Weekly Member Update - March 16, 2026
Block Print by Atypical Tuesday
There has been an ever-increasing amount of news about Flock cameras and the growing nationwide movement against them and, this coming week, our friends Up-River in Troy are going to be right in the middle of it. But before we tell the story of the happenings in Troy, a little background for those of you that aren’t familiar with Flock cameras and how they are SURVEILLANCE, not safety.
As many of you know, Indivisible Albany has been working the Flock beat for a few months now; we held a community forum on the subject back in early February and, just this past week, we partnered with our friends at Guilderland Indivisible for another presentation on the subject. In our experience, when folks hear the truth about automated license plate readers (ALPRs) like Flocks and how they are absolutely nothing like the myriad other cameras that we all encounter everyday, those folks get pissed and disgusted, and for good reason.
Flock Safety’s Standard License Plate Reader, aka “Flock Falcon”
There is a ton of valuable resources out there on ALPRs; the ACLU was raising red flags as early as 2013, and we also recommend this piece by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as crucial background reading. In a nutshell, however, ALPRs appear, at first glance, to be nothing different than the closed-circuit cameras and speed cameras that we all encounter every day on the roads throughout our communities. But ALPRs are much more than they seem. These are AI-powered cameras that capture images of any and all vehicles that pass by, recording each car's location, date and time, and storing not just your license plate number, but other details like your car's make, model, color and other identifying features such as dents, roof racks and bumper stickers, and sometimes even vehicle occupants. But what really differentiates ALPRs from standard closed-circuit cameras is not just the vast amount of data that ALPRs collect, but the fact that the data is uploaded to central servers where it can be turned into searchable data points and distributed to anyone with access to that ALPR network. The integrated system thereby allows users to not just see where individual motorists are, but also where they have been and where they will habitually go.
Among the several ALPR vendors currently in existence, Flock Safety is the unquestioned big dog. Marketed to its law enforcement clientele as a “smarter, faster and safer” tool of policing, Flock Safety trumpets its ability to integrate its camera data with existing public records and coordinate investigations across multiple law enforcement agencies far and wide. What they are really marketing to your friendly local police officers is the ability to tap into — and in turn provide data inputs to — a mass surveillance network that is observing every one of us, guilty or innocent alike, with little to no regard for our right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment. And Flock Safety is well on its way to building its network across the Country. According to ACLU Massachusetts, as of last July, Flock Safety had deployed more than 90,000 cameras nationwide, running more than 7,000 surveillance networks in association with thousands of different law enforcement agencies. According to Flock personnel, its ALPRs are used by over 1,000 businesses and roughly one-third of 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. And, it turns out that mass surveillance is profitable to boot; The New Republic has reported that Flock Safety is currently valued at more than $7.5 billion, with 2024 revenues in excess of $285 million. Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley, like seemingly every other tech CEO these days, has a bit of a God complex and has hyperbolically claimed that Flock will effectively eradicate all crime in the United States by 2035. Consistent with that savior rhetoric, Flock Safety works studiously with its law enforcement partners to cultivate its image as an indispensable piece of modern “public safety” infrastructure, often publishing exaggerated statistics and other copaganda to promote its products. As the ACLU tells it, “Flock is building a dangerous nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure . . . The problem with mass surveillance is that it always expands beyond the uses for which it is initially justified — and sure enough, Flock’s system is undergoing insidious expansion across multiple dimensions.”
As APLRs and Flocks in particular spread like mushrooms across the Country, the associated horror stories are proliferating right alongside them. In one well-reported incident, a Sheriff in Texas accessed the data of 83,000 ALPRs to track a woman suspected of having an abortion, including her travel to states where abortion is legal. This past week, it was reported that a Chicago school district had used ALPR data to dispute the residency of Latino family within a suburban school district. A police officer in Wichita, Kansas used Flock cameras to stalk his estranged wife. There have also been reports dating back to 2019 that ICE has used ALPR data to target vulnerable communities and, while Flock claims to not share its data with ICE, there is no stopping a Flock-partnering law enforcement agency who cooperates with ICE from sharing data with ICE as well, including data from communities which explicitly do not cooperate with ICE. There are even reports that police are using Flock data to investigate protest activity protected by the First Amendment.
