SHOW YOUR
WORK.

Every report cites its source

Each entry on the reports desknames the publisher, the publication date, and the location, and links to the original reporting with a clearly labelled link. The summary is ours and is written to be read here, so nobody is forced onto a publisher's site to learn what happened. The link is the citation, not the point.

How these are written

The write-ups on this site are drafted with AI assistance. Every factual claim is checked against the original reporting before it goes up, and where a figure could not be confirmed it is either left out or marked as unconfirmed. Where two sources give different numbers, both are recorded with their sources rather than quietly reconciled into one confident figure.

This is stated here because the whole claim of this desk is that it can be checked. A reader who wants to verify something should never have to work out how it was produced first. If a summary is wrong, the source link above it will show that faster than any assurance from us would.

What is not done: reporting is never invented, quotes are never generated, and a source is never cited without being read. A story that only exists as a social media post stays off the desk until reporting confirms it.

What the statuses mean

Status describes the outcome for the deployment, not how the story feels. A council that kept its cameras is marked Contract retained even when residents filled the room. Win means the jurisdiction decided against the cameras. Partial win means use was suspended or narrowed while the agreement still stands. Ongoing means it is unresolved. Removal verified is reserved for cases where reporting confirms the hardware actually came down, because a cancelled contract is not a removed camera.

Dates

Dates are the publisher's publication dates, stored as plain calendar dates and formatted without timezone conversion. A timestamp parsed in the wrong timezone renders as the previous day, which silently misdates a report.

Images

No publisher photograph is copied into this project. Where a photograph appears it is the publisher's own preview image, loaded from their servers and credited on the page. When an image is unavailable a designed placeholder is shown instead, so a missing photograph never looks like a broken page. If you hold rights to an image shown here and want it removed, say so and it will be.

Where to check the primary records yourself

This desk records what happened in each place and links the reporting. It does not hold the underlying search records, and for anyone who wants those there are projects doing that work properly.

Have I Been Flocked holds audit logs obtained through public records requests, with every file traced back to the request that produced it. It is fiscally sponsored by, and editorially independent from, the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation. Two things there are worth knowing about even if you never search a plate. Its guide to requesting audit logs explains what to ask an agency for and why, including the network-sharing export that names every agency yours shares data with. And its records show a distinction most coverage misses: an agency's own search log and the log of searches other agencies ran across the same shared network are separate files, and they are not remotely the same size.

Their data is not reproduced here and their figures are not restated as ours. Where a claim on this desk rests on records rather than reporting, the link goes to the records.

What this is not

Inclusion is not independent verification of every claim. Public records can be incomplete or outdated. Flockinghell is an independent satirical civic-information project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Flock Safety.

What this site counts

Two numbers are kept, both on the server and both aggregate. One is a count of how many times each page was viewed on each day. The other is a count of which sites people arrived from, recorded as a bare host such as "google.com" or "reddit.com", with arrivals carrying no referrer recorded as "direct".

There is no analytics script on any page, no cookie, and no identifier of any kind. Nothing is stored per visitor: no address, no browser string, no session, and no time more precise than the date. The referrer is reduced to its host before it is written, so a search term or a private page address in a full referrer URL is discarded rather than kept. Nothing recorded here can be traced to a person, because nothing recorded here describes one.

The purpose is narrow and worth stating: to know whether these pages are reaching anyone, and whether people find them through search or through a link. A client-side analytics service would have answered the same question while making the claim above untrue.

Corrections

Corrections are published rather than quietly patched. If something here is wrong, it gets checked and the change is recorded. Recent example: two publication dates and one headline were corrected after a post-launch source audit, and one report summary was amended to state a council vote outcome that had been omitted.

Lawful action only

This project supports public participation: records requests, testimony, contract review, and policy advocacy. Never trespass, damage, cover, move, or interfere with equipment.