You probably don’t even notice it most of the time, but you are constantly being watched. There are cameras and listening devices everywhere, affixed to street lights and set up at the entrances of businesses, a common feature of modern doorbells and silently watching neighborhood thoroughfares. There’s even a whole recording suite sitting in your pocket, waiting to log locations, faces, names, notable landmarks. Since the beginning of the 21st century, we have increasingly lived in an era of ubiquitous mass distributed surveillance, with our safety as its nominal goal.
But recently it seems like a line has been crossed. Citizens and privacy activists all over the U.S. are pushing back hard against one particular facet of the modern surveillance state: an Atlanta-based tech startup called Flock Safety. Founded in 2017 by three former Georgia Tech students, Flock sells a variety of devices to law enforcement agencies across the country, from Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) to AI-powered video cameras to deployable drones. Flock also sells cameras to basically anyone else, from neighbors to business owners, and all of those devices can be connected to a central database managed by the company.
But while other similar security companies have tried to blend in with their products, staying out of the public view and doing everything they can to be as unassuming as possible, Flock has been loud, ostentatious and controversial. Its ALPRs and cameras have been at the center of constitutional rights violation cases; its database is a frequent site of alleged abuse by law enforcement; and its CEO has called critics of the company “domestic terrorists.” This is why activists and citizens in cities all over the country, including Oklahoma City, have been pushing their municipal governments to “DeFlock.”
“Flock—and [its competitor] Axon, to be frank—are the problems. Not ALPRs, and not cameras, generally speaking,” said 38-year-old IT professional Jarrett Freeman, a northwest OKC resident who has been operating the “DeFlock OKC” website since March. “Where it gets to be a problem is scale, AI, questionable funding and wild valuation, and a company ethos that’s just ‘Lie to get the contract’ and ‘Get the cameras up faster than they [opponents] can keep up with.’”
Freeman is referring to instances when Flock has been caught reinstalling cameras that city governments deactivated and lying to citizens about what kind of information their cameras could and couldn’t collect, like heat maps of individuals’ movements throughout a city.
Freeman said he started noticing the cameras all over the OKC metro last year after reading up on the company’s “egregious vulnerabilities” and “problems with the system.” Seeing a relative lack of OKC-specific reporting being done on Flock, he decided to take matters into his own hands and file a set of Freedom of Information Act requests with the Oklahoma City Police Department.
What he found shocked him, and he promptly posted his findings to Reddit.
“When the city and OKCPD both responded that, essentially: anybody could use [the Flock database] (no access control), for any reason (no prohibited-use), without reprimand (no discipline standards for this platform), indefinitely (no audit procedure) and nobody even needs to know if the system works as intended (no transparency reporting) for three years,” he said via text message, “I shared those findings believing that I had done my part to get rid of them and some nebulous someone would see that they are voted out.”
Freeman was one of nearly 30 citizens who signed up to speak at the Aug. 18 Oklahoma City Council meeting where Flock’s contract was set to be renewed for a third time in as many years. No one who signed up to speak spoke in favor of Flock.
So what is Oklahoma City’s relationship with Flock? According to the amended Master Services Agreement, OKCPD uses 90 ALPRs across the city as part of its Real Time Information Center, a program the police started in 2022 as a “support unit” that “leverages existing and emerging technology to increase safety for the community and our officers while making us more efficient in identifying and combatting crime,” according to OKCPD’s website, while aiming “to improve situational awareness for officers in the field in real time, improving officer and citizen safety while respecting the individual rights of the public we serve.” These ALPRs take photos of your rear bumper area, capturing your license plate, car make and model, and any other defining features back there like visible bumps and scratches or bumper stickers, and puts all that into a database for police to look at later to see if a car matching that description was involved in a crime.
As Ward 5 resident Mari Williams, one of the first citizens to speak against the contract renewal, put it, “Flock investigates pre-crime, not crime.”
OKCPD Chief Ron Bacy, who delivered a presentation on some of the “guardrails” his department would be implementing on the Flock ALPR database, told the gathered crowd that Oklahoma City was a “crossroads for interstate and cross-national crime,” invoking the foiled election day shooting plot in 2024, as well as a Moore crime spree in late 2025, as examples of situations where Flock had been necessary. He assured the audience that OKCPD has been working closely with the Municipal Counselor’s Office to ensure that the ALPR network doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment, but said that according to recent court cases, namely the United States v. Acosta and the United States v. Brown, people had no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their license plates, vehicle movements or what their car looked like on the outside.
Mayor David Holt, following the overwhelming public testimony opposed to Flock, voted “yes” on the renewal, as did council members Katrina Avers, Bradley Carter, Todd Stone and Matthew Hinkle, leaving the question of OKC’s “DeFlocking” up in the air for another year. But there is certainly more to be found in Oklahoma City’s surveillance dragnet. The Oklahoma Gazette has filed a FOIA request for information about the Real Time Information Center, as well as the Connect Oklahoma City program, which according to OKCPD has registered and integrated nearly 8,500 privately-owned cameras into the RTIC since its foundation.
As for the citizens who came out to try to make their voices heard?
“I was frustrated. I feel like our council people did not listen to any of us that spoke,” Freeman said in a text message after the meeting. “The fact that absolutely nobody has ever stepped up to that podium to speak in favor of the platform speaks volumes in and of itself. I believe that the number of people that reached out to their Council person was almost exclusively against the platform.”
When the vote was cast and the decision locked in, Williams yelled out from the back of the room: “You should be ashamed of yourselves. How dare you! How dare you! How dare you!”
Later on, she said via text, “I simply hope that these elected officials realize that the entire city is watching their actions and remind them that their votes significantly impact the people. [Three] years ago virtually no one knew what Flock was. But now people from all walks of life do and are outraged by this mass surveillance and trampling of the 4th amendment. I believe this is truly a tipping point in our country, and Flock, as it connects to so many atrocities happening currently, might just be what breaks it.”
This article appears in Not Quite Bedlam.