Coincidentally, a nearby county has just announced that they have begun installing new Flock cameras [0].
Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."
The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.
EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.
[0] https://www.ketk.com/news/crime-public-safety/new-traffic-ca...
The odds are 100% that it will be abused.
Because they already are
Can you name just one incident of abuse?
https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...
A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.
Before posting that you couldn't Google the Milwaukee cop who got busted for abusing Flock camera access? From just a week ago?
If you want an absolute torrent of abuse search for cops running the IDs of their exes. That's why it's dead certain that Flock cameras will be routinely abused.
So then we need better access controls, and apparently the people who abuse it to stalk exes and such are already being prosecuted.
Doesn’t seem like the technology itself is the core issue here to me.
The only way you could have moved this goal post faster is if you had edited your original comment.
Edward Snowden. Everything after that is a no-brainer.
Hell, everything after Room 641A is a no-brainer.
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Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.
I think reducing crime and road safety is an excuse.
There are true innovators in the traffic camera space but i think counties often choose vendors who give them best ROI.
Can you elaborate on true innovators? No shade, but I have a hard time conceptualizing what innovation would look like in this space.
> Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.
Whether or not that is true, I suspect it is, the best way to avoid fines for breaking traffic regulations is to not break traffic regulations. They can't make anything from you that way if you do.
Until they start changing speed limits, adjusting the timing on yellow lights, or just saying you ran a stop sign when you didn't and - oops! - they happened to have their dashcam off or their car angled so the actual intersection was just out of view.
> Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts.
Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act, and turn their paranoia into support for law enforcement. It may not be the intended purposes, but the (real) purpose of a system is what it does.
It is no surprise that Flock, like other parties pushing for the erosion of privacy and personal freedom, are following the same playbook. Don't you want your kid (or your doggo) to get home safe? If you don't let us spy on you your literally supporting child abductors. Checkmate libertarians.
The reality of AMBER alert is they overwhelmingly come from custody dispute cases where the child's safety is not in jeopardy, because they tend to be the only kind of cases where they know enough about the "abductor" to issue an alert that is not just "look for a man driving a white van." The reality of child abuse is you should be infinitely more worried about authority figures dealing with the child — parents, relatives, teachers, pastors, coaches and yes, the police — than strangers driving unmarked white vans.
> the (real) purpose of a system is what it does
I agree with the rest of what you wrote but the quote is an overly cynical tired cliche when applied in a blanket manner. There are specific situations involving bad faith actors where it is directly relevant, and there are also times where it can be a useful observation about the impact of perverse incentives that build on top of unintended consequences.
But the way you're using it there it's no better than other politically charged nonsensical slogans.
> Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act
I thought they were mostly custody style kidnappings anyway.
They almost entirely are, 90% plus. And they're incredibly rare even including those, which you shouldn't.
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> I just don't understand the hate against these plate capture cams specifically.
Because the scope of information they gather is much larger than most law enforcement technologies.
> Law enforcement needs reform for sure
And the current protections are woefully inadequate.
I don't understand why you felt you needed to create a throwaway for that comment
Because it's nonsense. It's blatant "whataboutism" in support of authoritarianism.
This is a quite scary map. They are all over my local area. It may technically be possible to route a drive around them, but if you take the most convenient path between any two points at least one camera will spot you. I'd have to leave my neighborhood through back roads and enter local shopping areas through sidestreets.
This data shouldn't even be collected in the first place, let alone consolidated into a national network that any police officer can decide to spy on me through.
Download osm data, extract roads and surveillance, gpd overlay how=difference, remove/edit the different osmid's, write to pbf file, convert to obf file w/ osmandmapcreator, import into OsmAnd.
Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs on your phone.
Edit: link https://github.com/pickpj/Big-B-Router - I tend to find ALPRs that are missing in the OSM data, so keep on updating OSM data.
> Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs [that we -- regular people -- know about] on your phone [while still being observed by the ones we don't know about].
fixed that for you. :-/
You should assume every police cruiser has a plate reader, too.
They do, especially in cities and wealthy suburbs (and honestly a lot of poor rural areas too).
