Norman, Oklahoma is a Flockless outpost on the outskirts of the Oklahoma City metro area. As you drive south down I-35 away from the big city and into Norman, coverage from the automated license plate readers (ALPR) dwindles. That’s because Norman has rejected Flock’s pitch multiple times.
“They've given us two presentations in the last three years at the request of our police department who wanted to implement them,” Stephen Tyler Holman, the mayor of Norman, told me. “They haven’t been back since I’ve been mayor.”
Norman is an outlier. When the surveillance company comes to a city or a town, the city often signs up. The city council in my small town of 12,000 people just
voted to install 22 new Flock cameras
despite overwhelming pushback from residents. A big centerpiece of Flock’s pitch was that it would help solve crimes. My town’s chief of police told a story about how Flock had been instrumental in arresting child predators.
Holman told me that Flock and the cops made the same pitch to Norman. “Crime prevention and helping the police more efficiently solve crime. That was their main point that they wanted to advocate for,” he said. “They really focused on amber alerts and silver alerts and ‘don't you want to find kidnapped kids and elderly people that have wandered off who have Alzheimer's?’”
But Norman’s leaders had questions about privacy and data security and they didn’t like Flock’s answers. “Those were some of the reasons why we ended up not doing it,” Holman said. “Questions about data storage and how long and who has access to it […] you're gathering data on every single car vehicle that goes in and out of the city of Norman, regardless of if they've committed a crime or not, and then that's stored for 30 days on some kind of database? Who has access to it? How secure is it? Those are the questions we have that were kind of deal breakers for us [...] 30 days seemed like a long time to sit on that much data. There were some council members that w
