Like every bar in the country, Donna was figuring out how to make things work when the COVID pandemic hit. It was selling bottled palomas out of a window, and making food for other food industry professionals, hoping to just pay operating expenses until things opened up again. But in November 2020, it had become too much to sustain, and the bar closed its location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. According to worker Lauren Ruiz, “we thought that was that.”

It was a particular bummer because then-owner Leif Huckman had always run a nice place to work. Ruiz, at that point a 20-year industry veteran, describes a workplace where everyone had a say. Before it closed, Huckman, inspired by Danny Meyer, had been looking into eliminating tipping (though Meyer later abandoned that policy). 

So it was maybe less of a surprise when Huckman began reaching out about reopening Donna under a new mode of operation: worker-ownership. In his research about tipping, Huckman came across The Working World, an organization that, along with its partner funding arm, Seed Commons, helps establish worker-owned businesses across multiple industries (including factories) in low-income communities by offering training, resources, and non-extractive loans that don’t require personal guarantees. “I thought to myself, worker ownership could be an alternative way to incentivize a whole team to run a business better, and provide good service,” says Huckman of first watching a webinar from The Working World. Instead of chasing after tips and the (often false) promise that everyone’s good work would be rewarded, workers could run things democratically, and be equally invested in success.

In 2021, Huckman began transferring ownership to his former employees and converting Donna to a worker-owned business. They allied with The Working World for guidance over developing just what a bar run on democratic decision making by the workers would look like, both in theory and in practice. In May 2023, Donna finally opened its doors again in a new Manhattan neighborhood. Ruiz and Huckman say in the three years since the transition they’ve seen increased profitability, improved employee retention, and a boost in general worker satisfaction.

There’s also increased excitement surrounding this business model. A 2025 report by the Democracy at Work Institute’s State of the Sector shows “Worker Cooperatives and Democratic Workplaces have shown 34% growth since 2020 while more than doubling the workforce in these businesses,” compared to traditional small businesses which have seen 13% growth during the same timeframe.

At its core, a worker-owned business means the people producing the products, whether that’s a fancy cocktail or a pizza, are the same people making the business decisions. There is no phantom owner reaping profits without ever setting foot in the kitchen, or manager unilaterally dictating how money is spent.

At its core, a worker-owned business means the people producing the products, whether that’s a fancy cocktail or a pizza, are the same people making the business decisions. There is no phantom owner reaping profits without ever setting foot in the kitchen, or manager unilaterally dictating how money is spent. Every worker-owner, whether they’re a head chef or a dishwasher, has a say, and a stake, in the business. Which has the potential for incredible outcomes. No restaurant or bar operates the same and there’s no one-size-fits-all worker-ownership model. It’s not a silver bullet, but imagine if all the workers at restaurants with abusive chef-owners had equal power. It could radically remake the industry.

There aren’t many, but as every day capitalism seems to drive something else into the ground, it’s no surprise some workers are looking for an alternative. Worker-owned restaurants and food service businesses like Proof Bakery in LA; The Cheeseboard Collective in Berkeley, California; Red Emma’s in Baltimore; Prospect Butcher Co. in Brooklyn; and Skylark in Chicago are showing people what’s possible. 

Maybe we’re biased. After all, Ravenous only exists because our five worker-owners were looking for an alternative, too. But as restaurants struggle to survive increasing rents, tariffs, foodborne illnesses, and everything else that contributes to thin margins, worker-ownership has the chance to solve some problems. We spoke to hospitality industry worker-owners, and the folks helping build these businesses, about how to convert a food service business to that model. And more importantly, why you should.

It’s easier if the owner is on board

Most restaurants and bars don’t have an owner like Huckman, one who’s willing to cede power. The idea of a single owner calling the shots is omnipresent in all business ownership, but especially in the brigade-infected world of hospitality built on knowing your place and paying your dues. Huckman has since moved on as a hospitality consultant for The Working World. 

