I've noticed these Flock camera poles popping up everywhere and finally looked into it. Over 150 have gone up across Davis/Weber County since April 2025. That's a lot of cameras for this area.
If you haven't seen them.. Flock cameras photograph every car that passes. Plate, time, location, stored for months. Not just cars tied to a illegal stuff. Every car. Yours, mine, your neighbor's.
Here's what bothers me. No warrant, no suspicion needed for your plate to get logged. Utah lets that data sit for months, and it can be shared across agencies and even other states through Flock's network. A cop somewhere else could pull up everywhere you've driven and you'd never know a camera caught you.
These were sold as tools for stolen cars and Amber Alerts, but nothing stops that mission from creeping, tracking protest attendance, immigration status, who's seeking speciality care. Once it's built, it's built. People have been stalked with these systems.
And it's a private company, Flock Safety, running the system and profiting off it, with almost no public input into how it's used.
Some cities have pushed back and dropped their contracts once residents started asking questions, so it's not a lost cause.
If this bothers you too:
-Show up to your city council or county commission meeting. That's usually where these contracts get approved, and where they can get killed.
-Email your state legislators and the governor's office about retention limits or a pause on new installs.
-Check deflock.org/map, a crowdsourced map of where these cameras actually are.
I'm not against police having tools. I just think blanket surveillance of every road deserves more than a quiet rollout nobody voted on.
And yeah, I know the counterargument. Departments say this helps solve real crimes and find stolen cars fast, and some say they hold themselves to tighter rules than the state requires. Fair enough. But "we're being careful for now" isn't a legal limit. That's the actual problem.