The difference is these typically don't zap that data up to a central database that any agency in the country can access, the way Flock does if only because the security people at Flock are a joke.
> It may technically be possible to route a drive around them
That's an interesting idea...
I can't speak to flock but I know that other vendors in the space have software designed to calculate optimal locations to maximize probability at least one license plate scan for every trip taken.
Presumably that software can then be used to upsell additional cameras because with an increased density your capabilities start to approximate real-time live position tracking instead of just getting approximate locations of hot plates.
wow. quite literally the only ones in my area are surveilling the county park / community center. that's creepy. I'll just have to assume they're doing something creepier at the public library.
Why are you guys acting like you’re being investigated by the Feds? What possible problem could flock cameras actually cause you?
Uh speak for yourself but some of us are doing the good crimes and would rather like to continue that fight from outside prison and without being shot in the face.
We are all being investigated by the Feds 24/7 — that's what dragnet surveillance is: indiscriminate investigation at scale to be used retroactively.
"Don't do anything bad and nothing will happen" is frankly asinine to me, personally. That same logic could extend to stop-and-frisk or random door-to-door visits to check for citizenship.
>> This is a quite scary map.
It can be. FLOCK data was used to put Bryan Kohberger at the scene along with other people's security camera's. Cops regularly use FLOCK camera's to get hits for criminals that have warrants for violent crime.
I can see why people are ok with them when they're used to get criminals off the streets. However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop (where people are pulled out at gunpoint and detained) against a car they got a hit on - only to find out the person they really wanted wasn't driving or even in the car at all.
What's interesting is businesses and houses have so many cameras nowadays that the first thing cops do when they get to the scene of a violent crime is canvas the area for camera's. So yeah, you can avoid FLOCK, but there are most likely hundreds of other camera's that will capture you driving through any given area.
Do you have a source to your Bryan claim?
If you look at the map, there are zero flock cameras reported in that region.
None in Moscow Idaho where the murder happened, none in Pullman where he lived, and none showed between the locations.
There's a disclaimer when you first open the page that the map is incomplete and that users need to submit the data. It's possible that data hasn't been submitted/parsed yet
It's possible, but I can't find a corroborating news report, and it's the first I've heard this claim made about that case.
You can't rely on Flock's "transparency" reports either, they're woefully inadequate. In our County, the Sheriff spoke of a PD in the County getting a Flock hit. It was news to many, including Flock's transparency site, that that PD was a user of their services.
So I'm not overly surprised by this.
But the cameras that the law enforcement officers canvas in the area aren't centrally aggregated and tagged with meta data such that they can be queried at scale.
There have been numerous instances where cops used it to stalk exes, etc. If it isn't already, it will be used to stalk a blacklist of dissidents. It will continue to happen as long as the system exists.
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Sounds like it's working as intended. These systems don't track people, they provide objective clues and evidence.
By tracking everyone at all times.
> However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop
At what point do we accept that all systems are flawed? There could be many variables as to why the perp wasn't in the car. Maybe the perp stole the car. Maybe the perp borrowed the car. Maybe these systems do not work well in fog etc etc. I don't know how we're supposed to advance technology that makes us safer without getting into these muky situations from time to time.
Technology is a means to an end, not the end itself. If you can’t make it safe then don’t deploy it.
One way to possibly get the cameras taken down: insist on requesting the data as it's public data and should be publicly accessible.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/wa-cit...
It only gets them deactivated until the state legislature "fixes" the "loophole".
If they're not already exempted by law, legislators are likely to carve out exemptions. Federally, the FOIA already exempts the government from releasing data that would violate privacy (which was one of the hurdles to releasing Epstein related documents prior to Congress passing a law to demand it).
Isn't the entire argument for these based on the fact that people don't have an expectation of privacy in a public place? Not that I'm sure they won't try to make an excuse as to why it's different, but as far as I'm aware, you're allowed to just film in public.
Remember, according to Flock's CEO, Deflock is a terrorist organization.
Lol, sure it is. Ridiculous.
