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.
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.
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 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."
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I volunteer for my city & county , and I'm a privacy advocate, so I have an ambivalent opinion on Flock cameras. Given the completely untenable demands on law enforcement, and extreme driver recklessness , the only practical way to enforce law and order with drivers is some sort of automated surveillance.
Since covid, driver recklessness has been out of control. Running reds, extreme speed, escaping police are all common. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries and deaths remain extreme. At the same time, the public demands more oversight and constraints on police , which reduces their ability to enforce the law.
Imagine you are a policy maker, with worse driver behavior, and police force that are less able to enforce the law. What tools would you use to maintain law and order?
If you don't want surveillance, you will have to make some other tradeoffs to allow human beings to better monitor the public and enforce the law. They are not omnipotent and omniscient creatures.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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?
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?
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 is an excuse.
Law enforcement needs reform for sure but 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.
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.
The T word is out of line, but I think that's the spirit of what he meant.
https://oaklandcounty115.com/2026/03/03/clarkston-man-accuse...
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.
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.
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.
Since covid, driver recklessness has been out of control. Running reds, extreme speed, escaping police are all common. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries and deaths remain extreme. At the same time, the public demands more oversight and constraints on police , which reduces their ability to enforce the law.
Imagine you are a policy maker, with worse driver behavior, and police force that are less able to enforce the law. What tools would you use to maintain law and order?
If you don't want surveillance, you will have to make some other tradeoffs to allow human beings to better monitor the public and enforce the law. They are not omnipotent and omniscient creatures.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I love this for you!
[1] the literal you, as well as the figurative
I think they made a movie about that.