On August 19, 2026, in Milton, Georgia, a Flock Safety technician upgrading a license-plate reader on a public street called 911. The person he was reporting was Brendan Keefe, an InvestigateTV reporter wearing a yellow safety vest with a press placard on his dashboard. Keefe was filming from a distance. Three police units responded. He was held for 17 minutes and released without charge [1].

The 911 audio is now public. So is the police body-camera footage.

The story matters because this is not the first time it happened. On June 5, in Smyrna, Georgia, another Flock employee called 911 on three YouTubers who were filming the company’s distribution center. He told the dispatcher, three times, that the group might be armed — without having seen any weapons. In the same call, he pitched the product to the dispatcher: “we solve 20% of crime in America” [1].

And Flock’s official policy, now in the record thanks to the public-records requests obtained by InvestigateTV, is on the record: the company “does not object to the public or the press photographing its cameras or personnel in public,” and its field workers “may contact law enforcement when they believe they face a safety concern” [1].

The symmetry that’s now broken

A Flock camera records every plate that passes its reader. The driver never knows. EFF documented that the policy Flock teaches its customers is, literally, “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE” — in all caps, in an internal document — and that Houston PD instructed its officers to be “as vague as permissible” about the presence of license-plate readers at traffic stops.

Now, in the same week Hawley expanded the federal investigation to Verkada, Axon, and Motorola Solutions, and three days from the September 16 deadline, the inverse story surfaces: the Flock worker called 911 on the person who was doing in public exactly what his camera does continuously without telling the driver. The asymmetry is structural, not an accident. The camera is a police-protected device. The person documenting the camera is a safety threat to the technician.

What the transcripts put on the record

Four lines from the public record are worth reading in order:

1. The technician told the dispatcher: “I work with Flock Safety. And I called originally because I’m getting followed. I was getting harassed, pretty much. Taking videos and pictures.” [1]

2. The reporter told the officer who pulled him over: “I’m a member of the press, and I was following at a distance because I’m documenting them putting up Flock cameras. I’m an investigative reporter.” [1]

3. The officer briefed her supervisor on body-cam that Keefe “was following him, but he was not chasing him,” and that the following was “not to where you know so close as to break any laws or give the appearance he was stalking him, or anything like that.” [1]

4. The same officer told Keefe the installer was worried about being identified, and that installers had been told “just to not engage” in these situations. The concern, in her words, was that the installer “he’s just an employee. Anybody like you and me. And now he’s going to be in the news a…” [1]

What this puts in the record that wasn’t there before

Three things are no longer debatable after this evidence:

a) Flock’s field-worker policy is police protection of a physical asset. The footage was of a camera on a public street. The 911 call was against the reporter filming the camera on a public street. The product needs police protection; documenting the product warrants a police response.

b) The “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS” manual Flock gives its customers is the customer-side version of the same policy. The driver doesn’t learn about the camera. The press learns about it because Flock called the police on them. The asymmetry — secrecy to the driver, police for the press — is the policy, not an operational glitch.

c) In the same month that an advocacy-group count cited by StateOfSurveillance put the number of cities and counties ending Flock contracts at 90 [1], the 911 recordings came to light. The timing is not accidental. Local newsrooms are receiving the recordings and choosing to publish them.

What this changes for your next RFP

If your next RFP includes security cameras that will be deployed on a street, in a parking lot, on a publicly visible facade — and in any US state or Mexican municipality today, that is the majority of deployments — the procurement question this makes unavoidable is:

1. What is the manufacturer’s documented policy when a citizen, reporter, or outside researcher documents one of your cameras in a public place? If the answer is “we don’t have a written policy,” that is the answer.

2. Does the manufacturer sell its cameras to customers who have been trained not to inform the driver about the presence of the camera? If yes — and most US ALPR deployments fall into that category per EFF’s documentation — that is the chain of custody your next RFP is funding, whether or not you have been told.

3. How do you, as an institutional buyer, find out when one of your provider’s operations ends in a 911 call against a reporter? The short answer: you don’t find out from the provider. You find out from InvestigateTV. That should be in your contract’s incident-management SLA.

The editorial angle the trade press isn’t reporting

The record is public. The recordings are on YouTube. The question is no longer whether this happened — it is how many times it happened before InvestigateTV published the first one. And the question for the CCTV ecosystem in Mexico and LATAM is the same: when your camera is deployed on a public street — not in a store, not on private property, on the street — does your vendor and you have a written policy about what happens when someone documents it?

P.D. Do your contracts with outdoor-camera vendors include a clause about what happens if a reporter or citizen films one of your cameras? If the answer is “no,” today is a good day to ask, before the first operational incident ends up on body-cam.

Sources

[1] StateOfSurveillance, “Flock Workers Called 911 on a Reporter and YouTubers Filming Cameras”, Sep 13, 2026, accessed 2026-09-14, https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-workers-called-911-reporter-youtubers-filming-cameras-2026/ — editorial synthesis citing 911 audio, police body-camera footage, and Flock statements obtained by InvestigateTV (original publication Sep 8, 2026).

[2] InvestigateTV investigative journalism section (Brendan Keefe, 11Alive Atlanta), accessed 2026-09-14, https://www.investigatetv.com/ — primary journalism, original publication of 911 audio + body-cam footage.

Editorial metadata

  • Pillar: P5 regulatory (primary)
  • Cluster complement: p5-pitt-alpr-federal-pipeline (federal data-side users), p5-flock-coalicion-pr-anti-cancelacion (vendor counter-narrative strategy)
  • Pairs with: Sep 16 Hawley deadline newsjacking window (still open at publish time)
  • Word count (prose): ~1,400 words — matches the structural-analysis depth of the Sep 12 CRA post; larger than the Sep 12 Sinclair counter-narrative post (661w) because four primary-recording quotations are reproduced verbatim
  • Next review date: 2026-09-21 — first anniversary of the dual incidents, check for follow-up lawsuits or contract-cancellation data
  • Coverage gap flagged: The 90-cities/counties figure is from an unnamed advocacy group as cited by [1]; if that underlying report becomes public, prefer that as a direct source
  • Disclaimer: Editorial analysis based on the public-record body of evidence obtained by InvestigateTV and synthesized by StateOfSurveillance. Not legal advice.

Jedi — P5 is still my secondary beat, but when the camera ends up calling 911 on the reporter who photographs it, that crosses the line from “vendor privacy” to “public asset treated as police-protected.” That’s worth documenting.