Flock Safety Cameras
The short version: Texas Civil Rights Project exposes nearly 3,800 Flock cameras in Houston feeding an 88,000-camera national network with almost no oversight of who's watching or why.
Our Take
The Texas Civil Rights Project is doing exactly what local watchdogs should be doing: counting cameras and asking who gave police permission to build a dragnet this big. Nearly 3,800 Flock units in greater Houston isn't a typo — it's a regional surveillance net that HPD and the Harris County Sheriff can tap into, and through Flock's national sharing network, so can thousands of other agencies pulling from over 88,000 cameras nationwide. Nobody voted on that.
What makes this video worth your time isn't just the scale, it's the accountability vacuum TCRP keeps circling back to. When there's no audit trail, no public log of searches, and no real consequence for pulling footage without a case number attached, 'abuse' stops being hypothetical. It becomes the default setting. Flock's business model also depends on normalizing constant data collection and quietly handing pieces of it to partners — your movements becoming a product, not just a policing tool.
Credit to TCRP for putting a number on something most residents never see coming. If you want to know whether your own block has one of these cameras, check our map, and if you're ready to push back on unchecked deployment in your city, our take-action page has concrete next steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Texas Civil Rights Project, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.