City streets have become the front line of a national debate about surveillance, policing, and privacy. In a new Atlantic essay, Charles Fain Lehman argues that the current backlash against Flock Safety’s cameras—often framed in sweeping, dystopian language—risks turning serious concerns into political overreaction. Lehman’s central claim is that automatic license-plate reader technology, or ALPRs, can be part of a “toolbox” of enforcement options, but only if policymakers regulate their use rather than treating their existence as an automatic threat to democracy.
Lehman describes Flock’s product in plain terms: the devices are installed on light poles or buildings, photograph license plates as vehicles pass below, and add those images to a centralized database. The scale of adoption is part of what makes the controversy so combustible. According to the essay, San Francisco uses roughly 500 ALPR units provided by Flock, and the vendor says it is deployed with agencies across the country—“more than 5,000 agencies,” with “billions of plate images a month.” The very breadth of that network has fed fears that an ordinary traffic camera could become a mechanism for pervasive tracking.
Still, Lehman insists that the arguments behind the panic need to be separated from the legal and practical realities. He points to the Supreme Court’s position that people driving on public thoroughfares have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the movements their cars make—an outlook that, in his telling, undercuts the idea that ALPR collection is categorically illegitimate. The cameras capture plates, which are tied to government-issued registration for vehicles traveling on public roads, rather than direct video of personal conversations or home life.
That said, Lehman does not dismiss privacy risks. He acknowledges that concerns are legitimate and that the privacy threat is real, even if, compared with other intrusions, it may be “minimal” in the essay’s framing. The question, he suggests, is how policymakers respond: with blunt bans that may leave other, more invasive forms of surveillance untouched, or with calibrated rules that limit access, define permissible uses, and govern retention and oversight.
Opponents of Flock-style systems often argue that third-party control and data aggregation are the real dangers, not the hardware itself. That concern is echoed in reporting about New York’s broader surveillance infrastructure, where advocates and critics have questioned how camera networks connect to public systems. In a profile of the “surveillance state,” New York’s NYMag described how officials sought to embed surveillance capabilities into existing public infrastructure, highlighting a prior report that the NYPD used Big Apple Connect—an initiative providing free broadband to NYCHA residents—to connect housing authority cameras to the department’s digital systems. The article also notes the difficulty of keeping such expansions subject to independent oversight and the risk of graft when procurement and integration proceed without transparency.
The NYMag piece also points to ways Flock’s business model could raise alarms beyond privacy alone, including claims—at least as characterized in the reporting—about “unauthorized (and in some cases, illegal) provision of police data” for federal immigration enforcement and a purported commitment to “facilitating local police abuse and overreach.” While Lehman’s essay emphasizes constitutional and proportionality arguments, the “surveillance state” critique focuses on institutional incentives and governance, arguing that the systems become harder to constrain once they’re embedded.
In several cities, backlash has translated into concrete policy moves: trials end, cameras come down, and city leaders cite both resident concerns and questions about control over third-party data. Reporting from the Twin Cities indicates that West St. Paul ended its trial of Flock Safety license-plate reader cameras immediately, with crews beginning removal. City Manager Nate Burkett said the city saw no indication that the cameras were used for anything other than legitimate law enforcement purposes, and he said the decision was not a reflection on the city police. Nevertheless, Burkett expressed particular concern that a third-party company owned the data collected by cameras and that the city lacked full control over how that information would be used.
That tension—between operational claims of legitimacy and governance concerns about ownership, access, and secondary use—appears to be driving much of the national fight. Even when local officials believe the system is being used “properly,” residents and critics focus on what happens after the footage is collected: where it is stored, who can query it, how long it is kept, and whether data sharing can expand beyond initial, narrowly stated objectives.
Lehman, however, argues that banning the technology wholesale would be an error. “Intelligently regulated,” he contends, ALPRs can become a less severe option within a broader strategy for policing that aims to be smarter rather than harsher. His position is that public policy should not be dictated by the rhetoric of panic—particularly the language that casts modern camera networks as an engineered path to a “slave state.” In his view, emotion should not substitute for regulatory design.
The essay’s policy implication is not that cameras solve all problems or that regulation is easy. It is that leaving ALPRs entirely on the scrap heap may do more than remove a controversial vendor; it could also reduce the leverage communities have to demand stricter rules. If governments instead use technology where it is demonstrably limited, audited, and bounded by clear legal standards, Lehman suggests they can reduce harm while still supporting investigations and traffic-related enforcement.
At the same time, the public debate has not remained abstract. Technology for public camera networks is already widely present in urban environments. Publicly accessible camera directories, such as those maintained for certain city systems, show how numerous camera locations exist across major metropolitan areas, underscoring that ALPRs are only one node in a much larger ecosystem of monitoring infrastructure. That context matters, Lehman implies: a society that already collects information in many ways will have to decide which data practices are acceptable and which require limits.
For local governments weighing whether to keep or remove ALPR systems, the central question becomes less ideological and more administrative: how to ensure the technology serves legitimate law enforcement while preventing function creep. Cities that ended trials cited legitimate-use assurances, but also raised worries about third-party data ownership and limited municipal control. Critics who warn of a creeping surveillance state point to integration into existing public systems and the challenges of oversight.
Lehman’s call is therefore a middle path: regulate rather than discard. In the debate over Flock cameras, that means treating privacy and governance as real constraints—while resisting the temptation to decide policy based on worst-case narratives rather than on evidence, accountability mechanisms, and proportionality. The controversy over ALPRs may ultimately hinge less on whether cameras exist and more on whether communities can meaningfully control what is collected, how it is stored, and who gets to use it.
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