anyone looked at "Flock Safety" or similar systems?

After a number of local incidents, our neighborhood got motivated to form a safety committee. Being known as "that guy with all the cameras" I was asked to provide some input on someone's suggestion of the "Flock Safety" neighborhood camera system. Flock Safety : Keep the whole neighborhood safe with a wireless security system for neighborhoods and HOAs that uses automatic license plate reading cameras

These are small traffic cameras that mount on poles by the road; completely unwired: solar-powered, and data upload via cell service. Designed to capture plates, but a rep said they've been able to ID drivers in some cases. The company delivers any relevant photo & video when an incident is reported to police, but that's the extent of the interaction. Residents do not have direct access to raw footage otherwise. They apparently only do neighborhood installs, they don't sell separate hardware to individuals.

We have a proposal in from Flock. Now I've been asked to see if I can get competitive quotes from similar companies. My problem is, as far as I know this system is unique. No doubt we could find some fully custom, more traditional hardwired IP-camera system likely at a much higher price, but does anyone know of anything else like this?

cam235 said:

After a number of local incidents, our neighborhood got motivated to form a safety committee. Being known as "that guy with all the cameras" I was asked to provide some input on someone's suggestion of the "Flock Safety" neighborhood camera system. Flock Safety : Keep the whole neighborhood safe with a wireless security system for neighborhoods and HOAs that uses automatic license plate reading cameras

These are small traffic cameras that mount on poles by the road; completely unwired: solar-powered, and data upload via cell service. Designed to capture plates, but a rep said they've been able to ID drivers in some cases. The company delivers any relevant photo & video when an incident is reported to police, but that's the extent of the interaction. Residents do not have direct access to raw footage otherwise. They apparently only do neighborhood installs, they don't sell separate hardware to individuals.

We have a proposal in from Flock. Now I've been asked to see if I can get competitive quotes from similar companies. My problem is, as far as I know this system is unique. No doubt we could find some fully custom, more traditional hardwired IP-camera system likely at a much higher price, but does anyone know of anything else like this?

Click to expand...

At $1500 PER CAMERA per YEAR! Holy cow! It better wash & detail your cars too on a weekly basis.
I suggest waiting until member @bigredfish comes by and gives his two cents. He has been down this road before with his neighborhood.

Wow, I'm in the wrong business. I'll do it for $1000 p/camera p/month

Let me start by saying I'm not a Pro installer. I'm the current President of our little HOA.

That said, $1500 p/camera annually for ONLY tag cameras is well, er, dumb.

I suppose the first question is how big is your neighborhood and how many access points do you need to cover? Maybe I'm missing something but, What good is a tag camera without overview to see what happened? Tag cameras by themselves are great for catching speeders or toll booth runners, but how exactly are you going to prove in court that this particular car/plate was 100% positively involved in the robbery 2 streets over? And the BS on their site about most bad things happening with a car involved? We get WAY more theft from local druggies on foot than in vehicles.

Two suggested ways to go. Granted we are only covering two locations with our setup, so some initial costs could be higher depending on how many entrances you have and/or major intersections. But frankly the more cameras the dumber that deal sounds.

1) - We initially had a contractor install two poles, at entrance and cul-de-sac along with 3 Axis 2MP cameras ($800 ea value) to cover the entrance overview, entrance tag, and cul-de-sac overview. We paid about $9000 one-time for the initial install on and including beefy 12' poles sunk in concrete, power hookup, Internet hookup, outdoor enclosures for the router/bridge, completely turnkey.
We paid $100 per month for high speed internet to both locations. We also paid Eagle Eye Networks (Theyre the biggest in the cloud security video business in US and Europe) $90 p/mo for cloud storage with 24/7 real-time access to the live video feeds and/or downloading video from a web browser. (VPN secured access through the EagleEye bridge that sends the video to their cloud)

• So we had $9000 install 1x time
• $290 p/mo for Internet, cloud storage, and a very good web based interface to live and recorded footage that we could access 24/7.
• We later added two Dahua cameras to give us a total of 5. No increase in monthly cost.

2) We recently did away with the cloud service because A) the contractor we had to go through had no concept of customer service and pissed me off, and B) we felt we could ADD cameras (or upgrade cams in the future) AND save money by self hosting.

So we purchased 2 Dahua 4K NVR's and 2 Netgear routers, put them in the existing weatherproof enclosures, and in two 1/2 days I had us self hosting.

We saved $90 p/mo right out the chute by cancelling the cloud service, and I was able to get our internet costs down so we no longer needed to stream video 24/7 to the cloud. Only when we need to access it.