“I had an idea of what worker-ownership looked like, but I never imagined that it could be a hospitality-focused business model,” says Ruiz. 

In many ways, building a worker-owned restaurant is similar to unionizing a workspace, in that you need a group of people willing to do the work of research and communication among staff. Committed and well-positioned staff members, like Ruiz, are essential for success, says Scott Trumbull, co-executive director of The Working World. The first step in any conversion is facilitating the purchase and approving any financing, before moving on to a transition plan and making sure the new worker-owners understand the financials and operations of running a business. He says when a business introduces itself, he looks at the history of the business, its profitability, and speaks to current ownership about what would be required of them to facilitate a worker purchase. That’s just easier when both workers and owners are aligned. 

That’s not to say it’s impossible if ownership isn’t immediately on board. Trumbull and the organization’s co-executive director, Ghislain Guiebo, say The Working World and Seed Commons have found success when explaining the benefits of worker-ownership to bosses who are agnostic or even antagonistic to the idea of changing business models. Still, even when an owner is aligned with the concept, they may require a lot of explaining about the future and their subsequent roles.

Huckman also emphasizes that many successful worker-owned businesses are already being cooperatively managed in spirit. He says his organization will look at communication  between workers and if there are people already on the leadership team who care about the business and want to stay through the conversion. But success only comes when everyone understands what the model has the potential to create. “When you give employees the agency to affect change and to have a vote, I think it's a tremendous uplift to the work environment and morale,” says Huckman. “I deeply believe that it can make for a more profitable and a better run business when all of these things are in place.”

It still takes work even if you’re all radicals

“Back in 2003, 2004, we weren't yet using the language of worker cooperative,” says Kate Khatib, a labor organizer and co-director of Red Emma’s, a worker-owned bookstore and cafe, in Baltimore. She officially co-founded Seed Commons in 2015, while Red Emma’s was founded 22 years ago as an infoshop, a free community space focused on political activism and run by volunteers. Khatib says from the beginning they were focused on providing food and drinks with ethical sourcing, and that to do that reliably for customers, they couldn’t be volunteers. In 2013, after an expansion, Khatib says they started thinking of the business as an actual business, closely examining what “worker-ownership” meant. “Can you really say that you have a sustainable business or are experimenting with workplace democracy if you're not taking sustainability seriously for the workers?” Because “once you shift your business from being an activist side project to something that is paying people's bills, it really changes the way that your business has to operate,” Khatib says.

For Red Emma’s, that meant breaking down traditional roles and rebuilding the hospitality business from the bottom up. For example, in most restaurant kitchens, the dishwasher is on the lowest rung, and often thrown into other difficult grunt work. But workers at Red Emma’s didn’t necessarily want the dishwashers to also be in charge of mopping and cleaning the bathrooms, says Khatib. Workers began talking about how to spread that work around in a way that felt fair, but that still allowed people to specialize in barista or baking work if that’s what they wanted. “No matter how awesome the owners are, it’s a shift. You have to start thinking about your work differently. You think about your workplace differently. You think about yourself differently.”

That’s true even if a business is using the language of worker-ownership from its inception. “There is a real difference between theory and practice,” says Noah Wolf, one of three worker-owners at Sea & Soil, a sandwich shop in Brooklyn, New York. They’ve used the model from day one. It’s easy to both dream of or dismiss worker-ownership as a utopian fantasy where giving everyone equity in the business automatically translates to easy working conditions. But it’s still a business, meaning sometimes tough decisions have to be made around money and labor. “The only way that can be fair is for everyone to be part of making those tough decisions,” says Wolf.

Operations and governance aren't the same

Bustling kitchens do not run well on consensus. Even in the most egalitarian spaces, you can’t decide with every order who feels like making the espresso and who assembles the sandwich. “Operationally, we run exactly like any other bar,” says Ruiz, who serves as a general manager with bartenders, servers, cooks, and porters working as in any other traditionally run kitchen. What’s different is governance: “We have our board meeting once a month and we have our weekly worker owner meetings once a week. And that's when we make our [business] decisions.”

