POLICE CHIEF INSTALLS FLOCK CAMERAS WITHOUT NOTIFYING ANYONE, SCREAMS AT CITIZENS WHEN CONFRONTED

Our Take

Credit to YouTuber Devin for catching this on camera, because this is exactly the pattern we track at DeFlock: a police department quietly bolts an ALPR onto a pole, skips the public meeting, skips the council vote, skips the press release — and hopes nobody notices until it's already baked into daily policing. When a chief allegedly starts yelling at the very taxpayers who fund the department rather than answering basic questions about why a camera went up, that's not a PR slip, that's a tell. People who are confident their surveillance program is legal, necessary, and proportionate don't need to raise their voice — they explain themselves.

This matters because ALPR rollouts are almost never put to a real public vote. They get approved in budget line items, justified after the fact with a handful of anecdotes, and then quietly expanded. Residents are left discovering a camera network exists only when they notice the hardware on a pole or get flagged by a reporter's video. That's backwards. Communities deserve to know where these cameras are, who has access to the data, how long it's retained, and who audits the searches before the system goes live, not after a confrontation goes viral.

If this is happening in your town, you're probably not the only one who hasn't been told. Check our camera map to see what's already been documented near you, and if you find something that isn't listed — or if your local department is being just as cagey — head to our take-action page for ways to push for transparency before the next camera goes up without a word to anyone.