It was past midnight when I first stood beside one of those poles — a skinny black shaft barely two feet from the pavement, swallowed by darkness. You could miss it until your headlights catch it, and then your stomach drops. I kept thinking: someone could hit this and not survive the surprise.
I’ve been following these cameras for months, and what looks like a tech fix is starting to read like a roadside hazard.
A skinny black pole sits two feet from the edge of a rural Ohio road.
That is where The Guardian found a Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR), and that single detail opens a string of problems. Ohio Department of Transportation guidance calls for LPRs on roads without curbs to be at least eight feet from pavement; this camera was a fraction of that. The pole had no obvious inspection sticker and lacked a breakaway plate — the safety device designed to snap and absorb impact if a car hits it.
Steve Eimers, the man the internet knows as the Guardrail Guy, has been photographing installations that, he says, fail to meet basic roadside-safety standards. I watched his footage and listened to his story: his teenage daughter died after striking a guardrail, and he has since pressed officials to follow their own rules. His count in Erie County found only one Flock pole with a breakaway plate, and even that one sat higher than federal norms allow. These poles can sit like a hidden landmine between a lane and a shoulder.
Are Flock cameras dangerous for drivers?
They can be if installed improperly. The risk isn’t the camera itself; it’s placement, hardware choices, and whether the mounting meets engineering and permitting rules. When a pole is inches from travel lanes and lacks a breakaway plate, an accidental impact becomes a life-or-death event rather than a manageable crash.
In Erie County a rare breakaway plate was installed higher than allowed under federal standards.
That observation came from Eimers’s field work, and it matters because height and mounting detail determine how a pole behaves in a crash. Federal guidance spells out clear tolerances for plate placement and pole height; deviations change impact dynamics and risk to occupants. If a company treats roadside hardware like afterthoughts, the installations become a handful of mismatched dominoes along the shoulder, ready to topple when struck.
Flock has responded publicly. A spokesperson told Gizmodo the company has “heard concerns” about positioning and will review pole installations across its network to meet engineering, permitting, and installation standards. CEO Garrett Langley said he had a long conversation with Eimers after the advocate reached him on X and described the talk as productive.
Can communities remove Flock cameras once installed?
Sometimes, but it’s not always simple. Contracts, right-of-way permits, and questions about whether the company can remotely deactivate units complicate removal. In Verona, Wisconsin, officials covered cameras with black trash bags after voting not to renew their contract because they weren’t sure they could physically remove them or stop them from operating. Los Angeles Police Department let its contract expire and stopped using the cameras, yet other towns face resistance and uncertainty.
Some cities bought the promise of faster investigations and missing-person leads.
That’s why ALPRs appeal: Flock says its network supported more than 1 million criminal investigations and helped find roughly 10,000 missing people last year. But the data these cameras collect — license plate, vehicle make, model, color, time and location — sweeps up millions of ordinary people with no suspicion of wrongdoing. Mistakes happen: a Colorado woman was wrongly accused of stealing a package after a Flock capture placed her vehicle in the neighborhood; dash-cam footage cleared her.
Privacy advocates note that this trove of location data is often searchable by law enforcement without a warrant or probable cause. Open-source efforts like DeFlock map ALPR locations nationwide and track communities weighing contracts or cancellations. Videos of people knocking down or damaging cameras have also gone viral, a raw expression of local fury when officials feel powerless.
A company review is under way; the stakes are physical safety and public trust.
Flock says it will fix any issues found during its review, and Langley’s exchange with Eimers suggests the company heard the message. But communities are learning a hard lesson: a surveillance program can carry both privacy costs and literal physical risk if the poles that hold the cameras are treated as afterthoughts. You can be a small-town official deciding a contract or a driver on an unlit county road — either way, the question becomes whether public safety was part of the procurement conversation at all.
Flock’s cameras were sold as a law-enforcement tool, but if the poles that hold them are a hazard, will that change how cities judge those contracts and companies like Flock, DeFlock’s maps, and civic watchdogs that document installations?