Sinclair's 12+ Stations Air IDENTICAL Flock Camera Segment

Our Take

Local news is supposed to mean local reporting, not a script piped down from a corporate parent and read by anchors in a dozen different cities as if it's their own work. That's exactly what the channel Flock Off documented: Sinclair Broadcasting pushing an identical segment across more than a dozen stations, painting anyone who questions automated license plate readers as part of some far-left, pro-China conspiracy. When one company owns nearly 300 stations and can drop the same talking points into markets from coast to coast without labeling it as syndicated content, that's not journalism — it's a press release with a local weather forecast attached.

The irony here is thick. The pushback against Flock Safety isn't coming from a shadowy foreign-backed network — it's coming from ordinary residents, civil liberties groups, and local officials who've discovered these cameras log every car that passes, often with little oversight on who gets access to that data or how long it's kept. Calling that skepticism "pro-China" doesn't refute the concern, it just tries to bury it under a scarier-sounding label. Surveillance companies love it when the conversation shifts from "what happens to my location data" to "whose side are you on."

If a segment like this aired in your city and you want to know whether Flock or similar ALPR systems are already watching your street, check our camera map and see what your local police department has actually signed up for. And if you'd rather not wait for a national broadcaster to tell you how to feel about it, our take-action page has real steps for pushing back at the local level, where these contracts actually get approved.