Worker-ownership doesn’t automatically mean everyone has the same job, or even makes the same amount of money. What it means is every worker-owner gets an equal say in making those decisions. The opinion of the cashier and the opinion of the manager get equal weight when it comes to where and how to spend money, what new processes should be implemented, and what business priorities are, even if after those decisions are made, the manager can still tell the cashier what to do on the floor.

“When you give employees the agency to affect change and to have a vote, I think it's a tremendous uplift to the work environment and morale. I deeply believe that it can make for a more profitable and a better run business when all of these things are in place.”

This is one of the trickier things for many businesses that want to be worker-owned to figure out, says The Working World’s Trumbull. “People aren't clear on what kinds of decisions are operational versus governance or democratic decisions, and that can lead to a lot of conflict,” he says. “People are like, wait, you just made that decision without me. Shouldn't we have all made that decision together?” Establishing what decisions people in each role are empowered to make, and what decisions must be made together, ensures everyone can do their jobs without second guessing themselves.

Know which problems it solves…

Lest you think this is all just a matter of how a business files its taxes, there are incredible benefits to worker-ownership. The first being that it’s an incentive to make people want to work for you.

“There was a huge brain drain that happened in the hospitality industry,” says Ruiz of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Restaurant work became nothing short of deadly, and for many the low pay, lack of benefits, and general stress of the work became too much, and workers left the industry. “Offering equity shares, offering a voice in the governance body of the co-op, all of these things attract high level and high skill hospitality workers,” says Ruiz. 

Worker-ownership has the opportunity to create a more engaged workforce with less turnover, both because it is easier to reap any personal benefits of success as a worker-owner, and because the model itself creates stability, and draws people who want to be engaged in building a business.  “When you really create an opportunity for every worker in the business to have a clear, defined pathway to ownership and to leadership, regardless of what their job is, regardless of what position they occupy in the restaurant, you start to level the playing field and you start to take away some of that competitiveness,” says Khatib.

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Democratic decision making can also lead to a stronger business. Many of us have likely had the experience of knowing our jobs well enough to know what would create success and what wouldn’t, and offering that knowledge to a boss, only to watch the company we work for ignore our expertise and instead make some seriously baffling business decisions (what, just us?). Not only does that model generally result in a poorly-run business, it makes it easier for workers to mentally check out. Who cares how the business is doing if no one is going to take your observations seriously, and if you’re not even going to make more money if there are profits? 

Instead, the worker-owned model encourages collective decision making, which makes it easier to share different points of view and for the whole team to see the business from different angles. “I’m seeing things one way, and then [the other worker-owners] will completely shift how I'm seeing something,” says Gaby Gignoux-Wolfsohn, a worker-owner at Sea & Soil. “That’s a relief, not to feel stuck in your zone.”

…And which ones it doesn’t

The idea of remaking an established business model is certainly intimidating, and some workers may feel it’s not worth the trouble. Because there are also new challenges to consider. 

When conversion was first happening at Donna, Ruiz says not all her former co-workers were interested in becoming worker-owners. Some needed to learn what becoming worker-owners meant. “Some thought I'm going to be a worker-owner, so I get to make all the decisions,” she says, instead of seeing it as a way for everyone to work together. It is also all too easy for workers to recreate the combative dynamics of upper management and employees with worker-owners and workers who had not yet become, or were not interested in becoming, owners. For most people used to an us-versus-them workplace environment, it’s hard to understand what collective management means. 

At Sea & Soil, all workers can achieve worker-ownership after a certain number of shifts (full-time workers reach eligibility faster than part-time workers), and the goal is for everyone to take that opportunity. “The whole point is that throughout the year you're having these conversations, you're having reviews, you're letting people know what you are looking for in a worker-owner,” says Gignoux-Wolfsohn. And if finances make hiring impossible, you need to be clear about that, too.

