The first camera lay crumpled on the central reservation like roadkill. Its solar panel was twisted, its casing smashed clean off the pole. A few metres away, another had been carefully gutted—key components neatly removed, wires hanging loose.
Someone in La Mesa, a small city east of San Diego, wanted this to be seen.
The two wrecked Flock surveillance cameras were discovered last week, just weeks after the city council brushed aside a wave of furious public opposition and voted to renew its contract with the Atlanta-based company. For many locals, the timing didn't look like coincidence. It looked like a reply.
'There was a huge turnout against them,' says Bill Paul, who runs the independent outlet San Diego Slackers and first reported on the smashed cameras. 'But the council approved continuation of the contract.'
La Mesa is not an outlier. From Oregon to Virginia, a quiet, very physical revolt against Flock's automatic licence plate readers—ALPRs—is underway, with cameras sawn down, poles severed, and devices methodically dismantled. What would once have been fringe anti-surveillance activism is edging into the mainstream, as Americans discover who can access these cameras' data and how it is being used.
And one three-letter agency looms particularly large in the backlash: ICE.
Flock, valued at around $7.5 billion and headquartered in Atlanta, sells what it describes as crime‑fighting tech to police and local governments. Its cameras now watch roads and car parks in roughly 6,000 communities across the United States, quietly logging vehicles that pass within their gaze.
These cameras don't simply read licence plates. They also capture make, model, colour and other visual markers that can 'fingerprint' a vehicle and, by extension, its owner and movements. The information is stored in vast databases and can be searched by police—and by federal agencies—without needing a warrant.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that enforces deportations and immigration raids, is a regular user of this trove of data. For immigrant communities and privacy advocates, that alone is enough to turn a 'smart policing' tool into an instrument of fear.
Flock insists its technology helps catch violent suspects, recover stolen property and solve crimes that might otherwise go cold. But the examples piling up around the US tell a murkier story.
Source: International Business Times UK
