Flock Safety cameras went up around Safford. Local law enforcement calls them an investigative tool that only reads license plates, with safeguards and nothing to worry about. What we want is simple: the cameras come out. Until then, the floor is transparency, because we have a legal right to see who has been searching the cameras in our county, and that audit is the evidence that wins the bigger fight. The problem was never whether Graham County officers are good people. The problem is the network.
It's Not Just a Plate Reader
Local officials describe Flock as a camera that reads license plates, "just letters and numbers, no personal information." That is not what the company sells. Flock's own marketing names the feature Vehicle Fingerprint: AI that profiles each vehicle far past the plate, cataloguing make, body type, color, damage, aftermarket wheels, roof racks, and bumper stickers, built to track a specific vehicle even when the plate isn't visible.
It searches for people too. Law enforcement can query footage with plain-language descriptions, the ACLU documented searches like a person in a "camo hat, forest green sweater." The "we don't use facial recognition" line misses the point: you don't need a face when the system can be searched for a hat, a tattoo, or what someone's shirt says.
Flock's flagship platform, Nova, fuses camera data with jail records, dispatch logs, public records, and open-source intelligence into a searchable file on a person, with no warrant required. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a "dystopian panopticon."
Sources: Flock Safety product pages; BGR (June 2026); Berkeleyside (Nov 2025); ACLU, "Flock's Aggressive Expansions" (Aug 2025); EFF (2025).
The Network Has Already Been Abused
The strongest defense officials give is "nothing has been abused here in our valley." That specific claim may be true locally. Everywhere else on the same network, it fell apart, and these are Arizona agencies, the same product Graham County uses.
- Scottsdale PD ran more than 12,000 searches on the shared Arizona database, nearly one in four of all Flock searches statewide
- A Glendale officer typed an ethnic slur into the search box as the stated reason for a query, the "reason" field recorded the bias instead of preventing it
- Tempe PD ran three searches for "ATL No Kings Protest" across 425 networks, looking for any red vehicle in a time window ("ATL" is police code for "attempt to locate")
- Arizona DPS logged protest-related searches in June 2025
Sources: Tucson Spotlight (Feb 2026); EFF (Nov 2025); 404 Media; The Record.
Nationwide, the EFF obtained 12 million searches from 3,900+ agencies. More than 50 agencies ran searches tied to 2025 protests. Dayton, Ohio bagged all 72 of its cameras after finding 7,000+ immigration-related searches by outside agencies. A Texas officer used the network to hunt a woman who had a self-administered abortion. Border Patrol had back-door access to at least ten Washington departments that never authorized it.
Sources: Fortune (June 2026); SF Standard (Sept 2025); EFF; UW Center for Human Rights (Nov 2025).
Officials say a monthly audit keeps the system clean. Turn that around: the audit log is exactly how every one of these abuses got caught. The thing they call proof of safety is the thing that documents the danger. So let's see ours.
The Camera Is the Front Door
Flock's Nova platform can integrate with predictive-policing systems, including Palantir, the company founded in 2003 with CIA venture funding and chaired by billionaire Peter Thiel, a major backer of the current administration. Palantir builds the data backbone for two operations that turn out to be the same machine.
ImmigrationOS
Palantir's ICE platform fuses license plates, Medicaid records, and travel data into "near real-time visibility" of people's movements, assigning a "confidence score" and a map pin for arrest. ICE-Palantir contracts total $435M+ since 2011, and the tools raised ICE's target-location rate from ~27% to nearly 80%.
Sources: ACLU (Apr 2026); Fortune (Jan 2026); American Immigration Council; AFSC Investigate.
Project Maven & Palestine
The same company runs Maven, the Pentagon's AI targeting system that automates the "kill chain," a contract grown from $480 million into the billions, used to help pick targets in the US strikes on Iran. The UN's own June 2025 report ("Economy of Genocide") named Palantir specifically for providing AI battlefield software to the Israeli military. Tested on immigrants and Palestinians first.
Sources: OHCHR / UN report A/HRC/59/23 (June 2025); Liberation News; AFSC Investigate.
In September 2025 the administration signed NSPM-7, branding "anti-fascism" as terrorism cover and listing "anti-capitalism" as an extremism indicator. Not actions, beliefs. Put the surveillance network next to the enemies list: a government that writes "anti-capitalist" into a terror directive, and a camera network that already logged who drove to a protest. The machine is built and it has already been aimed.
Sources: White House (Sept 25, 2025); Brennan Center; ACLU; TIME.
DeFlock Safford is a project of The Mnemosyne Research Institute, a local research operation in Graham County. We're not anti-police. We're against a private surveillance network with no warrant requirement, sold to our town, that we don't control. Every claim here links to a primary document or major report. If we got something wrong, we want to know.