In the early hours of a July night, four surveillance cameras were cut down in Houston's affluent Old Braeswood neighbourhood. Their metal poles were severed, leaving the distinctive black oval devices and solar panels on the ground. The act of sabotage was not an isolated incident: similar attacks on cameras made by Flock Safety, a leading US surveillance company, have occurred in Minnesota, California, and Georgia, reflecting a deepening public unease over the rapid spread of AI-powered surveillance across American communities.

Flock Safety, founded in Atlanta in 2017, operates a network of Automatic Licence Plate Readers (ALPRs) that it says now numbers more than 120,000 cameras across 49 US states, working with over 7,000 communities. The cameras photograph the rear of every passing vehicle, using artificial intelligence to capture licence plates, vehicle models, colours, and even visible damage, storing that data in a shared database. Crucially, Flock does not sell cameras alone — it sells access to a nationwide network. Documents obtained by the BBC show that a typical licence plate search in one Houston-area school district scanned around 270 camera networks in April 2024; by April 2026, some 20% of searches were drawing on more than 6,000 networks. Law enforcement agencies emphasise the technology's value: one Houston-area police chief says his department's recovery of stolen vehicles rose from three per year to 45 after adopting Flock, and the company says its cameras contributed to more than one million criminal investigations in 2025 alone.

Yet documented cases of misuse have fuelled the backlash. A Kentucky police officer was charged after using Flock to track his ex-girlfriend — against whom she had filed a protection order — more than 2,000 times. In Texas, a detective conducted over 80,000 image searches to locate a woman suspected of having an abortion, without obtaining a warrant. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit, found hundreds of searches in Flock databases linked to political demonstrations, including recent