If you’ve driven through Columbia lately, there’s a decent chance one of the city’s 114 Flock Safety cameras clocked your plate. The system — automated license-plate readers that log every vehicle’s make, model, color, location, and time — has been running under a Columbia Police Department contract since the City Council approved it in October 2024, and it’s become a flashpoint at recent council meetings.
The numbers give a sense of scale: in the past 30 days alone, the network detected 988,338 vehicles and logged 505 searches, according to ABC 17 News. The five-year contract runs about $3 million.
Two Mizzou students raised concerns directly to the council on July 20, part of a local pushback group called Get The Flock Out Of Columbia. Founder Krista Murray-Salisbury told ABC 17: “I’m 100% here for keeping crime rates low…I am completely against having an AI we have no control over, scrape the data of every vehicle.” The worry isn’t just the cameras themselves — it’s who else can see the data, how long it’s kept, and how far outside Missouri it might travel, since Flock is a private company running the system rather than the police department itself.
Columbia Police Assistant Chief Lance Bolinger pushed back on that framing, telling ABC 17: “This technology has received as much oversight as any system I have seen during my 20 years in policing.”
Newer versions of the technology can also search footage by things like clothing color, though Flock says it stops short of facial recognition — part of what’s fueling the “scope creep” worry critics raise, since the system launched as a plain license-plate reader and has grown well past that.
Columbia isn’t the first city to have this argument. Several cities have canceled Flock contracts over privacy concerns, Amazon Ring dropped its own Flock data-sharing partnership, and a security lapse exposed more than 60 unsecured camera feeds elsewhere in the country. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie has said he’ll push federal legislation to cut funding to cities that use the cameras. Columbia’s council rejected a different surveillance system, Fusus, back in 2022, so this isn’t the city’s first time weighing camera tech against privacy.
No vote or policy change has been announced yet, but with the issue back in front of the council, it’s one worth watching if you drive through town regularly — which, on our stretch of I-70, is most of us.
Leave a Reply