YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops

A Canadian software engineer and YouTuber, Anthony Sistilli of Brampton, Ontario, built a homemade automated license plate recognition (ALPR) camera to track police vehicles and posted demonstrations on TikTok and YouTube, calling it a “personal Flock surveillance camera to Flock the Flockers.” His videos describe the build and operation and note that Brampton recently spent about 2 million Canadian dollars on high-resolution cameras and ALPR systems. After the posts, two Peel Regional Police officers visited Sistilli’s home to question his intentions and warn that collected data could reveal officers’ home addresses, shift times and daily movements, creating personal safety risks.

Sistilli uses the visit to launch a broader critique of ALPR deployment: companies like Flock aggressively sell the tech to municipalities while offering little evidence of crime reduction, opaque rules on data collection and retention, and real-world abuses - stalking, harassment of immigrants and wrongful accusations. The episode highlights the asymmetry in surveillance power, where police freely use ALPR data but resist reciprocal scrutiny. Peel Regional Police did not provide a public comment on the encounter.