“It’s about giving people the means of their own production, in that Karl Marx sense, but it's also very American, right? Start your own business, do it for yourself, be your own boss.”

But the biggest challenge is that the business world is just not built for cooperatives. Typically, restaurants require thousands of dollars of up front capital that average workers don’t have access to, a barrier all too familiar to many in Black and Latinx communities. “Traditional lenders, basically the whole financial system, is just not designed to give working-class people the opportunity to own these kinds of assets,” says Trumbull. Banks tend to look for people who have good credit and personal assets, who can take on a loan on behalf of the whole business. Not a group of people who all want to own a business equally.

When these businesses do secure financing, banks, and governmental entities often do not understand the structure. Ruiz mentions the difficulties of adding every Donna owner to a New York liquor license, and how it couldn’t name multiple people to the business’s checking account or as the guarantor on the lease. Often, one person has to assume that risk, even if there are multiple owners. 

Help is all around you

Running a restaurant is challenging, and shifting toward a worker-owned model won’t save a restaurant from mismanagement, environmental factors, consumer purchasing patterns, changing consumer-purchasing patterns, says Red Emma’s Khatib. Cooperative ownership won’t automatically make customers come in the door.

“You want the workers to be compensated well, the food to be as accessible as possible, and the ingredients to be sourced as ethically as possible,” Wolf says. “Squaring all of those things is really difficult, and being worker-owned doesn't solve that problem. It just allows you to face it collectively.”

Despite many structures not being built for worker-ownership, there are organizations that exist to help facilitate the business model. The Working World, Seed Commons, Project Equity and the Shared Capital Cooperative lend to and provide advisory services to co-ops, connecting workers with attorneys, accountants, and other experts to aid in the transition. States like New York, California, and Washington have business development initiatives for worker co-ops, while other states have proposed legislation. And organizations like the U.S. Federation of Worker Coops, Aorta, Start.coop and A Bookkeeping Cooperative provide business resources, trainings, and community for anyone interested in worker-ownership.  

Huckman sees the promise of worker-ownership as bigger than any one restaurant. He notes how businesses have turned away from fostering loyalty with benefits like pensions, and that younger generations have few paths available for building any sort of savings or capital. Worker-ownership provides entrepreneurial incentive that can drive the economy by offering everyone equity in what they build. “It’s about giving people the means of their own production, in that Karl Marx sense, but it's also very American, right?” he says. “Start your own business, do it for yourself, be your own boss.”

It's one of the best shows for Gen‑Z 20‑something degenerates who are just trying to figure it all out, one messy decision at a time.

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APOD: 2026 September 2 – Solar Eclipses and Culture Pretend you have never heard of a solar eclipse. The Sun’s behavior has been predictable your whole life. One day, you witness the sky transform as it does in today’s spliced image spanning two hours of the August 12, 2026 solar eclipse. The Sun disappears, leaving behind a bright, empty ring. What would you think had happened? Humans have interpreted eclipses in countless ways throughout history, embedding beliefs about connection, rebirth, or danger into culture. “Eclipse” comes from the Greek word “ékleipsis” meaning “abandonment”. In ancient Greece, the solar eclipse marked the anger of the gods and the Sun abandoning humanity. To the Diné people, this celestial alignment is a time of renewal. Out of respect and to avoid the danger of sunlight, the Diné stay inside until the Sun and Moon separate. The Batammariba people of Benin and Togo believe that the Sun and Moon fight during an eclipse, so the community encourages peace among themselves. Eclipses are an example of the longstanding connection between astronomy and society.

Excerpted with permission from The Curious Lives of Vegetables: An Artful Exploration of the Wonderful World of Edible Plants, Their History, and Their Crucial Role in Our Future written by Ali Francis, illustrated by Adriana Picker, published by ‎Hardie Grant North America, September 2026, RRP $30.00 Hardcover.