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A more generous term is civil disobedience. I think the argument is the original theft was using tax payers dollars on fancy tracking devices in the first place.
It's not civil if it's law breaking.
That's literally exactly what civil disobedience is.
No that's uncivil disobedience. The difference is inaction vs action.
> Civil disobedience is the active and nonviolent refusal to obey certain government laws, demands, or commands to achieve social change or protest injustice
Most associated with MLK Jr, who explicitly advocated breaking the law
You might wish to do some cursory research before arguing further. For example, as a starting point, the Wikipedia page on civil disobedience has an entire section labeled "Action" listing counterexamples.
That’s not a group associated with or really related to deflock. Deflock at most has stickers and signs to put up.
Yes, and according to Steve Ballmer (back in the day) Linux Torvalds was a terrorist. People are allowed to say stupid things.
I don't think this is true, I can't even find anyone else claiming this happened.
I don't remember him calling Linus a terrorist, though there were others that associated anything with a copyleft licence to be the loony left (or the commie left).
He certainly referred to both him and Linux as cancers though, that I do remember. He later changed his mind on that, and IIRC may even have publicly apologised for those statements.
He said Linux is a cancer, which was a stupid thing to say, but not the same as calling Linus a cancer. I say plenty of bad things about software that I would not say about the people who create it. I think Next.js is awful to use but that doesn't mean I think everyone at Vercel is an awful person, for example.
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by "say stupid things," you of course mean "tell bald-faced lies"
The most notable one: "Developers, developers, developers!"
People are allowed to say stupid things....and those people should be held accountable for the stupid things they say
Everyone who is not content with the way I do business must be a terrorist for sure. o_o
If you spot missing camera's - Flock or not - you can add them to OSM easily with https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance
Everydoor's UI is also quite nice for this. it even lets you enter in the orientation quite easily
I'm glad the data is being catalogued and made available like this but the interactive map doesn't work for me at all. Seems to be missing clickable zoom controls and gestures on my trackpad only seem to be able to get it to zoom out, not in (I think maybe it's becoming entirely unresponsive when it first registers the zoom in event and dropping the rest of it). Did anyone actually bother to test this on a low end device?
More generally, if you're a webdev with a high end workstation it's really important to occasionally spin up a single core VM with less than 4 GB RAM, open a youtube video, and then check how well your page works in a second simultaneously visible window.
It would be an interesting and potentially useful project to combine these camera locations with Maps routing -- similar to "avoid toll roads," we could "avoid surveillance cameras."
Woof. There is one that I basically must drive by everyday close to where I live. How can I figure out who is responsible for its installation so I can let them know how I feel (and will vote) about it?
It's probably your city/police.
I have two cameras in my small town, but I can avoid them, so I now go out of my way to cross town.
Nice. The bike trail to my office and a few grocery stores doesn't have any of these.
I added one a few months ago and went to go check it, and there are 2 others almost right on top of it pointing in different directions, I guess that can't be prevented? I'm fairly certain they didn't add two more ALPRs that close to each other.
You can go onto Open Street Map and tidy up the data. I would recommend surveying the actual situation first to ensure you don't mess anything up.
Weird. The city I live in has cameras, but only a few at random intersections. Most of the cameras are on a university campus, home depot, Lowes, and target. Are these normal places to put flock cameras for other cities?
The only flock cameras indicated in my town are the canonical Home Depot arrangement. I'm pretty sure it's part of their standard operating procedures at this point. The effect these have had on the in store experience (at my location) is the primary thing that has me interested in limited deployments. Shopping at HD prior to the ALPRs was a horrible time. I think they finally caught the guy who was stealing the little screws out of the irrigation vacuum breakers. You can actually get a complete, unopened factory product most of the time now.
And to think, all it cost was a significant loss of privacy nationwide
Home Depot didn’t have CCTV and loss prevention before Flock?
Just anecdotally looking around my city, it's noticeable that the camera's locations have a much stronger correlation with areas of high wealth rather than high crime.
Generally, only addicts steal from poorer people.
