Flock Safety Has A New Problem

Our Take

Julian Dorey's clip, pulled from his podcast, frames Flock's current moment as a business problem: Axon and other players reportedly eyeing Flock's police department contracts. That's worth sitting with for a second. The pitch to city councils has always been "public safety," but the reality underneath is a software-and-hardware vendor war for recurring revenue off a nationwide camera network that tracks your car. When competitors start circling, it's because the money is real and the market is still wide open — not because anyone involved is thinking hard about Fourth Amendment limits or data retention policy.

This matters because competition between surveillance vendors doesn't mean less surveillance — it usually means more of it, sold more aggressively, with more features, to more agencies, packaged as the "better" alternative. If Axon or anyone else steps in to replace Flock hardware, the underlying problem doesn't go away: plate-reading cameras logging every vehicle that passes, often with little public oversight, retained and shared across jurisdictions in ways most residents never voted on or even know about. Swap the logo, the dragnet stays.

Credit to Julian Dorey for putting this dynamic in front of a bigger audience — the more people understand this is an industry, not a neutral utility, the better. If you want to see what's already watching your street, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your city not be the next contract up for grabs, our take-action page has steps for pushing back locally.