Flock Safety provides law enforcement with playbooks to influence city councils

A coaching guide distributed to law enforcement agencies by Flock Safety provides a detailed framework for securing and maintaining surveillance contracts in the face of public skepticism. The handbook, titled How to Speak to City Councils About Public Safety Technology, instructs police officials to manage the political narrative of automated license plate recognition by engaging municipal leaders privately before public hearings occur. The document reflects a strategy of early intervention, advising agencies to brief city managers and council members before public comment periods provide a platform for opposition.

The guidance shifts the rhetorical approach to surveillance. Rather than refuting claims of mass surveillance, Flock advises law enforcement to acknowledge the term's use without attempting to disprove it, focusing instead on the specific intent of community safety. This reformatting extends to the financial justification for the hardware. The guide suggests that police move the discussion away from the procurement price of the cameras and toward the hypothetical cost of unresolved crime, effectively framing the technology as a fiscal necessity.

Internal modules and webinars associated with the guide, including sessions titled Meeting the Moment with Confidence, are designed to address what the company describes as an era of misinformation. This positioning follows several years of scrutiny regarding the company’s data practices, including instances where its network was utilized in multi-state searches and data sharing with federal immigration authorities. By providing scripted presentations and pre-packaged responses, the company aims to ensure that the primary technical information received by city officials is curated by the vendor and the end-user agency.

This cooperative advocacy creates a streamlined path for the deployment of surveillance hardware across American municipalities. In many jurisdictions, police chiefs and Flock representatives appear in tandem during council sessions, using the company’s provided scripts to argue that the public may not fully grasp the governance or mechanics of the system. The strategy prioritizes securing political alignment behind closed doors, ensuring that by the time a contract reaches a public vote, the administrative momentum is often irreversible.