Los Angeles police tried to get Ring doorbell footage surveilling Black

Our Take

Worldwide News is surfacing something DeFlock readers should already have on their radar: police departments don't need their own cameras when they can just ask you for yours. The LAPD's reported requests for Ring footage tied to Black Lives Matter protests fit a pattern we track constantly — law enforcement treating privately owned camera networks as an on-demand surveillance grid, no warrant required, just a polite email to Amazon or a knock on a homeowner's door.

This matters because the same logic powers Flock Safety's ALPR network. Flock doesn't own the cameras either — it convinces homeowners' associations, small businesses, and city councils to install them, then hands police a searchable database of who drove where and when. Ring footage requests during protests and Flock's growing plate-reading grid are two branches of the same tree: outsourcing mass surveillance to private property so it can bypass the usual constitutional guardrails. When cops can quietly request doorbell video of who showed up to a protest, or query a plate database for who parked near one, the chilling effect on First Amendment activity is identical.

If this story bugs you, don't just watch and scroll — check our camera map to see what's already watching your own block, and hit up our take-action page for concrete steps to push back before your neighborhood's cameras end up in the next protest-surveillance headline.