Flock Safety is a private surveillance-technology company that provides automated license plate recognition (ALPR) systems, drones, and the Raven audio surveillance system, to municipalities, law-enforcement agencies, and private entities such as HOAs and commercial property owners. Their products consist of networked cameras and microphones, cloud-based data storage, and AI-driven analytics designed to identify, track, and search vehicle movements over time.
While marketed as a “public safety” solution, Flock operates as a privately owned, profit-driven data aggregator that collects and retains large volumes of location data on the general public.
Flock Safety does not simply provide cameras and other surveillance technologies. It provides the infrastructure for continuous, suspicionless tracking of the public, operated by private entities, stored indefinitely, and searchable at scale. That model may be efficient, but efficiency is not a substitute for liberty, and safety purchased at the cost of fundamental freedoms is neither durable nor just.
Our city leaders entered into contracts with Flock Safety and placed cameras throughout our community neighborhoods. Courtesy of Deflock.org, below is a map of the cameras in our neighborhoods. There are additional cameras in Chino Valley as well. This map is incomplete.
Click Here to visit their site and see our community cameras in more detail.
In Prescott, the short and long answers are NO! For example, this was intentionally hidden from us by the Prescott Police Chief (we have the email), and the Mayor approved funding without our direct knowledge, and without the City Councils’ approval. This has never gone to a public vote.
Flock’s model reverses the foundational principle of a free society. Instead of investigating specific suspects, it records everyone first and searches later.
This creates:
A permanent record of innocent people’s movements
Surveillance without individualized suspicion
Normalization of monitoring as a default condition of public life
By outsourcing surveillance to a private vendor:
Constitutional safeguards are weakened, because private companies are not bound by the same transparency, accountability, or public-records obligations as government agencies.
Decisions about data retention, sharing, and access are effectively shaped by corporate policy rather than democratic oversight.
Citizens lose meaningful recourse when data is misused, breached, or repurposed.
This is not public safety by consent, it is surveillance by contract.
History shows that surveillance systems expand far beyond their original justification.
Data collected “for stolen vehicles” can later be used for:
Tracking protest activity
Monitoring political gatherings
Locating individuals for non-violent civil or administrative enforcement
Retrospective searches unrelated to the original intent
Once the infrastructure exists, restraint depends entirely on goodwill, not law.
When people know their movements are continuously recorded:
They self-censor where they go
They avoid lawful but sensitive activities
They hesitate to assemble, protest, or associate freely
A society that treats movement as suspicious is not a free society, even if the surveillance is automated and polite.
Flock Safety’s branding emphasizes convenience and efficiency, but the underlying shift is cultural:
From liberty as the default
To surveillance as the baseline condition of civic life
This reframes privacy not as a right, but as a conditional privilege.
There are several simple alternatives. Click Here, or on the How I Can Help Menu at the top of the page.