Last year in Colorado, a bully—a Columbine Valley police officer—showed up at the door of a local woman and said her vehicle had been filmed about 20 times in the vicinity of a crime scene. As he put it, “You can't get a breath of fresh air there without us knowing you're there.” Via the use of the dystopian camera technology manufactured by Flock Safety, and Ring camera footage from the crime scene, the officer told the unlikely suspect that he was “100 percent sure” that she'd driven her $70,000 truck to a residence to steal a $25 Amazon package.
Flexing his ego, the cop denied the startled woman’s request to see the Ring footage, explaining that she didn’t deserve that “courtesy” because she was lying to him. She then offered to show him the camera footage from her truck that would show that she wasn't in the area at the time of the theft, which he also declined before handing her a summons to appear in court.
After the cop left, the alleged porch pirate accessed the Ring footage via the Nextdoor neighborhood watch app and saw another blonde woman who wasn’t her. She then viewed the video footage from her truck, which showed that she'd driven by the package at the time of the theft without stopping. After submitting her evidence to the authorities, the police chief emailed her to dismiss the charges.
She requested an apology, but it never came. If Columbine Valley mayor Bruce Menk had wanted the people of the town to respect the police department, he would've mandated that apology. The police carry guns, but sometimes they need to be reminded that they answer to the people.
Some of the most vehement opponents of this invasive technology have taken matters into their own hands by vandalizing the cameras. Others who don't want their country to become another Big Brother nation like China just want the technology banned. But most likely the cameras are here to stay, as politicians fear being called soft on crime. It's become a matter of how to regulate their use. It's the question of how much power Americans are willing to give law enforcement in order to feel secure. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Complaints about misuse of the Flock technology are flooding in recently. A common abuse of the system is police officers using it to track their ex, or their ex's new partner, a violation of stalking laws. Roughly 50 law enforcement officers across the nation have been accused of using the technology for personal use. Weak police department oversight of Flock surveillance indicates there are many more offenders that haven't been caught.
Flock cameras aren’t like the license plate cameras that’ve been around for years. They can capture model, make, color, year, and adornments like bumper stickers and flags. With this kind of comprehensive information, law enforcement can build a profile of every driver on the road that they could use to violate individual rights. The Supreme Court has ruled, in accordance with the Fourth Amendment, that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the “whole of their physical movements,” suggesting that government acquisition of comprehensive search information requires a search warrant. But laws lag behind technology. Under current law, such searches can be conducted without a warrant.
Another contentious issue is Flock data saved for too long—sometimes even years. That gives law enforcement the ability to review the lives of people they suspect of no crimes. A short deletion window—the ACLU wants it set at 48 hours—mandated by legislation, would address that problem. Police departments never surrender power voluntarily, so they can’t be relied on to do this of their own volition. Flock Safety, under fire like other tech companies prying into people's lives, has tried to give itself some cover by recommending a seven-day deletion deadline while allowing evidence tied to an active investigation to be preserved separately. This is window dressing.
There's a “mission creep” problem with all new technologies adopted by law enforcement that goes back to Operation SHAMROCK, a US intelligence program that began in 1945 as a Cold War-era effort to obtain foreign communications intelligence and grew into a long-running arrangement in which major telegraph companies turned over vast quantities of Americans’ international telegram traffic to the NSA. A response to a foreign threat soon morphed into governmental mass surveillance of people unsuspected of crimes. Flock cameras could create a similar scenario. A technology police department’s purchase to find stolen cars also allows identification of every car that visited a protest, an abortion clinic or political meeting.
History has warnings about the dangers of governmental mass surveillance. From 1950 to 1990, the Stasi showed East German citizens how that works out when carried to an extreme. In the US, the FBI monitored Martin Luther King Jr. from 1955 to 1962 in an extensive surveillance and harassment campaign. From the 1950s through the early-1970s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program monitored civil rights, black power, anti-war, and socialist political organizations.
The debate over Flock cameras is heating up. During a Sullivan County (Tennessee) Commission work session on August 13, commissioner Joe Carr, directly addressed a Flock Safety representative attending the meeting and said, "I don't think we can make America great again without hanging your CEO publicly for treason. Your company is an enemy of the American people.”
More than 50 cities and counties have cut ties with Flock Safety in 2026 so far, evidence that organized pushback can prevail. Opposition to Flock cameras is the only issue that both sides of the political aisle can find any consensus on at this point, although Republican Joe Carr is an outlier. The tyrannical Columbine Valley cop spelled out the situation for everybody: “You can't get a breath of fresh air there without us knowing you're there.”