Flock Exposed - Where the Cameras Get Placed
Flock and its defenders insist the technology is race-blind because it only reads license plates, not faces. But growing academic evidence shows the cameras themselves are not placed evenly across a city or town - and where they end up is not random.
A Landmark Study: Surveillance Inequality
Researchers Jonny Finn, Andrew Baird, and a colleague at Christopher Newport University completed a geospatial analysis titled "Surveillance Inequality: Race, Poverty, and the Geography of ALPR Deployment," studying 614 Flock cameras across the Hampton Roads, Virginia region. Their conclusion: race and class are the primary predictors of where these cameras are placed.
Source: Legal Insurrection, "Flock Cameras Face Backlash Even as New Study Shows Anti-Theft Benefits," citing the study's own authors
The same Christopher Newport University research found that automatic license plate reader cameras are more highly concentrated in Black communities and high-poverty areas across the Hampton Roads region.
Source: 13News Now, "Study finds Flock cameras disproportionately surveil Black and high-poverty neighborhoods in Hampton Roads"
The numbers are stark: of the ten neighborhoods with the most cameras in the study area, eight are majority Black. And in neighborhoods where at least fifty percent of residents are Black, camera density runs four times higher than in whiter neighborhoods.
Source: VPM, "Hampton Roads Flock cameras surveil Black communities more intensely than white ones"; KQED, "Why Is Flock Safety So Controversial in the Bay Area?"
One of the study's authors, who has spent years studying residential racial segregation in the region, said he suspected going in that Flock cameras were highly concentrated in majority-Black and high-poverty communities - and the geospatial data confirmed it.
Source: WHRO, "Flock cameras in Hampton Roads surveil Black communities more intensely than white ones, CNU study says"
Flock's Defense, and the Hardware It Leaves Out
Flock maintains that its technology is race-blind because it focuses on vehicles rather than individuals. Critics call this a deceptive "tech-wash" of a much older pattern of discriminatory policing, simply repackaged as neutral technology.
Source: Emerald Book, "How Flock Safety's Faulty AI Disproportionately Targets Black Neighborhoods"
That "we only read plates" defense leaves out an important detail: Flock's camera hardware ships with optional facial recognition (branded Condor) and infrared capability built in, and those features can be switched on remotely from Flock's own systems without a new camera ever being installed. A town told it is only getting license plate reading has no guarantee that stays true - the capability to identify faces, not just plates, already sits inside the hardware on the pole, waiting on a software decision made at Flock headquarters. That makes the "race-blind, plates-only" defense considerably harder to take at face value once a camera is already disproportionately pointed at a Black or low-income neighborhood.
Source: Compiled from Flock's own Condor facial-recognition product documentation and Flock Exposed's Private Sector Use and Cases of Unauthorized Activation pages
Academic Research Beyond Hampton Roads
Academic researchers studying Flock's national network describe it as a communicative system that exposes people to discriminatory policing well beyond any one town's borders - arguing that the way Flock's cameras link together across jurisdictions helps spread aggressive policing practices from one area into others, enabling the targeting of immigrants, women seeking reproductive care, and other vulnerable groups regardless of local laws meant to protect them.
Source: Torin Monahan, "Grounding the Flock: Confronting Police Surveillance of Mobilities," Surveillance & Society journal, 2026
Questions to Ask Your Town
Has anyone mapped where our town's Flock cameras are actually located, and compared that against the racial and economic makeup of those neighborhoods?
Who decided the placement locations, and was that decision based on documented crime data or something less clear?
Do our cameras have facial recognition or infrared hardware built in, even if those features are not currently active - and who has the authority to switch them on?
If a feature like facial recognition were ever activated remotely by Flock, would our town be notified, or would we only find out after the fact?
This page will be updated as more factual sources become available.