Flock got introduced to my municipality (Oak Park, IL) when OPPD was able to use data from a neighboring muni (it may have been Chicago, I forget which) to work back on an incident. OPPD had (has) authority to make arbitrary technology acquisitions so long as they're under a fixed cost (I believe $20k) --- this is a common arrangement in area munis, and maybe around the country --- which, if you're a product manager at Flock, gives you a trivial and effective game plan: go close deals to get <$20k pilot deployments up and running, and then work on expanding them.

The problem you have if Flock squicks you out is that you're not a normie. Flock's pitch to normies is incredibly compelling. Flock theoretically lights up any time a stolen car drives into your muni; stolen cars are a primary vector for crimes (here, especially: carjacking, but also thefts, burglaries, etc). The data it collects is shareable only, and with consent, to other law enforcement agencies. It records make/model/color/plate, but no other direct identifying information. Assume for the moment that it all works as advertised, and it's on paper a weird capability to push back on your local police having.

Our own OPPD messed up acquiring Flock. I think they tried to skip the pilot, and go straight to a muni-wide rollout, which required board approval. That blindsided the board. Instead of rubber-stamping it as expected, the board kicked it out to the technology and police oversight (CPOC) citizens commissions. I serve on one of those. Here's what we came up with:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v_sko3OljbZUEbcZbv_L9q9z...

What we ended up getting:

* A negotiated special-purpose police general order governing use of Flock, limiting it to violent crime, and installing procedural safeguards (most notably: a monthly readout to CPOC on Flock hits).

* A rollback down to 8 cameras from 20+.

* A one-year review of how Flock went.

The glaring hole left open: we have no direct public input on which munis we share Flock data with.

A year later, the monthly readouts to CPOC were FOIA'd and published, and the results are in: overwhelmingly, Flock stops in Oak Park were not responsive to crimes in Oak Park, but rather had OPPD doing warrants enforcement work for neighboring munis. Worse: the premise of Flock, that we could plug into regional hot-lists of stolen cars and cordon Oak Park off from them, turned out to be terribly flawed: the CPD hot-list is full of bullshit reports or recovered cars never cleared, so we were regularly pulling random innocent people over. The Flock technology worked fine! But the municipal systems it depends just aren't ready to safely use it.

The big thing coming off Flock for us is ACLU's CCOPS model ordinance, which adds mandatory board review for any surveillance technology (broadly defined in the ordinance). We worked for 4-5 months getting it prepped for the board, which has counsel drafting a local enacting ordinance; I'm optimistic we'll get it this year. CCOPS is something any muni can get; it's a good pitch, with something for a lot of different constituencies to like.

I think the "private company monitoring public land" thing is an argument that carries a lot of weight on Twitter and HN, but my experience in (our own specific) local politics is that it's a good way to get people to look at you like a Martian.