To Flock or Deflock: A Texas Mayor on the Process of Installing License Plate Cameras (Part 1)

Well, getting started, we would like to know a little bit about the process for bringing flock cameras to Robinson.

How did that decision come about? And kind of when you were in the initial stages of the process, what was the first impressions when they were presenting the idea to you?

So the first time it was talked about in council was June of 2025.

And when we found out about the flock cameras, it came to us as a grant.

The grant was actually named after catalytic converters because we all know what a mess the catalytic converters were over the last year before that in the state of Texas.

So they kind of named the grant the catalytic converter grant to begin with.

And so we started discussing what it was, what we could get.

At the time, we were looking at where is Robinson? Where is our crime rate? What's happening? Well, we had had several car burglaries.

We were having a lot of firearm burglaries.

We were having, I would call, mischief and vandalism over at the football stadium in Robinson.

I mean, all these things had stacked up really in a in a short period of time and we're like none of that had any help to solve the the crimes and so as we looked at what these flock cameras did which was basically a snapshot of license plates going down the road and how that they would work to if someone found that plate knew that plate was involved in the accident it got punched into the system then all of a sudden you had the opportunity to to go and look and find where the last time that car passed you.

And so we decided that based on what it could do to help crime in the city, the fact that it was paid for by the grant, it wouldn't cost the taxpayers any money.

And we didn't receive any feedback at all, really.

But we first discussed it in June, and then we approved it in August of 2025.