Frequently asked questions

What is this site?

A public file on the City of Arvada's Flock Safety license-plate-reader program, built from the city's own records. A Colorado Open Records Act request for every contract between the city and Flock produced five documents: a 2023 order form, a December 2025 contract that turned a “no cost” pilot into a paid, self-renewing subscription, a purchase of Genetec in-car plate readers, and the two police policies that govern all of it. They are published here in full, and the rest of the site reads them closely: what was signed, by whom, for how much, what renews on its own, and what the record still does not say. Start with The Program or the Timeline.

Who runs it, and who pays for it?

One person, who is not a journalist, a lawyer or a public official, and whom nobody asked to do this or paid for it. There is no organization behind the site, no campaign, no funder and no advertising. It is not affiliated with the City of Arvada, the Arvada Police Department, Flock Safety or anyone else named on it, and nothing here is legal advice.

Why is there no name on it?

Because the site is critical of a police surveillance program, and because it does not need one. Everything here is built so that you never have to take my word for anything: each factual claim points at a document or an article you can open and read for yourself, and the primary documents are published unaltered, with checksums, so you can confirm they are what I say they are. A name would add nothing to that, and the site publishes no personal information about anyone, including whoever maintains it. If I turn out to be wrong about something, the corrections policy applies no matter who I am.

Why build it at all?

Because a surveillance network went up over public roads, on a police chief's signature and without a council vote, and the record of how that happened was scattered across contracts, meeting minutes and news stories that nobody had put in one place. This site is that place. It is a spare-time project with no staff and no budget, which is the reason for the next section.

Did you use AI to make this site?

Yes, and I would rather you hear it from me than wonder. I used large language models, the technology behind AI chat assistants, throughout this site as a time saver. They drafted and edited most of the prose, working from my notes and from the documents. They wrote the HTML, the stylesheet and the scripts behind the site, including the one that draws the camera map from OpenStreetMap data and the one that checks every change for anything that could identify me. They helped me get through long documents quickly by pulling out the passages on price, term, renewal and data sharing so that I could go to the page and read them in context. The satirical cartoons are AI-generated as well, and they are labeled that way wherever they appear.

Here is what the models did not do. They did not decide what this site would be about, or what it would say. They did not file the records request. They did not choose what to publish or what to make of it. Those decisions were mine, and so is the responsibility for every word here.

Why admit that?

Two reasons. The first is that a site asking you to trust it owes you an account of how it was made. The second is that these tools make mistakes. They can invent a detail, misread a date, or state something confidently that is not so. That is part of why the rules on the Records page are what they are: named sources only, silence reported as silence, arithmetic labeled as arithmetic, and absence never treated as proof. The footnotes are there so you can check the model's work, and mine. The rules did not come from the tools. The tools are one of the reasons I needed the rules.

So did a machine write this answer?

The first draft, yes. I asked for help with this page too, then read it and changed what did not sound like me or was not true. That is how the whole site was made: drafted quickly with a tool, then read against the record by one person. It is not the same as having an editor, and I will not pretend otherwise. It is why corrections are logged in the open rather than made quietly.

Where did the documents come from?

From the City of Arvada, under the Colorado Open Records Act. A request for every contract between the city and Flock Safety produced the five files published on the Records page, each with a SHA-256 checksum so you can confirm the copy you download is the copy the city released. What the release refers to but did not include, such as the camera deployment plan and the Falcon Flex agreement, is listed there too.

How do I know any of this is accurate?

You don't have to take it on faith, which is the point of the design. Every factual claim carries a numbered footnote to a named, linked source. Where the record is silent, the site says so rather than guessing, and the blanks are marked in amber throughout. The camera counts come from a single OpenStreetMap query that is printed on the Records page so you can run it yourself, and the limits of that number are printed beside it. If a claim here is not supported by the source it cites, that is an error, and the corrections policy says what happens next.

I found a mistake, or I have a document you don't.

Then I want it. Mistakes get fixed on the page and logged on the Records page with the date, never silently. A document is worth more than an argument: a contract, an invoice, a staff report, a meeting packet or a records response will be published and credited, including one that contradicts this site.

The site publishes no contact address, for the same reason it carries no name. The surest route is to put the document into the public record, where this site will find it: give it to a local reporter, bring it to a public meeting, or post it somewhere it can be linked.

What is a Flock camera, in a paragraph?

A fixed camera, usually on its own pole, that photographs every vehicle that passes, reads the plate and records what Flock calls a vehicle fingerprint: make, type, color, and details like roof racks, bumper stickers and damage. The reads are stored and searchable, by the agency that bought the cameras and, depending on its settings, by other agencies across Flock's statewide and nationwide networks. They are not red-light or speed cameras and they do not issue tickets. The longer version, with the vendor's own language, is on The Program, and the full list of what plate readers record beyond the plate is on What they record.

