Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department's Use of Flock Safety

Meaning of “small-town sheriff” and law-enforcement structure

• Several comments nitpick the ACLU phrase “small-town sheriffs,” arguing sheriffs are county-wide, elected top law-enforcement officers.
• Others defend the phrase as a common American idiom evoking rural, small-town imagery, not a literal jurisdictional claim.
• Examples show sheriff roles vary widely by county and state (full policing vs only courts/jails), underscoring legal and institutional complexity.

From village gossip to industrial surveillance

• One thread compares Flock-style systems to a small village where “everyone knows your business,” but notes today’s difference: data is centralized, permanent, and cross-linked.
• Some argue earlier eras never allowed easy “escape” from one’s village; others say premodern exit was economically or legally impossible.
• A key concern: this is not just local knowledge but an industrial-scale, shareable database covering large areas.

Asymmetry of surveillance power

• Multiple commenters stress asymmetry: only police, corporations, or select entities see the data, unlike mutual village-level visibility.
• Some fantasize about “universal ADS‑B for cars” or fully public surveillance to level the field, while others immediately worry about stalkers and abuse.
• There’s agreement that law-enforcement misuse of privileged data already happens and isn’t rare.

Deflock, mapping, and protest tactics

• Deflock is cited as a community effort to map Flock cameras (via a website and Discord), allowing people to avoid or track ALPR locations.
• Debate arises over operational security: joining a Discord linked to vandalism talk may risk bans or scrutiny; some consider such caution overblown, others call it basic OPSEC.
• Suggestions range from purely mapping to soft sabotage (bags, signs blocking lenses) to explicit vandalism (paint, peanut butter), which others criticize as reckless and legally naive.

Public-space privacy, law, and expectations

• One position: there should be no civil right to privacy in public; anything visible can be recorded, and regulation should focus only on misuse (blackmail, rights violations).
• Opponents argue that costless, mass, retrospective tracking transforms “being seen” into a panopticon, chilling behavior even when legal.
• Several say the old “no expectation of privacy in public” principle is outdated given cheap, pervasive tech, and call for new legal protections.
• European-style nuanced rules (intent, scope, aggregation, “dragnet vs targeted”) are cited as possible models, though others worry such fuzzy standards are hard to enforce and weaponize ambiguity.

Vehicles vs people, and Flock’s broader capabilities

• A pro-surveillance view claims “the vehicle is dangerous, not you,” so tracking heavy machinery is reasonable accountability; those wanting privacy should walk, bike, or use transit.
• Critics respond that transit and streets are also heavily surveilled and Flock already markets person/attribute search (“man in blue shirt and cowboy hat”), so this is fundamentally people-tracking.
• Others note it’s trivial to correlate plates with phones and other identifiers, making “we’re only tracking cars” a fiction.

Abuse, errors, and systemic risks

• Multiple comments highlight that mass data retention enables warrantless, retroactive tracking over months, something courts would not normally authorize proactively.
• There are references (in general terms) to false arrests from OCR errors, traumatic encounters, and settlement payouts; commenters question outsourcing such a powerful function to a private company.
• Some recount how agencies resist short retention policies, implying that long-term data mining is the real draw.

Civil-liberties framing and organizational trust

• Some distrust the ACLU as partisan or captured, but even critics often concede it is right to oppose Flock-style mass surveillance.
• Others point to additional civil-liberties groups litigating ALPR use as evidence that this is squarely a Fourth Amendment and civil-liberties issue, not mere partisan posturing.