The Monster Did It The Five Flavors of Flock Fatalism
Flock's core rhetorical product isn't safety — it's fatalism. Every argument the company makes for its products reduces to "this was always going to happen, so the only question is configuration." Discourse in Cleveland is exposing why that argument doesn't hold.
by H.C. van Pelt
21 min read
Photo: Guardians of Traffic by Erik Drost via Flickr/Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-2.0)
flock
cleveland
immigration
policy
fatalism
The City Club of Cleveland hosted an event last week titled “Flock and the Future of AI-Powered Surveillance.” The blurb described it as “a conversation on the evolution, ethics, and future of AI-powered surveillance across the nation with Joshua Thomas, Chief Communications Officer of Flock Safety, and Dr. Jen Golbeck, Computer Scientist, AI ethics and privacy expert at the University of Maryland.” Flock’s PR czar talks ethics with a leading scholar in the field … Yeah.
But before we get into that, it’s important to understand the context: the event happened on Friday, July 10. The following Wednesday, Cleveland City Council plans to vote on whether to extend its contract with Flock.
The unusual thing in Cleveland is that this new vote almost immediately follows a cancellation. Two months earlier, Signal Cleveland discovered that outside agencies had been running immigration searches against Flock devices in Cleveland and Cleveland Heights despite the city’s prohibition on immigration searches.
In response, Cleveland’s Public Safety Committee voted not to extend the city’s Flock contract. The city let the contract lapse in June. Then, despite having voted to end the contract, Cleveland’s Public Safety Committee has itself a do-over and votes to extend the contract by six months. The committee do-over decision is what will land with City Council on Wednesday for final approval.
While all this has been playing out, Flock’s cameras have stayed where they are, and the company has continued to surveil Clevelanders. Flock’s perpetual, irrevocable license allows it to continue using data collected before the contract expired. After the contract ended in June, Flock continued collecting data with no contractual restrictions or safeguards to cover it.
The conversation in Cleveland struck a chord, because the night before I had just wrapped up a thoughtful analysis of Shoshana Zuboff’s book “Surveillance Capitalism” with Flock’s new AI Sales Assistant. At the end of our discussion, even Flock’s brainless automaton had to concede that, maybe, this mass surveillance thing could be harmful. (A chatbot will agree with nearly anything you feed it, of course. That’s not a confession; it’s a mirror.)
The book we discussed in our little makeshift online bookclub, which had led my new robotic friend to its realization, had this to say on the subject of inevitability:
The image of technology as an autonomous force with unavoidable actions and consequences has been employed across the centuries to erase the fingerprints of power and absolve it of responsibility. The monster did it, not Victor Frankenstein. However, the ankle bracelet does not monitor the prisoner; the criminal justice system does that.
Every doctrine of inevitability carries a weaponized virus of moral nihilism programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility. Inevitability rhetoric is a cunning fraud designed to render us helpless and passive in the face of implacable forces that are and must always be indifferent to the merely human. This is the world of the robotized interface, where technologies work their will, resolutely protecting power from challenge
—Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Ch. 7, §VIII.
By providing these inputs to the AI salesbot, I became no less responsible for its output than Flock is for the outcomes of its system.
Inevitability rhetoric, Zuboff writes, is so ubiquitous in tech that it amounts to “a full-blown ideology of inevitabilism.” Its practitioners know exactly what it’s for: nearly every Silicon Valley insider she interviewed regarded the inevitability talk as “a Trojan horse for powerful economic imperatives.”
That is why Flock argues its fatalistic stance any way it can. Five ways, by my count: the vendor is interchangeable, the outcome is unstoppable (so your objection doesn’t matter), your privacy is already gone, the buildout is destiny, and the constitutional limit is real but not yet. Let’s take them in order.
An audience member addresses it head-on during the Q&A portion, by likening it to an Israeli settler taking a Palestinian home and justifying it with “if I don’t do it, someone else will.”
Thomas never engages with the analogy.
He does, however, try to enlist Golbeck as a co-author of the premise. Twice. First: “you made this sound like it is inevitable… But I agree with you, there is an inevitability with this.” Later: “as you said — and I’ve said — this is inevitable.” Golbeck cuts him off mid-sentence: “don’t attribute that to me. I don’t agree.” Cameras will exist, she allows, but “I don’t think this surveillance structure is inevitable.”
The premise apparently needs a co-signer. It didn’t get one.
His statement is inaccurate either way. In Denver, where Flock also continued its surveillance for several months after the city had terminated its contract because data had been improperly shared on Flock’s national network, the city switched vendors to Axon.
Yes, the city continues to be under surveillance, but the improper data sharing on Flock’s national network — which was the city’s entire reason for switching vendors — has ended. Thomas’ fatalistic substitution argument only works if all vendors are identical — they are not.[1] And the argument, it turns out, wasn’t composed for Cleveland. Little of what Thomas said that afternoon was.
