The Private Panopticon: How Subscription Surveillance is Redefining Public Safety

While a traditional municipal police department spends upwards of $50,000 to purchase and install a single high-end traffic camera, private enterprise has figured out how to lease automated license plate readers for a fraction of that cost. Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based surveillance firm, has scaled its network to cover over 4,000 cities across the United States. This rapid expansion is not driven by federal grants, but by a subscription-based hardware model that turns local neighborhoods, business districts, and police