By Jack Freedman, Staff Writer

If you’ve driven around the U.S. in the past year, there is a chance that you have noticed strange, tall, black cameras on the side of the road. These cameras have been supplied by surveillance company Flock Safety and placed in numerous communities, including Belton, seemingly overnight. 

Police and city council members of towns with which Flock has partnered have claimed the cameras keep their towns safe and help identify criminals, but incidents involving Flock have raised eyebrows across the country. 

I believe a more pressing issue is at hand than a few petty criminals, that being the normalization of mass surveillance.

Since Flock’s rise in late 2024, over 6,000 communities across 49 states have purchased their automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras in their towns. They get away with this in larger cities primarily through making friends with mayors. 

Their ALPRs track the license plates of cars and faces of people and keep them in their data banks for up to six months. The governments tell people that if they aren’t criminals that they do not have anything to worry about, negating the simple fact that innocent people aren’t comfortable being spied on in their hometowns. 

The cameras focus more on vehicles than people, which has led to numerous cases of false flagging. Earlier this year, an innocent Florida woman was falsely detained due to her car being incorrectly flagged and was placed in solitary confinement. In a similar incident, the cameras mistook a “7” on a man’s license plate for a “2,” leading to him being detained at gunpoint. In addition to the cameras themselves being faulty, there have been instances of officers misusing them. In Kansas, an officer used one of the cameras to track his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend multiple times. In Temple, there was an officer who resigned in August after it was discovered that he was using the cameras without legitimate law enforcement purpose.

While the majority of officers in the U.S. likely plan to use them ethically, the temptation still exists.

Flock Safety is, in itself, a rather sketchy company. Within a mere nine years since its founding, it has partnered with thousands of communities in the country, even ones that many people would see as insignificant. They acquired companies such as Aerodome, a drone manufacturer, and nearly partnered with Amazon earlier this year, but the deal thankfully never went through. Even their name presents an issue, as it seems to imply that they see humans merely as livestock to be herded by corporate overlords.

Many people across the country have led protests and petitions in the past year advocating for the removal of Flock cameras in their cities. Americans are not comfortable with having their likenesses transferred to data centers, despite officials dismissing them as paranoid. The issue has gotten so bad that an app called DeFlock was created allowing people to log where cameras in their town are located so that they can choose routes that avoid them. Flock themselves issued a cease and desist to DeFlock, but DeFlock prevailed nevertheless.

Thankfully, there has been some significant pushback against Flock in the past year. Many small to medium communities have convinced their city councils to remove them. The most significant victory against the company came in Denver, Colorado, in which all cameras were decommissioned after their contract ended.

In all fairness, not all police departments have abused Flock cameras. During its one year contract with Flock, the Robinson (Texas) Police Department reported a decline in robberies. In Belton, the cameras were used to identify the culprit of a Troy murder on Sept. 17. Still, these are isolated incidents and many argue if they are really worth the harm they do to communities.

In conclusion, Flock Safety and their line of cameras have decreased trust between the people and their governments. They are a threat to our privacy and civil liberties, and it is my opinion that they must put a stop to stalking the innocent.