At City Club, Thomas illustrated Flock’s value the way the company always does: with an eyewitness and a blue Jeep. Old-school cops “might have to stop every blue Jeep in the vicinity and create unwanted interactions with law enforcement”; Flock, instead, delivers “precision.”
If the delivery sounded rehearsed, that’s because it was. The anecdote appears nearly word-for-word on Flock’s corporate blog, and industry lobbyist Skylor Hearn performed it on a livestream alongside Flock’s chief lawyer in February (“more sniper than shotgun”). I’ve written about that routine before. This was at least its third documented deployment.
Note what the blog version promises: alerts fire “only when a specific license plate associated with a reported crime is detected. Not every vehicle of a certain color.” Then Thomas described what a search looks like for the audience: a color-and-description search — “a blue jeep with a bike,” no plate required. The moderator separately highlighted an instance where the ATF had used a car’s make, color, and bumper stickers to get a hit. Again, no license plate.
Flock didn’t end the blue-Jeep sweep; it just moved it. The search for blue Jeeps now runs against every car, everywhere, in advance, and the results are stored in Flock’s national database. The moderator, Signal Cleveland’s Nick Castele, spotted the swap: “But that starts with a very wide funnel of anybody who’s driving.”
“What’s the alternative?” Thomas replied. “You start with a very wide funnel of anybody who’s alive.”
Notice the shape of that defense. It isn’t “the funnel is justified” — it’s “a bigger funnel would be worse.” Flock never argues that its baseline is right; it argues that a hypothetical alternative is more wrong. Remember the shape. It comes back.
As it happens, the LAPD’s Inspector General published the funnel’s arithmetic in a review dated — poetically — the same day: Los Angeles’ ALPR system logged 210,568,103 plate reads in two months, yielding 337 recovered vehicles and 74 arrests.
One arrest per roughly 2.8 million scans of anybody who’s driving. Another 161 alerts were confirmed plate matches to cars that turned out not to be stolen at all, exactly like the incident two days earlier, where a journalist working for The Drive was boxed in by police cars and told “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
Flock CEO Garrett Langley tacked another fatalistic way: that of outcomes.
“If the state of Texas wants to enforce immigration, they might use Flock, but they’re gonna go enforce immigration no matter what Flock does.” And: “we can’t make that our problem as a company.”
This is Zuboff’s “the monster did it” in action. The outcome is presented as the result of an unstoppable, autonomous force. Texas will enforce immigration, the villagers will die; we can’t make that our problem as scientists.
What Langley omits is that he engineered the infrastructure to create the outcome: sharing is the default. It’s a nominal opt-in, with auto-approval workflows and no workable oversight mechanism.
Instead of building a three-foot monster and keeping it on the hill, Langley chose to build the ten-foot one and direct it toward the village.
Flock’s Chief Legal Officer, Dan Haley, completes the pincer: if Flock’s choices change nothing, neither do yours. Haley doesn’t engage with the notion that cities are canceling because of data security and access failures, or mysteriously changing settings. Instead, he tells the Legal Leaders Podcast:
protesters will say… their city council should cancel their Flock contract to send a message to the Trump administration.
As someone who has watched too many city council meetings to comfortably admit to: I have never once heard this argument. Residents often raise concerns about the many instances where ICE was found in Flock’s network — either because of “pilot programs,” or because cities disabled outside access and federal agencies got access anyway.
Residents of sanctuary cities or states that prohibit use of surveillance technology for civil immigration enforcement will often urge their elected officials not to do business with Flock, because it risks eroding the protections they fought to enshrine in local law. Not “to send a message to the Trump administration.”
Regardless, Haley launched an on-air assault on the strawman he had built:
Cancelling a Flock contract sends no message to the Trump administration. The Trump administration does not care if your community has a contract with Flock any more than it cares what I had for breakfast… It’s totally ineffectual.
To take Denver as an example, the problems the city had attempted to fix — “pilot programs” and a documented history of unauthorized access — have been addressed by trading a vendor we know can’t responsibly handle surveillance data for one that has not yet received as much public scrutiny.
Even though vendors like Axon are likely to take the wrong lesson from Flock’s continued fumbles, the public and officials in cities like Denver now know what to look for. It will be that much harder for Axon, Motorola, Genetec, Insight, or any of the dozens of others to evade scrutiny, as they have been doing for years.
At those many city council meetings I did hear the line “You’re already surveilled anyway” often. It has been repeated all over the country, by police, city officials, Flock sales staff, and pro-surveillance residents. Cell phones and connected vehicles are the usual culprits cited.
