In Red States, Law-and-Order Republicans Turn Against Flock Cameras
By Josie Calloway · Reporting from Pittsburgh ·
When you’ve spent a decade in an ER, you learn that the most dangerous things are the ones operating in the background—the silent sepsis, the slow leak.
When you’ve spent a decade in an ER, you learn that the most dangerous things are the ones operating in the background—the silent sepsis, the slow leak. South Florida’s surveillance network is exactly that: a systemic infection of the public square. For years, Flock Safety has been selling "safety" to city councils, and the councils have been buying it with our tax dollars, installing a digital dragnet that treats every driver like a suspect in waiting.
A Census of Movement Paid for by the Taxpayer
The numbers coming out of the Miami Herald are clinical in their brutality. In Broward County alone, law enforcement agencies spent over $3 million on these cameras, with Hollywood dropping $2.2 million—including a recent $1.7 million splurge on automated drones. Fort Lauderdale’s 88-camera network has catalogued over 174 million vehicles. That isn’t "policing"; it’s a census of movement.
When you look at the chart, you see the profit motive pulling away from the care motive. Flock Safety, founded in 2017, has scaled to 120,000 cameras nationwide, conducting roughly 2 billion scans a month, according to The Guardian. We are paying private companies to build a map of our lives that we never consented to. It’s the same playbook as the Clearview AI controversy, where the technology is deployed first and the "ethics" are debated only after the database is already full.
The Safety Lie and the "Protest" Search
The strongest case for these cameras comes from the Broward County Chiefs of Police Association, who argue that these systems provide "investigative leads" that help them respond more effectively. To a citizen in a high-crime zip code, that sounds like a lifeline. But "leads" is a sanitized word for "mass surveillance."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found that searches on Flock’s servers were often tagged with reasons as vague as "protest." That is the "lead" they’re talking about: the ability to track anyone who dares to stand in the street and complain. As Rindala Alajaji of the EFF told the Miami Herald, this system is "pervasive, sprawling and just ungovernable." When the tool is designed to track everyone, the "public safety" argument is just a shroud for social control.
The Infrastructure of Permanent Distrust
We’ve seen this movie before. The Global surveillance disclosures of the 2010s proved that once the infrastructure for mass surveillance is built, it doesn't matter who is holding the keys. The Edward Snowden leaks revealed a world where the government didn't need a warrant because they already owned the pipes.
That is why the current bipartisan backlash—from Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro to Florida’s Ron DeSantis—is the only sane reaction. DeSantis is right to warn against a "surveillance state," and Glenn Beck is right to call this a "panopticon." It doesn't matter if you're a progressive or a constitutionalist; once the cameras are up, they outlast the administration that installed them. We saw a version of this urgency during COVID-19 contact tracing, where "temporary" tracking tools sparked a permanent fear of government overreach.
The Florida Department of Transportation's mandate to remove cameras from state roads is a start, but it's a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Most of these cameras are on city streets or operated by HOAs, far beyond the reach of a state road permit.
The DeFlock movement is proving that these tools aren't inevitable. We don't need "better oversight" or "transparent data retention" from Flock Safety. You don't "oversee" a panopticon; you dismantle it. The only way to stop the surveillance state is to rip the cameras out of the poles and stop funding the companies that treat our privacy as a product.