Flock Safety Watches Everyone. Your Police Blotter Is Missing.

In Dunwoody, Georgia, Flock Safety employees watched live footage of children in a gymnastics room — not to investigate a crime, but to pitch a sales demo. In Waterford, Michigan, the police chief who defends a secret surveillance network keeps the policy governing that network locked behind a FOIA request. Nationwide, the company enabling this infrastructure calls the citizens who map its cameras “terrorists.” This is what one-way surveillance looks like.

The Camera in the Gymnastics Room

In the summer and fall of 2025, Flock Safety employees accessed live and recorded surveillance feeds at the Marcus Jewish Community Center in Dunwoody, Georgia. The cameras they pulled up were not street cameras. They were labeled “Gym Mendel – 1,” “Main Pool Right,” and “Gymnastics.” Children were present in each location.

This was not a security incident or a rogue employee. It was standard practice. Flock has vendor-level access to camera networks it installs for client cities and institutions — and it used that access as a sales tool, showing prospective clients what the cameras could see. Children doing gymnastics were the product demonstration.

In total, 8 Flock employees accessed Dunwoody's camera network more than 480 times. Feeds accessed included gymnastics rooms, pools, parks, playgrounds, and libraries. No parent was notified. No city official flagged it. The practice was discovered only because Dunwoody resident Jason Hunyar filed a public records request for Flock's access logs — an act of routine civic transparency — and then published what he found.

When the story broke publicly in April 2026, Dunwoody residents packed nearly three hours of city council meetings demanding answers. Flock confirmed the access happened and agreed, after the fact, to stop using Dunwoody's cameras for demos. Mayor Lynn Deutsch expressed frustration. The council renewed the Flock contract anyway.

Surveillance Flows One Direction

The Dunwoody incident is not the story of a company that did something wrong once. It is the story of what happens when surveillance infrastructure is built with no enforceable accountability on either end — no meaningful limits on who can access the cameras, and no meaningful obligation to share what those cameras reveal with the public paying for them.

Here is the structural asymmetry at the center of every Flock deployment in America:

This is the architecture of a one-way mirror. The government sees everything. The public sees an officially approved dropdown menu and a glossy portal that Flock's own staff, in internal communications, called useless.

Waterford, Michigan: The Audit in Plain Sight

Waterford Township, Michigan offers a model case study in how this asymmetry plays out at the local level.

Police Chief Scott Underwood has overseen the expansion of Flock Safety cameras in Waterford to 12 cameras as of early 2026, with plans on record to add four more and deploy Flock-powered surveillance drones. The three-year contract costs $20,000 per year — funded through the department's federal drug forfeiture account, meaning it bypassed normal budget appropriation and public vote.

When residents raised concerns about how the data could be used — specifically whether it could facilitate immigration enforcement — Chief Underwood called those concerns “misinformation, inaccuracies and speculation.” He said officers have an internal policy governing when they can share license plate reader data.

That policy is not available to the public. A FOIA request was required just to learn it exists.

This is not a knock on Waterford Township specifically. Versions of this dynamic play out in thousands of communities across the country. The pattern is consistent: police departments adopt Flock cameras quickly, often via forfeiture funds or grants that avoid public scrutiny, and then resist any meaningful transparency about how the technology is used — while simultaneously resisting basic proactive crime data disclosure.

Ask for surveillance: approved, funded, deployed. Ask for a daily spreadsheet of what the police did: too burdensome, too sensitive, too complex.

Bidirectional Transparency Is Not a Radical Idea

The principle of bidirectional transparency is straightforward: if government agencies can surveil the public, the public must have a meaningful, systematic ability to monitor the government in return. This is not about turning civilians into counterintelligence operatives. It is about basic democratic reciprocity.

For police departments operating Flock networks, bidirectional transparency would look like this:

None of these are technically difficult. A dispatcher with a spreadsheet can produce a daily incident log. Audit logging is a standard software feature. Vendor access controls are table-stakes enterprise security. The 2015 White House Open Police Data Initiative called for proactive, machine-readable crime data publication from every local jurisdiction. That standard has been largely ignored.

