Note: This guest essay was written by someone who works for a regulated entity and must therefore be highly circumspect with regard to any public commentary, regardless of topic. They have been closely following the evolution of the mass surveillance situation since early 2025.

Why Jessica Burbank’s Flock investigation deserved consideration for an Investigative Documentary Emmy

There are two ways for an investigative journalist to be first. One is to publish a story before another reporter does. The rarer kind is to recognize that something is an important story before everyone else sees its importance.

Jessica Burbank did the latter.

In August 2025, Burbank produced an hour-long documentary investigating Flock Safety, the rapidly expanding provider of automated license-plate readers and other surveillance technology. Her starting point was hardly the stuff of national headlines: a municipal contract in the affluent village of Scarsdale, New York.

What Burbank found there became a window into something much larger.

That matters because the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has an Emmy category almost tailor-made for this kind of work. NATAS describes Outstanding Investigative Documentary as films that expose “wrongdoing, corruption or hidden truths through deep reporting and original access.”

In other words, work that holds powerful institutions accountable and brings new evidence or revelations to light. Measured against that standard, Burbank deserved serious consideration for an Emmy.

On April 8, 2025, Scarsdale’s Village Board approved its Flock contract. The resolution had not appeared on the published agenda. After a presentation and executive session, the Board amended its agenda and approved the contract 6–1. The procedural portion took mere seconds.

Burbank’s documentary reconstructs what preceded that vote and what residents hadn’t been told.

Using records obtained under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, she established that Village officials had been communicating with Flock for months before the public presentation. The incoming police chief was invited to meet with the company the day after his selection and before formally taking office. On March 31, he emailed that “the map is approved,” referring to proposed camera locations—before the public presentation, contract approval, or funding.

That alone is solid accountability journalism.

But Burbank didn’t stop there.

A records request seeking market research and analysis of competing vendors produced only a sole-source justification signed by Flock’s CEO. Burbank searched elsewhere and found versions of similar Flock documents in government records around the country. She then identified communities where Flock contracts had followed strikingly similar low-visibility paths.

In Lucas County, Ohio, commissioners approved a $250,000 Flock agreement among a group of routine items, only to attempt to rescind it a week later after a commissioner reconsidered what they had authorized.

This is the machinery of investigative journalism: find an anomaly, obtain the records, test the official explanation, search for a pattern, and confront the subject with what you find.

Burbank did that last part, too. She interviewed Flock’s national communications director and questioned the company about its contracting practices and the similarities she had uncovered among municipalities. The film does not simply present critics of Flock; it puts Burbank’s findings directly to Flock and gives the company an opportunity to answer them.

Then the investigation makes its most important leap.

Scarsdale isn’t really the story. The network is.

The documentary explains that Flock’s distinguishing feature isn’t simply its cameras. It is the ability, where agencies participate in sharing, to connect searches across jurisdictions. Burbank examines a Texas sheriff’s investigation involving a woman who traveled across state lines for an abortion and gets Flock itself to acknowledge that searching cameras in other participating localities is a capability of its system.

From there emerges the film’s central insight: a national surveillance infrastructure doesn’t necessarily arise from an act of Congress or a presidential directive. It can emerge incrementally—one police department, one salesperson, one municipal contract and sometimes one barely noticed local vote at a time.

As Burbank puts it near the film’s conclusion, one might imagine that creation of a national camera network would require “high-profile debate on the nightly news” and congressional action. Instead, she observes, it can take little more than seconds at a town-board meeting and a police chief’s signature.

That observation looks considerably more important today than it did when Burbank made it.

There was also unusually immediate evidence of impact. Her written investigation was published August 2, 2025. On August 4, Scarsdale’s police chief sent the Village Board a memorandum concerning the Flock contract. On August 6, the Village canceled it. Burbank carefully stops short of claiming that her reporting caused the reversal, suggesting instead that journalism and sustained public participation “might” have mattered.

That restraint is important. Investigative journalism should establish what the evidence supports, not claim credit it cannot prove.

But the strongest argument for Burbank’s work may be one that only became fully visible afterward. She was early. The national controversy she identified in 2025 did not fade. It grew.

Flock and interconnected ALPR networks subsequently became subjects of far broader scrutiny over privacy, immigration enforcement, abortion investigations, police misuse and the extraordinary power created when thousands of local cameras become searchable beyond the communities that purchased them.

In other words, Burbank didn’t simply get to the Flock story early. She identified why it was going to become a national story. That distinction matters.

There are investigations that expose misconduct everyone already understands to be important. They can be extraordinary journalism. But there is another, rarer form of investigative reporting: finding something that appears small, recognizing the system concealed inside it and showing the audience why it will matter before conventional wisdom catches up.

Burbank began with a 37-second vote in a suburban village and found the architecture of a national controversy.

Her documentary ends with a sentence that now sounds remarkably prescient:

“The story of mass surveillance and Flock Safety is one I’m just beginning to tell.”

She was right.

None of this means Burbank was owed an Emmy. NATAS’s documentary categories encompass extraordinary work from some of the best-resourced documentary organizations in the world, and an independent production should be judged by the same standard of excellence.

But that is precisely why Burbank’s accomplishment deserves attention. NATAS says an Outstanding Investigative Documentary should uncover hidden truths through deep reporting and original access, hold powerful actors accountable, and bring new evidence or revelations to light.

Burbank did those things.

And she did one more: she recognized the significance of the story before much of the country did. That isn’t merely good timing. It’s one of the hallmarks of great investigative journalism.

Sources:

Millions in Public Funds, Zero Public Input: Flock’s Surveillance System Might Already Be Overseeing Your Community

The $7.5 billion surveillance company Flock Safety is operating in 49 states and over 5,000 communities, but the residents of Scarsdale, NY, are fighting back.

Jessica Burbank

Dropsite. Aug 02, 2025