If You're Going To Smash License Plate Scanners, Maybe Cover Your Own Plate First

Waterford Township, a suburb of Detroit, is a town full of Flock license plate readers — cameras, often installed illegally, that cops and ICE use to track anyone and everyone they feel like. The citizens of Waterford Township hate the scanners, but police keep expanding the program anyway. That is, they did, until one man — I won't say a hero, because what's a hero — allegedly took down a series of Flock scanners in a single night. 

A 24-year-old resident of Clarkston, a village near Waterford, is facing charges of taking down three Flock scanners in Waterford Township according to local news outlet Fox 2 Detroit. The cops may call this "malicious destruction of police property," a "felony," but I call it something else: a touch of idiocy, because one of the smashed cameras caught a clear enough glimpse of the vigilante's car as he approached that he was identified and arrested. 

Now, of course, I can neither endorse nor condone such behavior — our legal counsel advises against directly telling readers to go to felonies. I can, however, rail against such incredibly broad breaches of privacy that indiscriminately gather data on thousands of people every day. Flock cameras are a menace, a modern panopticon, and direct servants of fascism, and it's no wonder people keep knocking them from their perches. 

If you're planning to go out hunting security cameras, though, just be smarter about it than this 24-year-old in Michigan. Don't put your car in the camera's view before you knock it down — it'll save the footage, and you'll just be giving the cops a clear idea of who to go after. Remember that the things you're knocking down are, in fact, cameras, and you'll have a much better shot of getting out of the situation unscathed.