WATCH LIVE | Grand Rapids Public Safety Committee addresses Flock cameras

Our Take

13 On Your Side's livestream of the Grand Rapids Public Safety Committee meeting is worth watching for one reason above all: it's rare to see a Flock Safety representative and police brass make their case for ALPRs in the same room as the public, on the record. Most of these deployments happen quietly — a council vote buried on a consent agenda, a procurement memo nobody reads. When the company itself shows up to sell the pitch, it's a chance to hear the actual arguments being made for blanket license plate surveillance, and to notice what's missing from them, like independent audits, data-sharing limits, or any real accounting of how many searches are run for stuff that has nothing to do with violent crime.

Credit to 13 On Your Side for carrying the meeting live instead of just summarizing it after the fact. That kind of access matters because these committee presentations are where the framing gets set — 'this is just about solving crimes,' 'the cameras don't do facial recognition,' 'your data is safe' — talking points that rarely get stress-tested in the room. Grand Rapids residents watching this should be asking who else has access to that camera network, how long plate reads are stored, and whether the city will ever revisit the contract once it's locked in.

If you want to see whether Flock cameras are already running in your neighborhood, or in cities like Grand Rapids, check our camera map. And if this meeting leaves you with more questions than answers, our take-action page has tools for pushing your own council to slow down and ask them too.