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In Chef Kevin Mitchell’s classroom at the Culinary Institute of Charleston, the peanuts are small, pink, and maddeningly difficult to shell. He passes them around to students, most of whom quickly complain: the skins are too tight, the pace too tedious. “But that’s the beauty of it for me,” Mitchell says. “You have more respect for that ingredient because of the time it took you just to process it. It brings you closer to its stories.” And for a tiny, pea-sized bloop, the Carolina African Runner Peanut has a big tale to tell.

They may hang out with cashews and pistachios at the grocery store, but technically, peanuts are legumes. An ancient hybrid of two wild ancestors, they’re thought to have originated in what’s now southern Bolivia and northern Argentina, where Andean civilizations domesticated the plants over thousands of years. The peanut’s global spread is due in part to its hardiness: its epithet, hypogaea, means “under the earth,” referencing its smart reproductive strategy. After flowering, the plant pushes fertilized ovules underground, protecting the seeds from harsh conditions, where they develop into pods.

Spanish and Portuguese colonizers came across peanuts in the New World and promptly ferried them to Europe, Africa, and Asia. By the 1500s, they’d arrived on West African shores, where the plants loved the sandy soil and were quickly integrated into local cuisines. In countries like Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mali, cooks worked the legumes—often called groundnuts—into dishes like maafe, a rich, comforting stew simmered with creamy peanut paste, tender meat, tomatoes, onions, and veggies; they’re also featured in kuli-kuli, a crunchy, deep-fried snack made from roasted peanuts and spices.

Carolina African Runner Peanuts first took root in what’s now the United States in the 1600s, likely carried across the Atlantic by enslaved West Africans. Stashed on ships, the seeds were then planted in small garden plots behind slave quarters and often grown in secret. “People knew they were about to go somewhere and they wanted to be able to have something that they were familiar with when they got there,” says Mitchell.

From those covert gardens, this supremely delicious little peanut quickly won fans. Charleston, South Carolina, became an early cultivation hub, while Wilmington, North Carolina, grew into the major processing center. The crop was exported from there to France, where its oil became castile soap. Meanwhile, in the US, Black cooks drew from homegrown traditions—mashing, grinding, boiling, roasting, and candying them—to turn the Carolina African Runner Peanut into an icon of the American South.

By the 18th and early 19th centuries, the peanut was thoroughly embedded in Charleston’s bustling street food scene. Free Black women, called maumas, perched on three-legged stools from dawn to dusk selling groundnut cakes: candies made from parched peanuts, molasses, butter, egg whites, and lemon peel. The treats gave them a short-lived pathway toward economic autonomy; by the early 1900s, city sanitation campaigns and wartime policies forced the maumas off the streets.

Though the first known commercial peanut crop was grown in 1842 in Virginia, the legumes remained more of a novelty than a staple until the early 20th century. It was the work of Black innovators—like George Washington Carver, who developed hundreds of applications for the peanut while at the Tuskegee Institute, and Benjamin Hicks, a farmer and inventor who patented a gas-powered harvesting machine in the 1890s—that helped usher in a national peanut boom.

But industrialization rarely favors nuance. The larger Virginia peanut, which had descended from Bolivian stock and was used to make the all-American roasted ballpark snack, was easier to harvest and sell. Nudged to the side, historians believe that the last fields of Carolina African peanuts probably withered out in the 1920s. And by the end of the 1950s, the country’s original peanut was thought to be extinct. It wasn’t until food historian David Shields spotted an archival photo in the Sloane Collection at the British Library, a vast archive of early botanical knowledge, that the hunt for this long-lost legume began.

A handful of unlabeled seeds—stowed during the 1930s at North Carolina State University under the generic name “Carolina #4”—looked like a match for the runner peanut. In 2013, horticulturist Brian Ward of Clemson University planted 20 of them. According to National Public Radio, 12 sprouted: small, rust-colored, and oil-rich, just as described in historical records. Through successive plantings, that initial handful yielded 1,200 seeds, then 60,000 the following year, then a million by 2015. In 2016, the first crop of 15 million peanuts was harvested.

