Cops Play Hide and Seek About Using Spy Tech to Avoid Scrutiny and Bad PR

Concealing the use of unpopular spying tools isn’t anything particularly new for law enforcement—cops have been doing it for years—but it’s just as wrong now as it was 20 years ago.

This is especially troubling when many towns are signing contracts with Flock and other ALPR vendors with little to no public oversight.

This trend is certainly not lost on law enforcement agencies.

Hiding the fact that they’re using ALPRs from Flock and other vendors is one way of avoiding scrutiny and bad PR.

But law enforcement and their spy tech vendors keeping people in the dark about the surveillance technologies trained on them predates the Flock backlash by decades.