And, where I am, you're more likely to have a gun if you're poor, because there's more exposure to crime, resulting in a much more realistic understanding that the police won't save you in an emergency.
wage theft is a much larger crime
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police in the US also steal more than robbers, as a factual statistic
A potentially nice addition to this map would be your closest hardware, paint, craft store, or other spray paint dealership.
Interesting ... the police in this case are claiming to be the owners of the camera.
https://oaklandcounty115.com/2026/03/03/clarkston-man-accuse...
So, our city clearly has other cameras but they are from a different vendor (and don't show up on the map). I wonder how good/bad the other players in the industry are. Flock gets the press, is that just letting someone worse quietly fill in the gaps?
Haha Sudbury and Napanee are the only places in Canada to have them. They are tiny cities where nothing happens. Bored police officers imagining situations where they are needed.
Sudbury is 150k+ people so not exactly tiny in terms of Canadian cities (30th most populus).
UBC campus in Vancouver as well.
In my area I'm seeing a few random ones on roadways, but mostly clusters of them in the parking lots of Home Depots, Lowes, and Wal-Marts.
Same here, but just Lowes stores. That I know of. I surveiled the two local Lowes roughly a month ago and found two cameras not mapped, which I gleefully added myself. Want to send them a snail mail complaint at some point stating they won't be getting my business until they step back from turning us into a police state.
I contacted them about it too and got the most generic corpo pr about them being essential for the safety of their employees.
Are they Flock cameras or bog standard CCTV?
The Lowes cameras are definitely Flock. The look is unmistakable. See
This is pretty cool. I think I'd want a few more on my block. Can an individual request and fund one?
None in my area. Time to disperse. Get out of major cities like the pandemic promised. Fill in this great country we live in. Proliferate the governments surveillance for them.
Why dont they put up a couple drones up high in the sky
Huh, none on the upper west side in NYC. Interesting.
Reminder that at least in Washington state, all images from Flock cameras are public data and thus subject to public records requests.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
You can bet money theyre selling this data to private companies like repo men.
Great site.
Caveat: it does not seem to update camera statuses after initial reporting. I see several cameras that were removed long ago, or have been repositioned, but their old statuses remain.
You can use https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance to delete the cameras from OSM
DeFlock is powered by crowdsourced data from the OpenStreetMap community. The map is incomplete! New locations are always being added. Know of a missing ALPR? Contribute to the map: https://deflock.org/report/id
Jeez there’s a few all around my uni and surrounding areas, did not know about that at all.
I wonder how long until the site gets taken down. You know ... to protect the children.
So silly question. Flock is making money off of my Name, Image, and Likeness can I request compensation for that?
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All this does is incentivize crime doers to steal someone else's license plate first.
When your car gets stolen, suddenly nobody can access the data.
Are there any coordinated efforts for widespread scrubbing or removal of these parasitic devices?
When your car gets stolen, even with camera data, the police will not do anything.
I've yet to see an amount of property crime that can get the cops to lift a finger. I've seen them ignore a low-six-figures-stolen string of after-hours break-ins at businesses, captured at multiple location on camera with clear shots of the vehicle, legible plates, and faces of the perps. Just straight-up gave the impression they thought anyone believing they might want to look into it was a moron. And no, given where this happened it wasn't because of that "prosecutors won't charge anyway" thing people complain about some places (it's led me to wonder how much of that is cops just looking to pass the blame on cases they had no intention of investigating anyway).
The city might call you in a month when it gets towed wherever it was abandoned. The cops aren't going to look for it. That happened to me once.
On the "coordinated efforts" front, some anecdata:
Three separate posts on Craigslist in the Community section about Flock Cameras, trying to increase local awareness. Posted to two different cities, various posting iterations (e.g. with links / without, pics / no pics, etc.). All appeared to post fine when entered, but never saw the light of day and were marked as removed within a few minutes.
Any other subject: posts fine.
Try it yourself and see what you get.
How do we make this site mainstream? The public would really start to push back if they could so viscerally experience that they are being surveilled multiple times per day.
I think you overestimate the public.
