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Flock cameras are creepy. They might still be worth it.

We probably shouldn’t de-Flock the police.

To no small extent, Americans have grown accustomed to being watched.

For more than a decade, CCTV cameras have recorded a hefty portion of many people’s public movements, while ubiquitous smartphones have made us all perpetually vulnerable to unsolicited documentation (if not, social media notoriety).

Until recently, however, technical limitations constrained the reach of government surveillance (at least, in the physical realm). Police may have been swimming in CCTV footage. But using such videos to track any given person’s movements was an extremely time-intensive endeavor. To do so, an officer would need to sift through hours of footage captured on many different cameras.

Yet AI is now making it possible for the government to trace ordinary citizens’ movements with unprecedented ease and precision. Or at least, this is what the security firm Flock Safety has effectively promised — and the company’s critics have loudly warned.

Automatic license plate readers appear to have real but modest public safety benefits.

Cops have used the cameras to illegitimately track the movements of their exes, and critics.

But there is a long list of regulations that could make it much harder — and riskier — for police to abuse Flock cameras. And few places have actually implemented them.

Flock provides police departments with networks of surveillance cameras — primarily, automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that photograph each vehicle that passes them.

The firm’s main selling point is also its chief political liability: Its ALPRs log not only license plate numbers, but also generate textual descriptions of all vehicles they detect and store this information in a nationally integrated, searchable database. This makes it technically feasible for police to monitor the travels of most any driver with a few keystrokes.

Alas, some cops cannot be trusted with that power. In August, the Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers had been charged or accused of using license-plate readers for illegitimate purposes, often to stalk their exes or romantic interests. Even more alarmingly, some police departments appear to have used ALPR data to surveil their own critics and protesters.

These revelations fortified an already growing movement against license plate readers. In August alone, more than 90 cities and counties canceled contracts with Flock. And this backlash has been remarkably bipartisan. Deep blue cities like Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have backed out of partnerships with Flock, while Republicans in Florida have barred local police from installing ALPRs on state highways, and the Texas GOP has paused funding for Flock cameras.

The anti-ALPR movement is responding to real problems with how that technology has been deployed. And yet, according to Flock and many police departments, these cameras are also helping to nab car thieves and locate missing persons.

All this raises the questions: Do ALPRs really have significant public safety benefits? And if so, is there a way to have our license plate surveillance and civil liberties too?

To find out, I reviewed the latest academic research, dug through the worst horror stories in the news, and reached out to criminologists about the risks and rewards of ALPRs. Although the available evidence is limited, the technology appears to have modest — but genuine — crime-fighting benefits. And while the ALPR databases have been badly misused, this is in part because the tech has gone largely unregulated. With stringent safeguards, there may be a way to make it much harder for creeps and authoritarians to monitor law-abiding citizens’ comings and goings without forfeiting a useful law-enforcement tool.

On a late summer day in Chamblee, Georgia, Leslie Barrera was pushing her 1-year-old son Mateo in a stroller when a car pulled up next to her. A man sprung out of the vehicle, pointed a gun at Barrera, and tried to grab the baby from his carriage. But he’d chosen his victim poorly: Barrera charged him, wrested away his gun, and tried to shoot the kidnapper, only for the firearm to jam. A woman (oddly, disguised as a man) then emerged from the car and snatched the child. The baby-nabbers proceeded to pile back into their vehicle and........

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