The argument that publishing usage data would compromise officer safety or active investigations is real but narrow. It justifies redacting case-specific details, not eliminating the audit trail entirely. It is the same argument used to justify taking down LAPD's crime map — which San Francisco proved was unnecessary by publishing daily data throughout the same technical transition.

FOIA Requests as Terrorism: The Flock Safety Doctrine

In 2024, a Colorado organizer named Will Freeman built DeFlock.me — a crowdsourced, open-source map of Flock Safety camera locations, submitted voluntarily by members of the public who spotted cameras in their communities. The project's stated mission: promote transparency about the surveillance infrastructure being built in American neighborhoods without public debate.

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley's response was to call DeFlock “a terroristic organization” and compare it to Antifa. Flock sent a cease and desist letter. The cameras being mapped are installed on public streets, funded with public dollars, operated by public agencies. The act of noting their locations — information visible to any pedestrian — was characterized by the CEO of a $3.5 billion company as terrorism.

“Closer to Antifa than anything else.”

The camera-mapping controversy is not isolated. Flock has built an entire infrastructure for suppressing transparency requests. Investigative outlet Footnote4a obtained and published what it called “Flock vs. FOIA: The Suppression Manual”— a Flock-authored document titled “Guide to Flock Safety Data for Open Records Law,” last updated September 2025. The document opens by advising police departments: you do not have to create records.

Flock — a private company — is writing the legal guidance that government agencies use to deny their own constituents access to public records. The transparency portal Flock sells to every client as a sign of civic accountability? In December 2025, Flock stripped officer names, queried license plates, and vehicle fingerprint data from audit logs. What remains: a date, a camera name, and a drop-down reason field with Flock's own pre-approved menu options.

When researcher Cris van Pelt built HaveIBeenFlocked.com — a site that published Flock audit logs obtained legitimately through public records requests that police departments had failed to redact — Flock went after his web hosts. The company claimed the site posed “an immediate threat to public safety and exposes law enforcement officers to danger.”

The data van Pelt published was the data that exposed a Milwaukee police officer allegedly using Flock's system to stalk a woman. The victim discovered the surveillance only because she checked her plate on HaveIBeenFlocked. Flock's response was to attempt to take down the site that told her.

What Happens Without Accountability: A Pattern

The Electronic Frontier Foundation spent 2025 systematically documenting what Flock's surveillance network looks like without meaningful oversight. The findings span every category of civil liberties concern.

Cities Are Starting to Push Back

In early 2026, Lynnwood, Washington became the first city to unanimously cancel its Flock Safety contract, citing privacy concerns and immigration enforcement risk. Renton, Washington suspended its cameras twice — the second time in May 2026 — after public outcry, with council members questioning whether alternatives to Flock exist. NPR documented a growing wave of cancellations as the scope of unauthorized data sharing and secret statewide lookups has become public knowledge.

Michigan's state legislature introduced a bipartisan bill to regulate license plate reader use statewide — a direct response to the proliferation of Flock cameras and the absence of any standard governing how data can be used, retained, or shared.

A Washington state court ruled in November 2025 that data captured by Flock Safety cameras are public records — a decision directly at odds with Flock's campaign to keep that data exempt from disclosure.

The Question Every City Council Must Answer

SpotCrime's mission is to make crime data accessible to the public — the same public that is the nominal beneficiary of every Flock deployment. We work directly with thousands of law enforcement agencies to normalize and publish incident data. We know what it costs to produce a daily crime log. It is not expensive. It does not require special technology. It requires the political will to treat the public as a partner rather than a subject.

The argument that police surveillance technology protects communities carries real weight in some contexts. But that argument collapses entirely when the same agencies deploying mass surveillance systems refuse to tell those communities what they responded to yesterday — and when the company enabling that surveillance calls citizens who ask questions terrorists.

Bidirectional transparency is not a favor. It is the condition under which surveillance power is legitimate. A department that claims to surveil residents for their own protection, while simultaneously resisting every mechanism by which those residents could verify that claim, is not a partner. It is a one-way mirror in a room that used to be public.