth local news coverage says something about how normalized these devices have become — and how little most residents were ever asked whether they wanted one watching their street.
Whatever the motive behind this particular theft, incidents like this keep putting Flock cameras in headlines for reasons the company would rather avoid: vandalism, theft, hacking concerns, and local pushback. Every one of these stories is a reminder that a private company's hardware is bolted up in public right-of-way, collecting plate data on everyone who drives by, with contracts and policies that most city councils rubber-stamped without much scrutiny.
If you want to know whether one of these cameras is sitting on your own route to work or school, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for the next theft story to spark a conversation in your town, see what you can do right now at our take-action page.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WISN 12 News, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.