A police department's newly announced policy for Flock license-plate readers, introduced only after public blowback, illustrates just how weak the prior safeguards were. The policy shift itself is an admission that the department had been operating with little oversight or abuse prevention in place before the controversy erupted.
Meanwhile, Flock is being dropped by a growing number of cities, and the trend appears to be accelerating. While some of these cities may ultimately choose another automatic license plate reader provider, the hope is that any replacement will take abuse prevention far more seriously than Flock apparently did.
The episode underscores a broader pattern: surveillance tools often get deployed first, with meaningful rules arriving only after public pressure forces a rethink. Whether cities simply swap one ALPR vendor for another remains to be seen, but the bar for responsible use has been raised.