At City Club, Joshua Thomas told Dr. Golbeck and the audience, “you have an Instagram account for your dogs… Half of us in the room… are posting our photo and our location everywhere we go.” At TED2026, Garrett Langley told them, “Every person in this room can be tracked to a foot at this very moment with your phone. That’s a fact.”
It’s the funnel defense again: never “this is justified,” always “something else is worse.” Your dog’s Instagram, your phone, “anybody who’s alive.” Comparisons rather than justification.
It’s not a new line. Twenty-seven years ago, Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy put it a little more bluntly:
You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.
—Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems, Wired (1/26/1999)
Sun Microsystems has since been acquired by Oracle, whose founder, Larry Ellison, has been widely quoted as saying, “citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”
The companies and technology changed while the nihilism remains.
To counter Thomas’ Instagram-jab, Golbeck deployed the familiar “choice” counter-argument live on stage, saying, “I make incredibly intentional choices about what I share… they don’t have a choice where I do have a choice.”
The Supreme Court also rejected this flavor of fatalism in its recent decision in Chatrie. Yes, location history data had been turned over to Google, but it had never been voluntarily surrendered to Google, let alone the government.
Even when privacy issues exist, we don’t need to “get over it.”
In September 2025, Langley told Forbes that within ten years his company’s surveillance would eradicate “almost all crime” in the U.S. At City Club, Thomas expressed the extent of the company’s manifest destiny by saying “every city in America will eventually be using some of this technology.” Langley states the reason in his TED2026 talk: it’s to create “an environment where crime is unsustainable.”
Zuboff nails the rhetoric’s genre; the technological surveillance state “appears virtually ordained either by god or by history.” Somewhat ironically, she then notes:
The “societal goal” articulated by the leading surveillance capitalists fits snugly into the notion of limitless technological progress that dominated utopian thought from the late eighteenth century through the late nineteenth century, culminating with Marx.
The final lines in the first chapter of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party read:
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
An inevitable utopia, through modern technology.
At City Club, Golbeck likened mass surveillance to leaded gas. She told Thomas that at one point we used leaded gasoline, but when we found it was harmful, we banned it and found other solutions. Describing surveillance technology, she said “we are in the leaded gas phase now.”
Cities seem to agree with her. According to Tech Times, as of June 2026, “more than 53 municipalities across 20 states have terminated or rejected contracts” with Flock, “citing data-sharing violations, unauthorized federal access, and a pattern of surveillance settings that operated well beyond what cities were told they had signed up for.”
“The line exists, and we’ll tell you when we’ve crossed it.”
On the Legal Leaders Podcast, recorded in February 2026, Haley also said:
There will come a time where… this technology could get ubiquitous enough and powerful enough that there needs to be a warrant requirement… that day in the future is out there. And when it comes, we’ll build tools to enable that. It’s just not yet.
He cites “over 30 Fourth Amendment challenges… all unambiguous” to prove his point.
Five months later, Joshua Thomas toed that company line in Cleveland:
“as we approach those lines, yes, we should then decide how do we regulate that stuff”; “Flock is so far from that today.”
According to Thomas, there are now “more than 40 courts” that have resolved the issue. (The count grows by about ten per telling; a list has yet to appear.)
Despite the court holdings, Flock concedes there is a limit … somewhere. Flock also rhetorically assigns itself the authority to decide when that limit has been reached. The company will let you know if we’re “there yet.”
Of course, looking back to TED2026, CEO Langley — in his typical fashion — does not follow Haley’s lead. There, he tries to get the crowd excited about Flock’s network of more than 100,000 cameras and the army of drones, all hard at work to realize the “environment where crime is unsustainable.” His implied promise is that we’ll be there soon.
But Cleveland rejected the notion that it needs to wait for Flock to decide when a line has been crossed. The city is proposing language that would make the requirement local law, not subject to a vendor’s judgment. Cleveland’s as-amended ordinance doesn’t stop at warrants:
Flock shall not disclose data obtained through the ALPR contract in response to subpoenas, administrative requests, informal inquiries, preservation letters, national security letters or any other legal process that does not constitute a search warrant unless required by applicable law.
This is a city council enumerating and rejecting national security letters by name, in a camera contract, with a financial penalty of up to 25% of the contract’s value attached. (The “unless required by applicable law” carve-out will do some work, but the same section also obligates Flock to “narrow, resist, quash or otherwise challenge” any overbroad demand.)
Haley promised Flock would build tools for warrants when the day comes. Cleveland declined to wait for the vendor’s calendar. Deferred fatalism, undeferred by ordinance.
Fatalism is a rhetorical posture. It is also, it turns out, a product feature.
When Cleveland’s committee voted to end the contract and let it lapse, the cameras kept recording. Flock volunteered to run them for free while the city figured things out.
For all the talk of local ownership and control, the only switch a Flock customer actually controls is the garbage bag.
