Flock is Building a New Surveillance State and People are Fighting Back

In the age of artificial intelligence, datacenters, and an ‘inevitable’ consensus between the far right and tech industry, Flock Surveillance systems are popping up across the country. But this didn’t happen in a vacuum, and communities are fighting back.

It has already been well-reported and well-documented — with cases in Virginia and Colorado — that Customs and Border Patrol has accessed the Flock network in order to detain immigrants. In another horrific case, a police officer used Flock camera footage to track a woman who had an abortion. 

Knowing these things, it’s disturbing to think how ICE agents and police can use this tool of mass surveillance in order to repress not just Black and Brown people, but the movement for immigrants and the movement for Black Lives. It’s especially disturbing considering other technology that Flock offers that cities have been signing onto such as their gunshot detection program, Raven.

Pontiac, Michigan’s City Council renewed their contract with Flock’s Raven gunshot detection program. Activists and residents came out to the meeting to oppose the renewal.

What was especially astounding to me as someone in the audience and as a community member who made a public comment, was the way that the “tough on crime” discourse has persisted and evolved around the question of surveillance technology. 

At the hearing, Councilman Jackson said that the city’s residents could become “desensitized to gunshots.” A statement both my wife (also in the audience) and I were intensely baffled by. To understand just how a statement of that nature was made about a black and brown community, alongside a few similar statements from other council members, we need to recap the past few years, even if it risks relitigating the 2024 Democratic presidential primary. 

A defining feature of political discourse of the COVID era, especially in the wake of civilian uprisings after the police killing of George Floyd, was a characteristically bourgeois concern about law and order, which the right was able to use to support and promote its anti-immigration and racist program

Many will recall how right-wing and centrist pundits expressed “concern” about the so-called wave of crime that emerged in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, while intentionally ignoring the relationship between such crime and social ills like poverty, homelessness, and precarity that are generated by capitalism. This posture of concern about crime was quickly taken up by the Biden administration, with Democrats replaying the Third Way strategy of the Clinton years where the Democratic Party aimed to move to the center by championing conservative positions, like appearing tougher on crime. 

In effect, ‘tough on crime’ politics and rhetoric have become de rigueur among establishment Democrats seeking to tail the electoral victories of the Trump Republicans. Critics have noted how these strategies disproportionately criminalize Black and brown communities, while doing nothing to reduce recidivism rates or to address the root causes of crime such as slashed social services. 

This, in turn, played into the nomination of former “top cop” Attorney General of CA, Kamala Harris, who sneakily adopted the framework of the 1994 crime bill throughout her career. It should shock nobody that this mentality unfortunately came back in full view at the Pontiac City Council meeting, with grave ‘concern’ about crime being the justification for the Flock Raven systems that will monitor all sound where placed, with no real local oversight or audit. 

My own view on the matter is simple: it should shock no one that this is another attempt to undermine local control, except that, like the Emergency Managers of the Snyder era, we have private-sector goons like Garett Langley who take pride in their ability to control communities, their politics, and the narrative around ‘safety.’ If anyone or anything is safe, it’s likely the investments of real estate and other sharks that want to buy up our communities and kick out or incarcerate the locals. If we truly want our communities to be safe, we need to start by helping people access employment, education, and social services, and by empowering them to represent and defend their interests, rather than signing a blank check to peddlers of the panopticon.  

As socialists, we must understand that these circumstances have not arisen in a vacuum. We have seen how the carceral surveillance state has grown and expanded as the Neoliberal era has progressed in America, and the proliferation of Flock is its newest Zenith, as we have seen the deployment of surveillance as a new tactic of Trump’s carceral regime, be it ICE’s wanton cruelty to immigrant communities or the targeting of the Left, as in the case of the Prairieland 19.

But this also presents us with opportunity. As communities continue to resist ICE, and speak out against the Trump administration, they have also made their displeasure and disapproval known. Viral speeches of the righteous indignation of citizens at City Council meetings and resentment of increased surveillance are all over the internet, and present a new focal point of organic action. In a time when figures such as AOC reject abolition of the carceral state as a fantasy of “Woke 1.0,” the people’s resistance to the expanding carceral surveillance state must not be fooled by the Democratic Party lest it become the newest victim of “the graveyard of social movements.”