Mitchell is one of the lucky few who’s been able to try these elusive flavor bombs. The Carolina African Runner might be half the size of its modern cousin, but it’s wildly more flavorful. Nutty, vegetal, dense with oil, it tastes like someone took the supermarket peanut dial and cranked it up to 11. “It’s going to sound crazy, but I guess it’s more peanutty; it’s a lot more intense,” he says.

But Mitchell knows that reviving a crop is not the same as restoring its cultural and economic context. The Carolina African Runner is hard to grow, lower-yielding, too small to be harvested and processed by conventional equipment, and a real pest to shell. Basically, no one has figured out how to make the peanut profitable enough to compete with its commercial cousin. For now, efforts to bring it back seem to have stalled.

Mitchell describes feeling caught between two worlds. As a trained chef, he wants to see the Carolina African Runner featured on restaurant menus, championed by cooks who will tell its story with care and respect. But as a Black educator, he recognizes a troubling irony: if this peanut remains nothing more than a small-batch luxury item, many people from his own community will be priced out of accessing the very ingredient their ancestors brought to this country.

“It’s my opportunity, my responsibility, to inform the people around me about the story,” he tells me. “And I tell my students all the time, ‘For you to become a better chef, you have to be connected to the food that you’re cooking.’”

In any group of decent size, some people will be more involved than others. For years I learned and taught about communities of practice (CoPs) in public health. The principles I learned have applied to pretty much every group I've worked with since. Social theorist Étienne Wenger studied how people participate in a community of practice. These levels of participation are fluid and move from the outside in:

• Transactional members interact with the community of practice only on occasion. They may dip into a meeting or gathering for help with a problem or to access a community-built resource. Or they may have a specific expertise that they sometimes offer the group.
• Peripheral participants attend gatherings more often than transactional members. They will observe what happens in the group but rarely take part in the proceedings. Their frequent presence gives them familiarity with the group's activities, vocabulary, and norms.
• Active members make up about 15-20% of the group. They contribute during meetings and events. They take part in workgroups or planning meetings. They're reliable support but rarely start new activities.
• The core is where the leaders in the group operate. This is about 10-15% of the total membership. These folks set the group's agenda, organize events, and promote discussion. New ideas or direction often come from influential core members. This group is most responsible for the passion and energy that keeps the group running.
• Much further away are the resistors or skeptics. These are people who aren't supportive of the group's activities or priorities. They often fade away unless their critiques find acceptance within the CoP.

movement is good

These days I'm involved with a local mutual aid group called Long Haul Kitchen. Every Sunday since 2020, our group has distributed 120 free meals to folks in Seattle's SODO and Georgetown neighborhoods. Every Thursday we fill people's propane tanks at no cost. The community shares thousands of dollars a month to pay for the services and supplies we distribute. But mutual aid runs on labor: that money is useless without people to put it to use.

People will engage and disengage from a community of practice for many reasons. Movement between levels of participation is how groups sustain themselves long-term. When we make it easy to move from one level to another, we give folks a chance to step up. Even our core group members have changed over time. Some people move or move on; their lives may change in ways that mean they come around less often. Movement allows a core member to become less involved rather than leave completely. It also allows a transactional or peripheral member to become more active. I've been around long enough that I consider myself to be in the core group. Like in a strong community of practice, we need people to feel free to get more or less involved over time. How do we do that?

creating movement

Find ways for people to stick around. Not everyone wants to move between levels. Some folks like doing the same thing over and over. We can encourage that too. Others are waiting for an opportunity to feel more useful. Either way, we work to create a safe environment where people can feel the direct results of their actions.

Create pathways towards the core. One member might be peripheral during the school year but more active during breaks. I started out in a regular kitchen support role. I helped out a few times before I thought about taking on the lead role. It's a big job—planning the meal, buying ingredients, and getting it all done in 3 hours. That became part of the challenge for me: "can I pull it off?" Talking with other leads I realized that many of them felt stress about the parts of the role that excited me. We have been strategizing ways to lower those barriers to move more folks to the active and core levels.

