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The City is Watching Your Every Move!
RUMOR brought to Jimmy's Camp: The City is watching the community with Flock cameras.
Jimmy's Fact to Trade:
This rumor is false, Fountain does have cameras around the city, but they are definitely not watching your every move. The city currently has one live traffic camera, with one more on the way, and has finished installing nineteen of its “Flock cameras” with six still pending installation.
Flock cameras first arrived in Fountain in 2023 when a local neighborhood’s HOA decided to put them in. After Cumberland Green installed the cameras, the following year a Flock Camera representative approached the city and gave a presentation to City Council on September 10th, 2024 (YouTube Council Recording-Flock presentation start- 30:38). Following the presentation City Council approved the Flock Cameras for use in Fountain.
The one live traffic camera is located at one of the most trafficked intersections in the city, at Royalty and Crest, and the other one, once ready, will be going up at Mesa Ridge and Fountain Mesa. The live camera currently installed has been in place for a month and is used to help our public safety navigate traffic during accidents and emergencies, as well as serves as a resource that can be utilized for investigation purposes if necessary. This said, although officers can login to the live traffic cameras at these intersections, nobody is assigned to just sit and watch the feed of those devices.
The “Flock cameras” are little black cameras that are located across the city, aimed directly at the city’s public streets. These cameras are in place to specifically scan license plates of vehicles on public roadways and nothing else. The Flock cameras scan every license plate that drives by and quickly runs it through a state and national database check. If the license plate has a “public safety alert” associated with it, the program sends an alert to local police. Examples of public safety alerts include: Amber Alerts, Senior Alerts, Endangered Missing Alerts, Developmental Disability Alerts, Blue Alerts, Missing Indigenous Person Alerts, and Medina Alerts. The cameras will also alert officers of reported stolen vehicles. As opposed to the two live traffic cameras we’ve already discussed, police officers cannot access the Flock camera unless they receive an alert notification by the Flock system, so if someone is concerned that Police Officers can watch the community through these cameras, they can’t. These cameras can’t be used for facial recognition, and they are not speed cameras, their only function is to read and record license plates.
Let’s provide an example of how all of this works, just to be sure the facts are clear: let’s pretend your car is stolen (we really hope not). You call the Fountain Police Department to report your stolen vehicle. The Police Department gathers all the information of your vehicle and enters the details into the national database. From that point forward, anytime your stolen vehicle passes by a Flock camera, whether it is in the City of Fountain or another city who utilizes Flock cameras, it will send an alert to the local police department. The alert includes a picture of your vehicle, the date, time and Flock camera location it just passed by. Officers then do the best they can to use that Flock camera alert to locate and recover your stolen vehicle, and many times the suspect who stole it! So, you get your car back and you also get a safer community as well thanks to the Flock camera system!
Published: 06/24/2025