Truth NWA
Sources

Where everything on this site comes from.

Nothing here is anyone's opinion. Every quote is from a public document, a court record, a government audit, a published study, or a published statement — and every one of them is listed below with a link.

The city documents

DocumentCityDateWhere it lives
City Council packet, including the Master Services Agreement and Order FormSpringdaleJuly 22, 2025City council packet, public record
Police Department Policy 10.14 (license plate readers)SpringdaleEff. April 9, 2026Department policy, public record
Police & Fire Committee meeting recordingSpringdaleJuly 14, 2025Public meeting recording — transcript
City Council packet, ordinance and Parks memo (Flock item, pp. 439–447)BentonvilleMay 14, 2024CivicClerk portal, public record
Board of Directors packet, Order Form, Statement of Work and staff report (pp. 62–76)Siloam SpringsDec 17, 2024Agenda Center, public record

The public statements

StatementWhoCity
"Dear Springdale Community" letter, on department letterheadChief of PoliceSpringdale
"Addressing Community Concerns Regarding Flock Cameras & Public Safety"City Council memberBentonville
Community letter, August 2026Police DepartmentSiloam Springs
Statements at the July 14, 2025 committee meetingFlock Safety representative, Chief of Police, Chief of Staff, council membersSpringdale

The vendor's own published documents

  • Data Ownership guide — flocksafety.com/legal/data-ownership, last updated August 21, 2026. The source of the "train the system" line.
  • Terms & Conditions — flocksafety.com/terms-and-conditions, last updated August 21, 2026. Quoted on this site only as Flock's current public terms, never as any city's operative contract.
  • State-specific contractual provisions — flocksafety.com/legal/state-required-provisions. Lists six states. Arkansas is not among them.
  • Sole-source letters — included in the Bentonville and Siloam Springs council packets.
  • City of Dunwoody, Georgia agreement — a public record from another city, showing the same vendor's contract with negotiated machine-learning terms.

The statutes

Pulled from the official act PDFs published by the Arkansas General Assembly — Act 1491 of 2013 and Act 668 of 2025 — not from a commercial code website. Two sections in this subchapter were rewritten in 2025 and the commercial sites lagged. Read all 12 of them in full →

The research

Study or reportYearPublished inType
License Plate Recognition Technology (as a Crime Deterrent) 2013 CrimeSolutions, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice GOVERNMENT
License Plate Recognition Technology: Impact Evaluation and Community Assessment 2011 Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, George Mason University RCT
Combating Vehicle Theft in Arizona: A Randomized Experiment With License Plate Recognition Technology 2012 Criminal Justice Review RCT
Cost-effectiveness review of ALPR in policing 2025 Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing 9(1):4 SYSTEMATIC REVIEW
The Impacts of Large-Scale License Plate Reader Deployment on Criminal Investigations 2019 Police Quarterly 22(3) OBSERVATIONAL
Automated License Plate Readers, Vehicle Theft, and Clearance 2026 CrimRxiv working paper Working paper — not peer reviewed
An Evaluation of a Major Expansion in ALPR Technology 2025 Justice Evaluation Journal OBSERVATIONAL
"10% of reported crime in the U.S. is solved using Flock technology" 2024 flocksafety.com Vendor publication
2025 Impact Census 2025 flocksafety.com Vendor publication
Flock Installed AI Cameras In This Small City And Claimed Crime Went Down. It Went Up. 2024 Forbes JOURNALISM
Annual Report — Law Enforcement Use of ALPR 2024 Virginia State Crime Commission GOVERNMENT
How many crimes has Flock Safety solved in Cleveland? 2026 cleveland.com / Government Technology JOURNALISM
The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports 2004 American Economic Review NATURAL EXPERIMENT
Thinking, Fast and Slow? Some Field Experiments to Reduce Crime and Dropout in Chicago 2017 Quarterly Journal of Economics RCT
The Effect of Early Childhood Education on Adult Criminality 2023 American Economic Journal: Economic Policy NATURAL EXPERIMENT
Acquisitive Crime and Inflation in the United States: 1960–2012 2016 Journal of Quantitative Criminology NATURAL EXPERIMENT
Crime and Inflation in U.S. Cities 2019 Journal of Quantitative Criminology 35(1) NATURAL EXPERIMENT
The Changing Returns to Crime: Do Criminals Respond to Prices? 2019 Review of Economic Studies 86(3) NATURAL EXPERIMENT
Identifying the Effect of Unemployment on Crime 2001 Journal of Law and Economics 44(1) NATURAL EXPERIMENT
Are U.S. Cities Underpoliced? Theory and Evidence 2018 Review of Economics and Statistics NATURAL EXPERIMENT

The incidents

Every one of the 109 entries links to its own source — a court filing, a government audit, an agency press release, or a named news investigation. See them →

The meeting information

Each of the 18 governing bodies was checked against that city's own page, ordinance, or agenda PDF. A handful of city websites would not load; those entries say so and link to the page a person should open. See them →


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