Huntington City Council hears public opinions on Flock cameras

Our Take

WOWK 13 News captured something that doesn't happen often enough: people showing up in person to tell their city council they don't want AI-powered license plate cameras watching their every move before a single unit gets bolted to a pole. That's the leverage point. Once Flock cameras are installed, they tend to stay installed, quietly hoovering up plate scans, timestamps, and location data on residents who never consented to being tracked just for driving through town.

Huntington is still at the proposal stage, which is exactly why this pushback matters. Council members weighing a vendor contract need to hear that constituents understand what they're actually buying: a private company's camera network feeding a searchable database that other agencies, and sometimes federal ones, can query without a warrant. "Public safety" pitches rarely mention retention windows, audit failures, or how easily this data gets shared far beyond the city limits that funded it.

If you're in West Virginia or anywhere else watching a Flock proposal move through your local government, don't wait for installation day. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed nearby, and use our take-action resources to help you show up to your own council meeting the way Huntington residents just did.