Editor’s note: As a reminder, The Lookout is experimenting with shifting its weekly publication to Saturdays, from Friday evenings. Like it? Hate it? Let me know in the comments!—Dave.

Analysis is only as good as the underlying data. Garbage in, garbage out. To produce indispensable new research on Richmond’s controversial seven-figure surveillance network, one Church Hill professor has taken it upon himself to go Flock-spotting.

But while it may feel like those slim black poles topped by cameras and solar panels are everywhere, actually confirming and logging their specific coordinates is a painstaking process.

“It’s been challenging,” said Steven Keener, Ph.D. with a chuckle in a recent phone interview with The Lookout. The co-founder and inaugural director of the Center for Crime, Equity, and Justice Research and Policy at Christopher Newport University may work in Hampton Roads, but he lives in Church Hill. Having already co-authored groundbreaking scholarship on that metropolitan area’s arrays of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) made by Flock Safety, a notorious Atlanta-based technology firm, Keener is now bringing his work home. And shuffling through spreadsheets, this ain’t.

The “groundwork” that Keener and fellow travelers in Richmond’s growing anti-Flock movement are currently undertaking is “getting out there and physically verifying that, ‘Yes, this is, this is a automatic license plate reader camera, and not some other type of camera,’” he said. It also requires differentiating those devices from Flock’s “gunshot detectors”—microphones hooked up to software designed to locate gunfire, the accuracy and efficacy of which is a separate, related source of contention.

Keener, an assistant professor who teaches crime and mental health courses at CNU and also sits on the board of directors of the nonpartisan criminal-justice reform group Justice Forward Virginia groundwork, was able to skip this step when he and his co-authors produced their Hampton Roads paper, thanks to an order from a federal judge unsealing a map of Flock placements filed during over an ongoing lawsuit over its constitutionality. That paper, a preprint of which was published in January 2026, is one of the most comprehensive pieces of independent academic analysis available on how ALPR placements relate to race and class, and its findings were bleak.

Eight of the Hampton Roads 10 census tracts with the most Flock cameras are majority-Black, and high-poverty neighborhoods there had more than twice as many ALPRs as low-poverty ones. Subsequent evaluation of that metro’s crime data logged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that crime rates were negative predictors of Flock placement.

“We're not done on this,” he told The Lookout earlier this year. “If we can actually get access to more data, we'll get even deeper.”

Access to data has been a stumbling block in Richmond. Despite Mayor Danny Avula’s stated goal of transparency, the Richmond Police Department has denied repeated requests from both journalists and anti-Flock activists to release a map showing where it has placed its ~100 always-on cameras, citing potential for vandalism. (It is true that some Flock devices have been damaged/knocked down, but if there’s evidence that this is coordinated activism rather than stochastic shitheadery, RPD has not publicized it.)

“If the city was actually transparent on this and would release the locations, then this would be relatively straightforward for us,” Keener said. Absent some sort of data deus ex machina, though, that looks unlikely. So the professor is working to validate the location of each of Richmond’s ALPRs in person, using open-source tools like DeFlock to light the way.

Other local groups have been making their own grassroots efforts to support this project. Earlier this month, for example, MapRVA conducted an open training session in Shockoe Bottom to teach residents how to properly identify and log ALPRs and other surveillance devices in DeFlock, which then populates its own Richmond-specific map.

Once Keener’s hard-won Richmond dataset is complete, he plans to duplicate the work he and his co-authors did in Hampton Roads to get a comprehensive look at where RPD’s Flock devices are located, and how those locations relate to factors like race, class, and crime. But even “at this point, the patterns are pretty obvious,” he said. “It’s going to be the vast majority of census tracks that are the most surveilled in Richmond are predominantly non-white.” While RPD’s intent may not be to surveil those communities more than whiter and wealthier ones, Keener added, that’s what appears to be happening.

(This tracks with statements that RPD Chief Rick Edwards made to me as I reported out this Richmonder investigation showing the city has spent more than $1 million on Flock so far. While there are “some [cameras] in the West End,” Edwards said in a phone interview in January 2026, “we do generally put them where our gun-violence hot spots are.” Those 13 zones are mostly located in the city’s Blacker and poorer East End and Southside areas. In comments to the press, Edwards has repeatedly disputed the notion that RPD’s Flock placements are an indication of racially biased policing.)

While the validation work is in process, Keener has zoomed out his Flock focus a bit to find other ways to quantify just how heavily surveilled Richmond is. Using an approach known as kernel density analysis, the team was able to “broaden the radius” of its work beyond this or that census tract to gauge relative surveillance intensities across Virginia. “When we ran that statewide, what we found is that the top 14 census tracts in terms, of the highest kernel density analysis, are all the city of Richmond,” he said. Their work indicates that the top 68 are all either here or in Norfolk.

“What that essentially tells you is that Richmond and Norfolk are two of the most intensely surveilled cities in the Commonwealth,” Keener said. The findings, which underpin an article by Keener and his co-authors currently under academic review, offer a fuller picture of “how unlikely it is you could actually move about daily without hitting these cameras,” he said.

Keener will have the fullest picture of how heavily surveilled Richmond is on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis once he’s mapped all the city’s Flock cameras. He encouraged interested East Enders to download DeFlock’s app and begin logging their own sightings. “Honestly, any kind of verification would be extremely helpful,” he said. “Most of these cameras are actually concentrated in pretty close proximity” to one another, he added, making it easy to validate camera clusters quickly once they’ve been happened upon.

On observation, there sure seem to be a bunch in the East End. Happy hunting, Flock-spotters.

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!

The Lookout has stayed on the neighborhood’s talkiest tale since sending a first-ever breaking-news update about it this past Monday. And buddy, you’d better believe there’s more to report. Here’s the most recent coverage, filed midday Friday:

To avoid going insane, I am not going to rehash all the twists and turns from the past week here. Hit the L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog to get caught up. And mark your calendars for the Church Hill Association’s monthly meeting on May 19th: longtime 7th District councilmember Cynthia Newbille and Department of Parks and Recreation staff (possibly including Director Christopher Frelke) are slated to attend for discussion of how the city has handled the project thusfar, and what comes next.

As promised, The Lookout followed up with the Department of Public Works to find out when the red-light cameras at N. 25th and E. Main Sts. began issuing citations, and how many it’s racked up thus far. The upshots, respectively: March 9th, and a an absolute shitload. Look at these figures:

The East End array spit out 2,354 tickets in the 53 days between March 9th and April 29th, according to DPW data shared with The Lookout. It works out to over 44 tickets a day on average, and—at $50 apiece—some $117,700 in traffic fines. (If they’re all upheld, of course.) The 10,340 total tickets issued citywide pencil out to more than half a million dollars in fines for reckless drivers running lights in the first month-and-a-half-ish these cameras have been active.

That strikes me as a frankly insane amount. I knew it was bad out there, but… what, man?

Courtesy of Lookout reader Enzo Chiariello, the latest edition of East End Animal Friend is live now, and cute as hell:

As a reminder, East End Animal Friend is a new recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to [email protected] for consideration!

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