Spearheaded by the work of the ACLU, ALPR.watch, haveibeenflocked.com and the excellent DeFlock database, the pushback against Flock and other ALPRs is also growing. DeFlock has documented 53 different municipalities who have cancelled or terminated their ALPR contracts, and, just this past week, the North Country Village of Saranac Lake successfully defeated Flock in their community. A grassroots movement in the People’s Republic of Ithaca successfully expelled Flock from there and, to our south in Dutchess County, the Town of Pine Plains beat Flock before it even got started. To our west, the City of Syracuse is engaged in a protracted fight against Flock, with reports that Flock plans to keep Syracuse’s data even if they lose their contract with the City. While Colorado is currently debating legislation intended to rein in ALPRs, politicians in California are returning Flock’s campaign donations under public pressure. The anti-Flock movement is real, and it is growing.
Amid this backdrop and the growing cacophony against ALPRs generally — and against Flock in particular — comes our friends in Troy. On March 5, a collection of concerned Trojans spoke out forcefully before their City Council against the presence of Flock cameras in the Collar City; you can view the speakers beginning at the 1:05:00 mark of this video. In the wake of these expressions of understandable concern by her constituents, Republican Troy Mayor Carmella Mantello took to the right-wing misinformation cesspool that is today’s Facebook to defend the presence of 26 Flock cameras in the City and to nonsensically accuse her fellow Trojans of trying to “defund the police.” MAGA Republicans like Mayor Mantello and her patron Steve McLaughlin will never waste an opportunity to regurgitate a GOP talking point, no matter how inapt.
Lo and behold, a few days after Mayor Mantello’s Facebook rant, a new item appeared on the agenda of the Troy City Council’s Finance Meeting scheduled for this coming Thursday evening. It turns out that Troy’s existing contract with Flock expires on March 31 and now Mayor Mantello and the Troy Police want the Troy City Council to sign up for another two-year term at a cost to Troy taxpayers of $78,000 per year. Consistent with the copaganda produced by Flock itself, the Troy Police breathlessly laud their Flocks as “an essential tool of modern law enforcement [which] enhance[s] public safety in the City of Troy.” Without providing any examples, the Troy Police also talk up the Flocks’ “paramount” role in investigating violent crime and finding missing or vulnerable persons. Presumably, this is because the police had no ability to investigate crime or find missing people before Flocks came around.
The 26 cameras on Troy’s Flock network have their eyes on you as soon as you come off the Congress Street bridge, and then they will catch you again as you turn off Congress onto Pawling Avenue. If you go to Hudson Valley Community College, the Flocks will see you on North Road, South Drive and George E. Halliday Drive. Flocks are on High Street off the Menands Bridge, and they’ll see you driving up 2nd Street as you cross Bridge Avenue. Wave hello to the Flock when you’re on High Street where it crosses the mighty Poesten Kill, and then head up to Hoosick Street, where you’ll see them outside Park Ridge Apartments and then down the hill where they follow all lanes of traffic traversing the Collar City Bridge. And don’t think the ‘Burgh escapes Flock’s watchful eye, because one is planted outside the Walgreens on the way across the 126th Street Bridge to Waterford.
And that’s just Troy. We know that Flocks (and a couple of Genetecs) are all over all of our communities, from Bethlehem, Colonie and Guilderland back to the Rivertowns of Green Island and Cohoes. They’re in Schenectady too, and in Clifton Park, Saratoga Springs and East Greenbush as well. Therefore, in addition to our public education campaign concerning Flocks, we here at Indivisible Albany are also actively engaged in accessing public records to see the contracts between Flock and our hometowns in order to ascertain just how much we are all paying to be surveilled every damn moment while we’re out living our lives. So, while we’re going to be standing strong with Troy as they fight the good fight this coming Thursday, we also know that this is a fight that is eventually going to be fought all across the 518. Troy is only the first domino, and with the solidarity and hard work of folks like you, we can be sure that other Capital Region Flocks will be coming down too.
