Debate over Flock cameras in Perrysburg
The short version: WTOL11 reports Perrysburg has quietly installed 17 Flock cameras, and residents are now asking why nobody got a real say.
Our Take
Seventeen cameras for a city the size of Perrysburg isn't a pilot program, it's a dragnet — and WTOL11's reporting captures something we see over and over: these systems go up fast, often before most residents even know a contract was signed. By the time there's a public "debate," the hardware is already bolted to the poles and the data is already flowing to a vendor's servers and whatever law enforcement partners get access.
What makes Perrysburg worth watching isn't the number itself, it's the pattern. Seventeen cameras means near-total coverage of a small city's in-and-out traffic — every car, every driver, every trip logged and searchable, regardless of whether anyone's suspected of anything. That's the quiet trade city councils keep making: convenience for police in exchange for permanent, retroactive tracking of everyone who drives through town.
Credit to WTOL11 for putting the disagreement on camera instead of letting it get buried in a council memo. If you want to see how Perrysburg's camera count stacks up against your own town, check the map, and if you'd rather not wait for your city to have this same debate after the fact, our take-action page has steps for getting ahead of it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WTOL11, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.