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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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].
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
plate reading help police track down suspects without pursuit. video recording in general help police collect evidence necessary to convict reckless driving.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/wa-cit...
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...
[1] https://www.beltontexas.gov/news_detail_T11_R1277.php
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
fixed that for you. :-/
That's an interesting idea...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most associated with MLK Jr, who explicitly advocated breaking the law
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.
https://every-door.app/
https://github.com/Zverik/every_door
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.
https://oaklandcounty115.com/2026/03/03/clarkston-man-accuse...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
https://deflock.org/identify
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.
Are there any coordinated efforts for widespread scrubbing or removal of these parasitic devices?
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 these cameras prevent those crimes?
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.
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.
I love this for you!
[1] the literal you, as well as the figurative
I think they made a movie about that.
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.