We have met the enemy — and it is watching us. There’s a growing backlash against Flock cameras, the automated license plate readers that have become ubiquitous across the country.
The cameras take images of license plates, which are then stored in a searchable database that police departments can query in the course of investigations. Opponents of the cameras consider them an instrument of Big Brother, who’s not only watching, but constantly recording and tracking. Vandals have disabled and stolen the Flock cameras and even shot them. There’s a movement to get jurisdictions to cancel their contracts with Flock (the leading such company, but not the only one), and it has met with some success.
Los Angeles just let its contract with Flock lapse, citing “serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues.” There’s a reason, though, that police departments so rapidly adopted the cameras — they are an extremely useful investigative tool.
It is certainly true that the technology, like any power we give the police, can be misused. According to The Washington Post, “Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk their exes.” The Post calls the abuse “rampant,” but 50 documented cases isn’t a large number given the widespread use of these devices: There are 120,000 Flock cameras across the United States scanning license plates 20 billion times a month.
It is understandable that people don’t like the idea that they are, in effect, living in a panopticon. But license plate readers aren’t the only offender. There are all sorts of other surveillance cameras, many of them privately owned and operated, that the police access during investigations. We let our mobile phones and various apps track us all day long. And something like 60 million households have Ring or other security cameras that record what’s happening on their property and often in the immediate surroundings.
The only reliable way to ensure that you aren’t being recorded is to stay inside — and draw the curtains. Officers who abuse the license-plate readers deserve to be fired and, if appropriate, charged with crimes, which is often what happens. Strict rules around what constitutes a legitimate query of the system and routine audits should make it harder for rogue officers to use the cameras for nefarious purposes.
The police officials who are advocating for Flock aren’t doing it so the cops can track the average person’s trip to the grocery store or yoga studio. The cameras routinely aid in the identification and apprehension of the perpetrators of serious crimes, the location of missing persons and the recovery of stolen cars.
According to the Jacksonville, Florida, sheriff’s office, since 2024, the cameras have “helped solve 15 murders, 17 kidnappings, six forcible sex offenses, nearly 100 shootings and 172 missing-persons cases.”
A website set up by Charles Lehman of the Manhattan Institute is tracking news items about Flock contributing to successful police work. There are such stories every day, all over the country. Two recent entries related the arrest of an armed robbery suspect in Grass Valley, California, and the rescue of two kidnapped teenage girls in Bulloch County, Georgia. After getting a tip, the authorities used Flock to find the suspect in the Brown University shooting last year.
Perhaps these crimes would get solved anyway, but if even a fraction of them didn’t, Flock would be making a meaningful contribution to public safety. It used to be that America had, in effect, ungoverned spaces where malefactors could hide in plain sight. To use an extreme example, the Symbionese Liberation Army operated for a couple of years out of various safe houses in the San Francisco Bay area during the 1970s, something almost unimaginable in our technologically advanced age of constant information sharing.
Rolling back Flock won’t reverse this tectonic change that’s been decades in the making, but it will deny law enforcement a valuable asset.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.