The purpose of a system is what it does.
Flock cameras are a vast, nationwide system of AI-powered cameras (currently 120,000 strong) installed along the most commonly used roads throughout the nation. In cities and towns, large and small, these cameras snap hundreds of millions of photos every day, and machine-learning models instantly analyze every car’s license plate, make/model/color, bumper stickers, bike racks, cosmetic damage, and even physical identifiers of people in the car. Each snapshot, serving as a fingerprint of your vehicle (and, by extension, yourself personally), is stamped with a date, time, GPS location, and direction of travel. Flock Safety (the private, for-profit company responsible for this network) sells camera installations and subscriptions to this database of surveillance footage to public and private entities, it is not just the police that have access to this information.
You can spot these cameras yourself, for they have sprung up here in Clayton as well. The next time you’re on HWY 70 traveling East, driving past Venero’s Pizza, look for a thin black pole with a solar panel mounted on top, placed in the grass divider between the parking lot and the road, and wave to the camera as it creates another datapoint with which to establish a pattern of your movements. Or if you’re traveling West towards Walmart, look to your right when passing the entrance to Medical Park Place to find another Flock camera, logging that this is your 5th trip this week. Or even when you’re traveling North on O’Neil Street, where you’ll be pleased to cross two cameras (one by the intersection between O’Neil and Covered Bridge Road, the other directly in front of the entrance to the Neuse River Trailhead) that are both noting that you typically travel towards Riverwood around this time of day.
Make no mistake, this is warrantless long-term surveillance, enacted upon every single citizen of Clayton. Our 4th amendment right was established against unlawful searches, and long-term surveillance is, without contention, a search (read the Supreme Court’s ruling on Jones vs. United States (2012)). Further to that point, a warrant for a search shall not be issued to any law enforcement agency, until probable cause has been established in pursuit of an ongoing criminal investigation.
What crime are we ALL under suspicion of, that our Chief of Police Greg Tart deemed it necessary to sign a contract with Flock in 2024 for the installation of 10 Flock Cameras in our town? With what warrant has Clayton PD obtained that justifies the gross violation of our natural right to privacy? Or has our own Chief of Police, of all agents of the law, forgotten the law itself, which has determined that we have a reasonable right to privacy even in public spaces? It is the right of no man, agency, or company to know your everyday commute. Not the police, not Flock Safety, no one.
We must ask ourselves how much abuse we are willing to tolerate at the hands of our police department, because abuse is precisely what this is.
