Towns Are Felling the Automated Cameras That Watch Every Street

Late in July 2026 the resistance turned physical. A camera came down with a saw in Troy, New York. Another was paint-bombed in Oakland, a third rammed by a truck in Idaho. On July 30, CNN counted a wave of vandalism and canceled contracts across the country. In Verona, Wisconsin, after the council voted to stop using them, the company told the town not to remove the cameras and was unsure they could be shut off remotely. So the town pulled trash bags over the lenses.

Flock Safety runs 120,000 cameras across 49 states, logging tens of billions of data points a month. The strange part is the coalition felling them. Constitutional conservatives and progressives, people who agree on almost nothing, are canceling contracts in Fort Collins, Eugene, Madison, and Knoxville. This is not a fight about crime, and it is not a fight about technology.

The unease has evidence under it. Reporting by 404 Media documented officers using the network to track ex-partners, a side door left open for ICE, and a search that trailed a woman who ended her own pregnancy. A tool sold to recover stolen cars had become a way to locate people.

Scripture is not nervous about an eye that sees everything. It pictures a gaze in every place, keeping watch over the good and the wicked alike, and calls it comfort. The whole weight sits on the verb. That watch keeps. It guards the widow's boundary and marks the cheat at the scale. To fill every place, though, is a reach the text hands to one holder.

Jeremiah 23:24Can any hide himself in secret places so that I shall not see him? says Yahweh. Don't I fill heaven and earth? says Yahweh.

Every one of us longs to be truly seen and dreads being surveilled, and those are not opposites. What separates them is who keeps the record, and why. An eye that watches to keep you can hold your whole life. An eye that watches to manage you should not be trusted with your plate.