We manage the POE (Dahua 4208 $K series) NVR's via their web interface via VPN and/or through Dahua Smart PSS which is free and works great. Ive also trained other Board members and the Secretary at our our Management Company

• Hard costs for the "upgrade (DVRs, HD's, Routers) $900
• Monthly savings - $150 p/mo reducing our ongoing cost to about $150 p/mo for the 5 cameras, and I'll be adding a 6th that will cost us exactly 0$ p/mo

>>Here is a web page<<(1080p) I made to show the HOA Board how we capture video. Each picture as you scroll down the page opens a video when you click on it. It follows a vehicle entering and eventually leaving our street. 3 tag cams, 2 Overview cams, and my own 2 cams as I happen to be in a good spot and have good cams that contribute. (Forgive some of those clips as they were just after being installed and I hadnt finished tweeking the cameras)

Not a single Homeowner had a problem with us spending the lets call it $10,000 + $3000 p/yr with a tiny little HOA of just 41 homes. This is 1/2 of our annual budget and not a peep. They appreciate that we have Excellent coverage, and LE has used our video many times to hep catch bad guys. Our HOA has two purposes:
1- Maintain Property Values
2- Provide some measure of security

Here's a recent sample:
Homeowner calls and says odd activity in cul-de-sac. I tune in, after watching for a few minutes, I see 3 individuals walking off camera into our little wooded park to do a drug deal, so I call LE, tell them I'm watching live, LE shows up with 3 cars and they all get a free meal in the County jail that night.
(Dont forget to change Youtube player to 1080p)


See other Sample clips Here on my Youtube channel

Thanks for posting this great info bigredfish, this is very good to know. I think our neighborhood needs a guy like you! In our case it's not a HOA, just an informal voluntary group which maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of homeowners contribute to. All told the neighborhood has 7 access roads and contains nearly 1000 homes. Being in San Jose, property values typically > $1M each (not that you'd know it looking at the 1500 to 2500 sq.ft. fairly modest homes on small lots.) There's definitely frequent car-door checkers on foot, bike, skateboard etc. but the more significant breakins we've had all involved getaway cars. I totally agree with you this kind of system is not enough by itself. I've been promoting security cams in general and more people are getting them, but they typically don't go to the effort of finding a location that works to get plates, so we mostly have just the typical distant shot of the side of a vehicle.

Ahh much bigger problem and wayyy out of my level of expertise.

(Ouch! I'll keep my 2400 sq ft modest home and small lot for 1/4 of that thank you

So assuming escaping from California isnt an option, and again only an opinion of 1 novice, if I was in your situation I'd seriously consider calling EagleEye and getting a quote through a local installer to set a pole at each location, with both overview and tag cams on each. (Maybe there are guard shacks or other structures present to negate the need for the poles?) and Stream it to their cloud service (Which does so in bandwidth friendly chunks during non peak usage times and stores the rest locally at their bridge until it can send it) as it isnt likely anyone is going to want to be full-time and perpetually responsible for managing things for that big of a neighborhood for free...
Success Stories - Eagle Eye Networks

If you want to self host/self manage probably one of the Pros here can talk about Ubiquity radios to stream to a central location and that sort of thing...

Good luck!

cam235 said:

After a number of local incidents, our neighborhood got motivated to form a safety committee. Being known as "that guy with all the cameras" I was asked to provide some input on someone's suggestion of the "Flock Safety" neighborhood camera system. Flock Safety : Keep the whole neighborhood safe with a wireless security system for neighborhoods and HOAs that uses automatic license plate reading cameras

These are small traffic cameras that mount on poles by the road; completely unwired: solar-powered, and data upload via cell service. Designed to capture plates, but a rep said they've been able to ID drivers in some cases. The company delivers any relevant photo & video when an incident is reported to police, but that's the extent of the interaction. Residents do not have direct access to raw footage otherwise. They apparently only do neighborhood installs, they don't sell separate hardware to individuals.

We have a proposal in from Flock. Now I've been asked to see if I can get competitive quotes from similar companies. My problem is, as far as I know this system is unique. No doubt we could find some fully custom, more traditional hardwired IP-camera system likely at a much higher price, but does anyone know of anything else like this?

Click to expand...

That's a lot of money for limited value. Is the hardware any good? Or is it some cheap plastic from overseas? Who is the original hardware mfg?

California has a state law pertaining to ALPR (automated license plate recognition) that you'd need to be aware of if you were using ALPR.
California Automated License Plate Reader Policies
If you simply store video and don't run ALPR it may not apply, idk.

You may also want to consider forming a neighborhood watch. I would include some presentations on security cameras at neighborhood watch meetings or in emails. You could also provide a mechanism for registering cameras with the HOA so you can keep track of where cameras are located. You might be able to get people to choose better cameras than ring or nest with some effort.

Does your voluntary HOA have covenants that are binding to all homes in the neighborhood?

Hey @bigredfish any change since that useful post a couple of years ago? On a cul de sac and interesting in coming up with a similar solution for our neighborhood. Maybe one regular camera and one LPR. not sure we would have access to power nor resident internet. Would ideally need a self standing solution at a minimum recording for incident and ideally accessible by local residents. Curious if you have a simple recap of cameras and equipment to consider to at least start the process. Thanks a lot

Well we’ve upgraded cameras and added one since then. I’ll post more info this evening when I get a bit of time.

Thanks @bigredfish. Appreciate the help here. Ideally not only cameras but also how you set it up for power and internet connection.