In our intensely divided moment, there’s one thing that the right and left seem to agree on: they hate Flock cameras.

The cameras are installed in most urban areas across the country and record the license plate number of every car that drives past them, storing information about people’s movement in a database, for use by local governments and police departments.

According to the company, Flock has 120,000 active cameras across the United States. Many police departments and investigators claim they make solving crimes and locating individuals easier than ever.

But critics are stacking up, citing alleged police misuse, privacy rights violations and mass surveillance. 

“It reminds me of these sci-fi AI, like, the government’s-watching-you kind of movies,” anti-Flock organizer Brian McKellar told The Post.

Over the past several months, Flock cameras have been the cause of constant protests and the formation of grassroots groups against them, like DeFlock. Vigilante vandals have even taken to obstructing and destroying the cameras themselves.

Perhaps the most interesting feature is the protests aren’t along party lines. Progressive social media like Bluesky is flooded with people accusing the cameras of being tools of a fascist government, while conservatives with a libertarian streak tend to see it as an issue of big government overreach into our private lives.

McKellar, of Idaho Falls, is a self-identified conservative who believes in law and order, but he thinks the cameras go too far.

“I don’t live in Idaho because I want to be surveilled all the time. I like the country. I like the West. I like being in the Wild, Wild West,” he told The Post.

McKellar, 40, only became aware that his local police department had taken to using Flock cameras for surveillance last year, when another resident made a complaint about them during a town hall meeting.

The revelation disturbed him so much he helped launch DeFlock Idaho this summer. It’s a grassroots organization of citizens, who pressure city councils to reject Flock cameras and work to obtain public records about how they’re being used.

“It’s not even just the Feds anymore. It’s the city and the county that can now watch and surveil me in detail,” McKellar told The Post. “This is definitely not just a conservative issue. I don’t think there’s a line between where you sit on a party affiliation.”

A spokesperson for Flock told The Post their technology “supported more than 1 million criminal investigations and public-safety incidents” in 2025 and was used in 20% of solved cases in jurisdictions which use the cameras.

They also claim more than 10,000 missing people were located using Flock that year.

“Every chief in this state that has these can go over scenario, after scenario, after scenario where it has helped solve crime,” police chief Paul Melanson of Farmington, Connecticut, said in a Tuesday press conference.

Or as Chief Deputy of the Adams County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois put it: “It’s like having extra sets of eyes.”

But one major concern raised by critics is police misuse of data. There are no uniform national rules restricting how the information collected by Flock cameras can be accessed or used, and police departments across the country have wildly different retention periods for the data.

“We’re seeing officers abusing the system to stalk their exes [and] women that they’re interested in,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Post.

The Institute for Justice reports that, in just the past five years, there have been 39 cases of romantic stalking by police via Flock camera. Officers have used the devices to track the movements of current, former, or prospective partners who have no connection to a crime or investigation.

In one especially shocking incident, Former Deputy Jaquarius Yarbrough of Richmond County, Virginia, allegedly used the license plate tracking system to stalk a woman he was having an affair with 1,639 times over several months. 

“What we’re talking about are cameras that are documenting everywhere your car goes,” Maass said. “There are databases where police can type in your license plate and see everywhere you’ve gone… The government shouldn’t be creating databases of movement.”

He noted that opposition to Flock cameras has “always been a cross-partisan issue,” once people are made aware of them: “People will see it go up on their corner and they’ll be like, ‘What is that?’ Once they Google it and they see that this is something that is tracking them, they start to get mad.”

The anger seems to be boiling over.

According to the Guardian, Flock cameras have been vandalized, damaged or destroyed at least 33 times across 23 states. People have “paint bombed” the cameras to cover their lenses or made 3D printed objects to obstruct them, and a few have even left American flags behind at the scene as a symbol of resistance.

Some vandals have been charged, like 44-year-old Jevon Martinez of New Mexico. He was arrested in July for allegedly destroying three cameras and leaving behind a note saying “You’re welcome, the Republic of New Mexico.”

Legislators are taking a more pragmatic approach.

In California, Senate Bill 1013 would require officer training, annual audits, and logs of all database searches conducted by police. And last month Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie proposed a bill that would deprive jurisdictions using Flock cameras of funding.

The potential consequences of false positives are also a major concern of Flock’s opponents. An internal analysis by police in Roseville, California, found that 71% of alerts for stolen or felony-linked vehicles sent by Flock cameras to the department contained misread license plate numbers.

In Ohio, a man is suing his city after police pulled him over because they believed him to be driving a car with stolen plates based on Flock camera data. That turned out to be untrue, but not before police released K-9s on him in a move his attorneys call “unlawful excessive force.”

Another incident in Sherwood, Arkansas, saw police officers detain a couple with a 1-month-old child in the backseat at gunpoint after a Flock camera incorrectly flagged their vehicle as stolen. 

And a San Diego man spent nearly a month in jail for attempted carjacking because he was driving a red Alfa Romeo matching a suspect’s car, even though the Flock camera used to nab him placed his car five miles away from the incident in question 23 seconds after the crime.

“Flock understands that communities have questions about privacy,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Those decisions belong to communities and their elected officials. Flock supports clear legal guardrails, local control, documented search purposes, audit trails and transparency. Public safety and privacy should coexist.”

But Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute, says this “vehicle fingerprinting system” almost certainly raises constitutional concerns.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is ultimately a Fourth Amendment issue,” he told The Post, referring to the amendment which protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government and requires warrants to be based on probable cause.

“When people are just going about their daily lives, and having the government collect this data on them in the absence of any kind of criminal predicate, that itself is absolutely constitutionally problematic,” Eddington said.

He also urged those who assume the technology won’t affect them because they have nothing to hide to think twice.

“It doesn’t matter whether you think you’re doing nothing wrong,” he said. “It only matters whether or not the cops or the prosecutors decide that you are doing something wrong. And then your life gets turned upside down. And in most cases, it’s never the same after that.”