The paperwork is built the same way. Flock’s standard terms reserve to the company “final discretion to veto a specific location” for camera placement (§10.2). When I raised the clause with Flock’s VP of Aviation, Rahul Sidhu — mid-explanation that camera siting is “how local democracy works” — he conceded it: “Yes, Flock can veto a location.”
Flock’s revised terms grant the company a perpetual, irrevocable license to customer data that outlives the contract. That’s the license Cleveland is living under right now. And in Ridgecrest, California, email records show police arranging Flock poles on private property owned by an LLC, with the department “signing the consent forms on their behalf,” and Flock telling them “that would be fine!”
Then there is Los Angeles. On July 11 — the day after the City Club forum — the LAPD let its Flock agreement expire, ending a three-year relationship over what its chief information officer called “serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras.” Flock said the decision “comes as a surprise.”
The Inspector General’s review explains where the surprise came from. The department’s MOU let Flock “retain[] the right to any recordings or data provided through Flock” and “use the data for any purpose.” The nation’s second-largest municipal police force found itself on the receiving end of the same boilerplate as everyone else.
Roughly 1,500 Axon in-car cameras feed plate data into Flock’s system, with no written agreement covering security at all; in the OIG’s words, “Flock’s access to Axon data is unknown in the absence of a written agreement.”
Fifty of the Flock poles arrived free, donated after the Palisades fire, under an undated MOU signed by Flock’s general counsel and by the Chief of Police. The OIG’s first recommendation: suspend new ALPR deployments and contracts pending public input. The California State Auditor flagged the same contract deficiencies in 2020, but the paperwork stayed broken for six years.
And, per ABC7’s report on the expiration: “It’s uncertain whether the cameras will continue recording after the agreement expires.” Of course it is.
PDF Attachment: LAPD Office of the Inspector General: Review of the Department's ALPR System and Use in the Field (July 10, 2026)
None of this is what inevitability looks like. It is what enforcement looks like, even if belated. Zuboff again: “Men and women made it, and they can control it. They merely choose not to do so.”
Attached to Cleveland’s ordinance is CPD’s evaluation deck, dated June 16 — presented the night before the committee voted the contract down. Its “ROI” section is a fill-in template, and the template does the deciding.
PDF Attachment: CPD ROI scorecard, Ord. 683-2026 attachment 3
“Investigative Leads Generated”: 30,000 baseline, 144,000 with Flock — roughly four times Cleveland’s entire annual reported crime volume, which suggests camera hits relabeled as “leads.” “Officer Utilization”: baseline 0, result 144,000 — a percentage metric, expressed in the identical number as the leads row. “Time Saved”: 150. One hundred fifty what? The deck doesn’t say.[2] The “Evidence” and “Notes” columns exist, but are empty. The operational benefit scores are straight self-assessed 5.00s.
The money page values “Personnel Time Saved” at $1,936,875. The dollar amount is precise, but the methodology is absent. The “Annual Cost” is noted as $1,000,000. The contract one attachment over is for $250,000 a year. Nothing reconciles.
And at the bottom, in a cell labeled Auto Recommendation: “Proceed to Level 3 (Enterprise Deployment).”
This is fatalism as a workflow: vendor rhetoric upstream, template procurement downstream, human judgment entirely removed at both ends.
One more notable detail: among the deck’s “success stories” is the county’s 37-defendant fentanyl indictment — a case in which prosecutors say Flock cameras were “used to track vehicles associated with this group, identify travel patterns and assist investigators in linking participants.”
Tracking travel patterns over time, like in a heatmap, is precisely the thing Thomas assured the City Club audience Flock doesn’t do. The department’s evidence for renewal is the counterexample to its vendor’s constitutional defense.
On Wednesday, Cleveland City Council votes. Whatever it decides, the sequence is important: the city discovered the searches, said no, and the cameras kept recording. Then the city said yes to six more months — this time with a warrant clause, a penalty, a transparency mandate, and instructions to go shopping among Flock’s competitors.
Thomas opened the City Club hour by taking the only real question off the table: “The question I have is not will it be used. The question is how.” Every flavor of Flock fatalism exists solely to keep that first question — “will it be used?” — from being asked.
It is the one question the company can’t survive being asked city by city, contract by contract. Even Flock’s head lawyer concedes a constitutional line exists — he just asks you to let his company decide when we’ve crossed it. Maybe he’ll create a spreadsheet for that too.
Zuboff summarizes the stakes: inevitabilism “precludes choice and voluntary participation. It leaves no room for human will as the author of the future.” Cleveland’s warrant clause, Evanston’s cease-and-desist, Dayton’s trash bags, Denver’s exit, the LAPD’s walk-away — those are all human will, authoring. They show that even when decisions are slow, ugly, or reversible, they are not inevitable.
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