After Austin switched off its Flock license plate cameras in June 2025, car theft rose 24% when measured against trends in comparable cities.
Austin's auto theft came in above expectations every month for the following year. About 776 more stolen cars than there otherwise would be.
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Source: Wheeler, A. P. (2026). Synthetic control for city crime [Web application]. apwheele.github.io/SynthRTCI/
Not surprising when you consider the major study on this:
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Austin Justice
@AustinJustice
Does Flock deter car theft?
The first major study of its efficacy compares police departments that use it and those that don’t.
For those that installed Flock, car thefts fell 11%, and arrests for car theft rose 16%.
Dishonest accounts like this want you to think crime is up because we have no idea who the criminals are.
Crime is up because we refuse to put anyone in jail.
Flock cameras don't solve that. Flock cameras lets the govt track inconvenient citizens.
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Austin Justice
@AustinJustice
Memphis has one of the worst violent crime rates in America and a terrible DA who cuts deals with criminals. Crime is falling anyway.
What they did:
1. Aggressive expansion of license plate readers and drones citywide. Stolen cars and suspect vehicles get flagged in real time.
Flock cameras are welcome in China. Think about that. The cure is worse than the disease.
Total surveillance police states are pretty efficient at suppressing non-authorized crime. And dissent. And wrongthink. And wronkspeak.
Let's make Austin a so much safer Ingsoc city! After all, our cars are worth much, much more than our liberty. 👍
What are the chances of a car thief suffering any significant consequences in Austin? About zero, I'd say. They'll be right back on the street doing it again, perhaps the same day.
This is what you want us to accept a total surveillance state for.
Hard no. Fuck that noise.
If DA's actually punished criminals and enforced law and order it would be leaps and bounds more effective than FLOCK cameras. No city in America deserves mass surveillance or useless prosecutors.
What a shock… what an incompetent city government and only getting worse
I just can't get behind the flock cameras. No amount of data would ever persuade me to be in favor of governments reading cars arbitrarily. It's just a step too far of an already infringing large government.
I’ll solve this for you without flock and without suppression of rights to law abiding citizens.
Most crimes are committed by recidivist criminals.
1) Bring back prison work programs. Trash pick up, road crews, etc.
2) prisoners earn federal minimum wage. I’ll be nice and say
Austin auto theft didn’t actually “rise 24%”—APD reported it fell 18% year over year. The 24% is the difference between Austin and a model-generated counterfactual. That may be suggestive, but it isn’t proof that ending Flock caused 776 thefts. Without the donor cities,
If you aren’t committing crimes, collecting your license plate location data on public roads is no big deal.
The issue is. It the cameras. It’s how they’ve designed the data retention, which indicated pretty strongly they shouldn’t be trusted with the privilege.
It's a very small number of criminals doing the car theft. It takes real police work to get them and real DA work to get them convicted. That is the problem. Adding more flock at the taxpayer expense $$$ just to have them get caught and released is the problem here.
They're not ready for this conversation. They will understand when crime maps start to evolve in their nice neighborhoods.
local democratic control and privacy is more important than safetyism
The cost of liberty. I’m fairly certain Austin’s liberal and lax law enforcement had more to do with it than the removed cameras. Check the trend in a conservative city with traditional law enforcement.
Everyone having government monitored cameras in their homes would reduce abuse and a host of other crimes as well, what’s the point?
Surveillance states have serious problems long term, the short term benefits are not worth it.
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Polymarket
@Polymarket
JUST IN: Army veteran jailed for 30 days over a shooting he did not commit after investigators relied on Flock surveillance data to identify him as a suspect.
BS. Statistics don't lie but interpreters do. Apprehensions being down may make sense but criminals don't give a shlt about your cameras working or not.
Looking at the actual numbers, car theft went DOWN. Your BS comparison against some BS model means nothing. Models are crap. ALL of them. They aren’t real, they don’t reflect reality, and they are NOT SCIENCE. They are crap.
I can understand why everyone is freaking out about the flock cameras but they do help catch criminals, deter crime and solve missing persons cases. It’s politicians fault for using the cameras to generate more $$ for themselves by giving out tickets. That’s what killed the
When Austin starts locking up violent thugs who are on camera committing crimes I will believe Flock may have helped in some way. Until then, bullshit.
The creator of the 1619 Project sent her young daughter to a struggling public school, convinced that upper-middle-class parents could lift it up. A decade later, the results are in.
Can you dumb down the graphs or label them more? It’s not obvious what we’re looking at.
We don’t prosecute crime either so there’s that.
On top of that Flock as a company is not trustworthy. If the city itself was running these systems and left them open to full and regular public audits then maybe it could be an option but that’s not how things are
Certainly law enforcement will argue reasons to give up our freedom and civil liberties for the sake of safety and protection.
I wonder why our insurance rates haven’t gone down. Sounds like insurance companies are abusing us with high rates. We need a new insurance system
Austin doesn't punish criminals. If they did that, this problem would be solved.