08/22/2026
TIME TO UPSET EVERYONE. The use of Flock cameras by police has generated a lot of attention. I have some mixed feelings. As with most complex issues, there are a lot of advantages and tradeoffs that nobody wants to discuss.
Agencies only tend to clear crimes where the victim/offender knew each other. Clearance from stranger crimes is a lot harder. Flock and their ilk (such as geofencing data) are one of the few tools that have a chance of identifying suspects when LE has nothing to go on.
The crime data for 2025 has been released by the FBI and it's dramatically improved. Clearance of violent crime is the highest it's been in 10 years. More notably, the robbery clearance rate is the highest it has been since 1965. Burglary clearance rates have improved and are now the best they've been since 1975. I do not now what percent of this increase we can ascribe to Flock systems and others License Plate Read (LPR) networks, but it isn't zero.
If you think that chronically understaffed agencies are clearing cases at a higher rate without some help, I have a bridge with great views to sell you. What I suspect is that when they arrest a suspect(s) for a crime, they can go back and retroactively tie that person and that vehicle to multiple crimes and clear those as well. Facing ten counts of something rather than just one is great way to get enhanced penalties to keep people off the street longer.
If you are opposed to Flock and similar systems, then you are effectively consenting to living in a society in which half of the violent crimes go unsolved. There are a lot of bad guys who are now sitting in jail, who were removed from the streets sooner because of LPR systems. This is not a new phenomena. I'm aware of several high profile cases going back five plus years that were cleared for these technology based reasons. If you claim you want social justice, you must recognize that black people are dramatically overrepresented as crime victims and that locking up the feral among us is more likely to make the black population safer.
Are there cases of Flock data being abused? Absolutely. But there are also cases every year of officers abusing the National Criminal Information Center (NCIC) for the same purposes. I have yet to hear one call to shut down that system. What happens when an officer abuses FLOCK needs to be the same thing that happens when they abuse NCIC - firing and criminal charges. Part of the problem is that abuse of Flock data is treated as an internal matter and not a criminal matter.
The other part of me says - even when we catch the criminals, the system refuses to do its job. Why should we sacrifice privacy, or open the door for creeping authoritarianism, when we know the guilty will remain unpunished anyway?
I realize that most Flocks are installed based on grants so there is low/no cost to the agency. However, when those same agencies sit on hundreds of untested sexual assault kits - kits who would likely take serial rapists off the streets - they show they really don't care about identifying bad guys unless it's effectively free. We went through a lot of debate about DNA databases. Why give the government more tools when they refuse to use the ones they have?
LPR's have been around for years. What's different is the sheer numbers but more importantly, the AI backbone to create a more complete picture of what the data shows. There are concerns (not unfounded) about what this network means for the future. If something that was previously impossibly expensive sudden drops in price, the temptation to buy it increases. Previously, a mass social surveillance system and a following social credit system was too expensive. That price is now significantly cheaper. Are the odds of us devolving into a Chinese Communist society increased or decreased with such a network?
Another commentator observed that a society has an overincarceration problem when there are people imprisoned who should not be. A society has an underincarceration problem when there are people who should be incarcerated who are not. I'd offer that we are still suffering from massive underincarceration.
And to hit the last alienation button, we don't have solid numbers yet but the desire to deport as many people unlawfully in the country as possible has been impactful as well. Whether it's physically removing criminals from the country or creating an environment where "staying out of trouble" is strongly encouraged under serious penalty, the effect of increased immigration enforcement isn't zero either.
[An apology - If I haven't upset you yet, give me a little more time....]
