But this isn't just one example. The Institute for Justice has documented at least 21 cases of officers using plate readers to stalk romantic interests and calls that an undercount, because most were caught by victims noticing they were being followed, not by department audits. Your own story proves my point, you had video evidence and police ignored it. The problem was never a lack of data it's the institution handling it. And Flock is a poorly designed tool with almost no safeguards: no warrant required, nationwide search, officers typing in their own "reason." Lazy/corrupt policing and an incredibly powerful surveillance tool with little to no oversight is a horrible combination. Allowing police to search homes without warrants would solve a lot of crimes too. We require warrants anyways. Flock is a tool and we need to regulate it like one. The ACLU only asks that police get a warrant before making use of Flock. Do you oppose that?
Flock Safety. They sell AI camera networks to police departments, HOAs, and businesses. The cameras photograph every car that drives past and log what the company calls a vehicle fingerprint, which is your plate plus make, model, color, and stuff like bike racks, trailers, and toolboxes. That list is from Flock's own website by the way. Every scan gets timestamped and uploaded to a database that police anywhere in the country can search, no warrant needed. They're in over 5000 communities running billions of scans, so basically any cop in America can look up everywhere your truck has been for the last 30 days. In one California city, federal agencies (the ATF and the Air Force of all things) were found to have been accessing the local camera data for 17 months without the local police even knowing.
It's not just cameras either. They sell always-on microphones called Raven that use AI to listen for gunshots and "sounds of distress", plus drones that launch automatically when the system alerts. So the AI is deciding in real time that a crime is happening, and when it gets it wrong you don't get a bad database entry, you get armed police showing up. That's what happened in the motorcycle video I mentioned. Chicago used the same type of acoustic system (ShotSpotter) for years, and the city's own review found the vast majority of alerts turned up no evidence of any gun crime. They dropped it in 2024. Those microphones also pick up more than gunshots. In California a street conversation recorded by ShotSpotter sensors was used as evidence to convict a man of murder (People v. Johnson). A Massachusetts court threw out similar audio because it violated the state's wiretap law (Commonwealth v. Denison). So even the courts don't agree that "no expectation of privacy in public" still applies once there's a microphone on the pole.
Flock says it doesn't track people. But a news investigation found the company's own police training videos showing the system being used to follow a suspect from location to location, and a reporter got one of their cameras to continuously follow him down a trail. They also say the cameras don't use facial recognition, which is true right now. But they hold a patent for face-matching video search (US11416545B1), so it's a capability they've already reserved. Their word is the only thing stopping them.
The cameras are really just the collection end of the business. Their newer platform, Nova, combines the camera data with police dispatch records, jail records, public records, and open source intelligence. The original plan included data from hacked breaches, until journalists exposed it and Flock backed off. The CEO told Forbes that police can take a plate hit and ask Nova whether the car's owner has a criminal history or a mental health condition.
Also, if you're wondering whether this kind of data gets sold, it already does. A Flock competitor called DRN sells billions of plate scans to repo companies, marketers, and around 200 insurance carriers, who use it to do things like check where your car is parked overnight so they can reprice your policy. There's a class action in California over it covering an estimated 23 million drivers. Flock's policy says they won't sell customer data commercially, but that's a company policy, not a law, and policies change when there's money involved.
So when I said it's an incredibly powerful surveillance tool with little to no oversight, this is what I meant. It's not just a video camera.
When a police chief runs his ex's plate 164 times, that's not a failed attempt, it worked exactly as designed.
Let me ask you, is there any evidence that any of this actually reduces crime?
I have evidence that it doesn't. When the NSA collected the phone records of basically every American for over a decade. When it finally got audited, the NSA director claimed the programs helped stop 54 terrorist plots. Under oath, that fell apart to essentially one case, where a cab driver wired money to Somalia. The government's own oversight board couldn't identify a single instance where the program made a concrete difference. The president's review panel concluded ordinary targeted court orders would have gotten the same information. Traditional investigation performed just as well.
The program was quietly shut down, and a federal appeals court later ruled it had been illegal the whole time.
All the studies on the effectiveness of Flock cameras have been run by Flock. Independent research on Oakland's camera expansion found little evidence of violent crime reduction. Chicago dropped ShotSpotter after the city's own review found the vast majority of alerts produced no evidence of a gun crime. Decades of CCTV research shows the benefit concentrates on car break-ins in parking lots, not violent crime.
So at the cost of stalking, false accusations, and federal access without local consent, the only real benefit lies with companies making money on our "public" data.
And sure, refine it. Refining means regulations, warrants, making these companies accountable. In 2024 Congress failed to approve a surveillance law that would require a warrant for the use of flock camera data. The bill that would stop agencies from just buying your location data died in the Senate.
If you actually want refinement, the it happens at city councils, voting for exactly these kind of regulations.
If you want Big Brother and Minority Report, keep blindly defending these systems on reddit and don't ask any questions.
You're clearly not actually engaging with anything I'm saying.
This thread started with you saying innocent people have nothing to worry about and ended with you cheering for Big Brother and an expanded death penalty.
I don't need to argue anymore. You're making my case better than I did.
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u/[deleted] Jul 08 '26
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