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Could be wrong but I don't think Flock makes speed trap or red light cameras. These are license plate readers that conduct constant surveillance of everyone at all times, whether or not you've broken any traffic laws.
plate reading allows police to identify known and unknown suspects. For known suspects (e.g. police have PC, suspect fled), plate reader can help find the suspect without high speed pursuit. For unknown suspect (e.g. citizen report of street racing), plate readers can develop a suspect pool and narrow down candidate suspects for further investigation.
Police just aren't doing their job in the US, who even knows what they're doing at this point. Basically no country had the post-covid driver issue as much as America. Some states basically halved fines lol, make them do their jobs.
The amount of times I've seen cops just sitting in their cars playing on their phones or loitering around chatting and ignoring everything around them is ridiculously high.
Seriously. People run reds in front of cops and they do nothing. I was tboned and the person that hit me had no license or anything to identify and ran a red and still was let go without anything.
What led to this?
> Running reds, extreme speed, escaping police are all common.
How do these cameras prevent those crimes?
plate reading help police track down suspects without pursuit. video recording in general help police collect evidence necessary to convict reckless driving.
It sounds like you're talking about solving crimes, not preventing crimes.
solving crime and convicting criminals has first and n-order effects. For one, a few criminals commit most crimes, so locking people up reduces many crimes. Secondly, convictions are a deterrent.
> At the same time, the public demands more oversight and constraints on police , which reduces their ability to enforce the law
Don't make excuses for them. If you're legally allowed to kill people on purpose, you (should) get oversight and tight constraints. We don't because of a lot of reasons, but we should
They get paid six figure salaries for not actually doing a whole lot, they can manage.
To what extent? Do you want infinite oversight and little-to-no crimes convicted? What are your expectations on law and order vs criminality? do you believe people naturally police themselves?
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If you know where some of them are, you can add the data yourself: https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance
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Maybe you could reach out to Flock directly and ask them to install cameras in your kitchen and bedroom too (for crime reduction reasons).
Enforcement is one way to reduce crime. Another way is to reduce poverty. Which will we choose? One road leads to South Africa. The other, Denmark.
These cameras aren't even enforcement, just surveillance.
I think we all know even with the best technology in the world the police aren't gonna get off their lazy asses if your car gets stolen. This is just a way to burn money.
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Can you elaborate upon the kinds of crime reduction that these systems provide?
Isn't it obvious?
> License plate is reported to police associated with a crime.
> Cop looks up plate number
> Flock Camera shows general status and location of that license plate.
> Cops find the car involved with the crime, preventing further criminality.
So they're useless for crimes not involving a reported license plate? Sounds like a pretty worthless marginal gain. The Chinese have done it better since their mass surveillance apparatus isn't contingent on reported license plates, or even the involvement of a vehicle. Start a fight on the street and they'll find you. Is America really this incompetent that they can't match a 10+ year old system?
No, that's just one of the things you can search on.
So what you're saying is that I can report your[1] car as being associated with a crime, and the police will show up wherever you and/or your car is and treat you like a criminal?
I love this for you!
[1] the literal you, as well as the figurative
No, the comment is not saying that. You appear to have invented it.
If you think there's something wrong with my interpretation, then please explain what that is to me. I'm not seeing a problem with it.
(I may, in fact, be an idiot. Help me out here.)
We're policing future crime now?
I think they made a movie about that.
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love this , give me more cameras please , fuck those criminals.
Coming 2028: Dissent is a crime
This is great, we can see where more cameras need to be added around the neighborhood!
Much prefer camera driven enforcement to cop-on-beat driven enforcement.
Flock cameras aren't enforcing anything. They collect your license plate and distinguishing details of your car. It's just car X with plate Y detected at location Z at time T.
Notably, they are not used for speed detection or 'good driving' detection.
You might think that having a constantly-present, objective, impartial camera enforcing a law is better than a sometimes-present, subjective, often not impartial beat cop doing that. But that's not what Flock does. Flock just turns that 'sometimes-present' beat cop into an 'always-present' beat cop, without addressing any of the other beat cop problems.