I have nothing to hide. Why should I care?

Because the record of what has gone wrong with these systems is not hypothetical, and most of it happened to people who had nothing to hide either. Denver's cameras were searched more than 1,400 times for immigration-related reasons through the national network, without Denver's knowledge. Loveland's data reached Border Patrol. A Columbine Valley officer tracked the wrong woman to her door with Flock data and accused her of theft. Deputies in Texas used it to follow a woman seeking an abortion. In most of those cases the agency whose cameras were searched was not the agency doing the searching, and did not find out until afterward. That is a property of the network, not of any one department's good faith, which is why the sharing settings matter more than anyone's intentions. The cases are laid out, with sources, on Context.

Did anyone vote on this?

No council ever has. The 2023 order form, the 2025 paid contract and the Genetec purchase were all signed for the city by the chief of police, and the 2025 purchase was made under the sole-source provisions of the city's purchasing ordinance, so there was no competitive bid either. The contract renews on its own every year unless the city gives notice. That is the thing this site keeps returning to: the only rules that apply to Arvada's cameras are the ones in a contract and a police policy that no public body has voted on. The details are on The Program and The Policies.

Is this site against the police?

It is against a surveillance program being bought, expanded and shared with very little public explanation. That is a complaint about process and disclosure, not about the people in uniform. The site does not allege unlawful conduct by anyone, and no record reviewed for it documents misuse of a plate-reader system by Arvada Police personnel. If the city published its sharing settings, its audit logs and a camera count, most of what this site documents would be resolved, and I would call that a good outcome.

What can I actually do about it?

Start with Take Action: five things a resident can do, the council meetings between now and the renewal, who sits on City Council and how to reach them, and how to make three minutes at a public meeting count. The contract renews on its own unless the city gives notice by November 9, 2026, so the calendar matters.

How do I find the cameras near me?

The crowdsourced map at deflock.me, built on OpenStreetMap data contributed by volunteers, is the best public inventory there is, and it is linked from every page of this site. The map on this site's home page is drawn from the same data, and every dot on it links to that camera's location on the live map. It undercounts, because a camera nobody has mapped does not appear, and it can overcount, because a removed camera may linger in the data. If you see a camera that is not on it, you can add it; the map explains how.

Can I see what the cameras recorded of my own car?

Nobody knows yet, which is itself part of the story. In December 2025 a Colorado man asked Boulder police for the Flock images of the vehicle he drives, and the department refused to run the search, saying its systems may be accessed only for law-enforcement purposes as part of documented criminal investigations. He and a second plaintiff have since sued, and no court has ruled. Arvada's 2023 agreement limits access to the same kinds of purposes, and its policy declares plate data “not open to public review,” so the same questions reach here. The case is on Context.

Can I file a records request myself?

Yes. Anyone can file under the Colorado Open Records Act; you do not need to be a resident or give a reason. The records this site most wants are listed on The Program: the camera locations, the sharing settings, the audit logs, the pilot-period billing and the Falcon Flex agreement. Agencies may charge for staff time after the first hour, so ask for specific records that already exist rather than for “everything about Flock.” Nothing on this site is legal advice; the statute and the agency's records custodian govern.

Does this site track me?

No. There are no analytics, no cookies, no advertising, no social-media buttons and no third-party scripts or fonts. Every page ships with a strict content security policy that forbids loading anything from anywhere but this site. The company that hosts the files sees the ordinary request logs that every website's host sees; the site itself adds nothing to them. Links to outside sources open in a new tab and are sent without a referrer.

Can I quote or reuse what is here?

Yes. The public records are public: download them, share them, print them. The site's own writing may be quoted or reproduced with a link back to the page it came from. Map data is from OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database License and should carry that credit. The cartoons are AI-generated satire and should be labeled that way if you reuse them. Please do not present anything here as the City of Arvada's own material, because it is not.

Are there other sites like this one?

Yes. The same person, with the same method and the same rules, maintains sister sites on neighboring programs: deflockgolden.com (Golden's city contract), deflocklakewood.com (Lakewood's city contract), deflockmorrison.com (Morrison's town contract) and flockmarinelli.com (the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office program). Each stands on its own record and keeps its own corrections log.

Why does this site keep mentioning a second plate-reader system?

Because Arvada has two. Flock's fixed cameras watch the streets, and Genetec readers ride on patrol cars, with a copy of their data already reaching LexisNexis. Ending the Flock contract would not touch the Genetec system, and no map of fixed cameras can show it. The two are set side by side on The Program.