We've popularized different ways to lead in the kitchen. We've split the time commitment: one person will do the shopping while the other leads. We expanded our list of pre-tested recipes for folks who worried about not making enough food. We've tested a system with two leads on a shift for a person who feels nervous about the responsibility. I look for folks who might be good at a lead role and ask if they've considered it. I learn about the hesitations they may have about stepping up. These solutions haven't led to a rapid or immediate growth of active participators. But I hope that they show a willingness to change our practices if it would better support our community.

Find ways to (temporarily) step away. I'm not describing people that should leave for the health of the group. Instead, I'm concerned with core members who may burn out if they can't disengage. Our mutual aid group is decentralized; nobody must serve a term or season. We come back because we choose to. And there's no pomp and circumstance directed at people who decide to take a less active role. We create a sense of safety by showing core members that the work will continue if they need to take a break. People are essential but not irreplaceable. But roles like the folks who manage our finances and storage space are still hard to replace. Our propane distribution team is there nearly every week. There's still work we can do to make sure those folks can take a break, too.

people at every level

How do we commit to the people, communities, and the groups we're in relation with? Even folks like me, who gravitate towards leadership, aren't leaders in every situation. Sometimes it's nice to be along for the ride without having to take the wheel. I also appreciate spaces that let folks give more when they feel safe and ready to do so.

Long Haul is just one mutual aid network in Seattle. We field about a dozen community members to help out every single week. Even when participation is low, we'll make and distribute a simple meal for folks in our community. I've spoken to folks who lurked on our signal group chat for months before they signed up for their first shift. Our groups may be a community of practice, a mutual aid network, or some other configuration. Whether a member is active or peripheral, transactional or core, we're all part of that community. How we engage is as much up to us as it is to the spaces we inhabit.

If you would like to support The Long Haul Kitchen, you can visit our patreon or send money our way. If you're in the Seattle area and would like to help out, please email me!

With over 100,000 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) sprouting out of the ground over the past few years, you might be tempted to ask: “with what money?”

Drug money, as it turns out, though it’s not exactly what you might think. A bombshell investigation by Mother Jones found that police departments across the US are using settlement money from the opioid crisis meant for struggling communities to instead fund Flock surveillance cameras.

All together, Mother Jones identified 19 agencies across ten different states which spent nearly $1 million of opioids settlement funds on ALPRs from companies like Flock and Axon (though the publication notes that’s almost certainly an undercount.)

The funding pipeline looks like this: after massive pharmaceutical firms agreed to pay out a combined $50 billion for their role in the opioid crisis, state agencies responsible for allocating those funds decided that police departments would make efficient use of the dough. Police agencies — which already account for one of the largest shares of municipal expenditures in the US overall — made a heartwarming pitch: send us that opioid money, and we’ll use it to buy new police toys and stamp out drug dealers.

As police departments across the US have made abundantly clear, ALPR systems are much better for stalking and harassing innocent civilians than they are for actually fighting crime. And when it comes to combatting the opioid crisis, specifically, there are perhaps few police toys less suited to the task.

“While $50 billion may seem like a lot of funds, once it’s divided up over 18 years and thousands of localities, a lot of places really aren’t getting that much, particularly given the scope of the crisis,” Robyn Oster, director of policy at the Partnership to End Addiction told Mother Jones. “Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

Overall, it’s a slap in the face to anybody victimized by the man-made public health emergency that was — and still is — the opioid crisis. Rather than funding state-run rehab clinics or harm reduction campaigns, that money is being flushed away into AI surveillance cameras so that police can catch hardened criminals legally buying weed, or picking up petty cash from the ground.

“It’s just really not the way to make the most impact in addressing addiction,” Oster said.

More on Flock: Flock’s Network Is Losing Value to Cops as More and More of Its Cameras Go Offline

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