Odds & Ends:
Pro Publica has reporting that women in Florida are being compelled by court order to have C-sections that they do not want or need. Why? Because rights of personhood are being extended to their fetuses. In some instances, the women are being forced to appear before a judge, without the benefit of legal counsel, from their hospital beds while in active labor.
The Intercept has reporting that the Pentagon has confirmed what we already knew, that American forces were responsible for the Tomahawk missile attack that killed 175 people, most of them children, at an Iranian girls’ school on the first day of the Iran War. Contrary to Donald Trump’s ignorant speculation, we are the only Country engaged in the Iran War that possesses Tomahawk missiles.
The Orange King’s primary legislative objective — the so-called SAVE America Act — will be debated before the United States Senate this week. In case you hadn’t heard, the SAVE America Act purports to solve the nonexistent problem of “voter fraud” by noncitizens, which is of course already illegal. In reality, the bill would require all Americans to prove their citizenship, primarily by birth certificate or US Passport, in order to register to vote. In so doing, the SAVE America Act would potentially disenfranchise up to 21 million Americans, with young voters, voters who have taken on their spouse’s surname and voters of color being disproportionately affected. The legislation would also inject chaos into election administration by the various states in the midst of an ongoing midterm election, would require the states to turn over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security and would severely restrict mail-in voting and require voter ID at the polls. Trump and his right-wing allies are so enthusiastic about this legislation that they are pushing to kill the Senate filibuster to get it passed. As of this writing, Senate Majority Leader John Thune seems disinclined to go that route, meaning that the SAVE America Act will require Democratic votes in the Senate to pass. You can help make sure that doesn’t happen.
New York Focus has a really helpful deep dive into the competing state budget proposals of Governor Hochul and the one-house bills coming out of the New York State Senate and Assembly. Meanwhile, independent of the state budget process, the Governor and Legislative leaders are negotiating immigration related legislation, with Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins stating this past week that negotiators are “really trying to get as close as possible to New York for All.”
The Department of Justice has proposed federal rulemaking intended to shield US Attorneys from the disciplinary authority of the States that have licensed them to practice law. Like just about everything that the Regime has done, this is plainly illegal, and likely unconstitutional as well. It also comes as Attorney General Pam Bondi was herself the subject of a complaint in Florida by more than 70 former judges, law professors and other prominent lawyers. Deputy Attorney General — and former Trump lawyer — Todd Blanche also appears to be under investigation by bar authorities in Manhattan based, at least in part, on Blanche’s interview of convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. We’re sure that the DOJ’s new proposed rule is wholly unrelated to the existence off the bar complaints against Bondi and Blanche however…
In conclusion, we’re now less than two weeks from No Kings 3! Our website has all the maps and information you could possibly need about our Mass Demonstration and March at Central and Colvin and, if you are so inclined, you can let us know here that you’ll be in attendance on March 28 beginning at 1pm. As we said last week, this day of action has a little something for everyone and, to help get you ready, we’re offering up a host of training opportunities. First and foremost, in partnership with our allies in the Greater Capital Region Coalition, we’re hosting an in-person Civil Resistance training at The Love Center this coming Saturday. For this particular training, participation is limited, so please sign up in advance if you are interested. If you can’t make an in-person training, Indivisible and the ACLU are partnering on a host of trainings this week beginning with two different sessions of Know Your Rights trainings specific to No Kings participants. Finally, if you are interested in joining our Safety Ambassador Corps to help make sure that No Kings 3 goes off without a hitch, drop us a line and then sign up for Indivisible’s Safety and De-Escalation Training and Safety Marshall Training.
