City of Fitchburg votes to discontinue Flock services
The short version: Fitchburg's city council voted unanimously to drop Flock Safety, proving that ALPR contracts can be unwound once officials actually weigh the privacy costs.
Our Take
Credit to WMTV for catching a story that deserves more attention than it gets: a city council looking at Flock Safety's track record and deciding, unanimously, that it's not worth keeping. That word "unanimously" matters. This wasn't a partisan split or a single holdout — it was a full board agreeing that the tradeoffs weren't justified. That kind of consensus usually means the data on cost, actual crime-solving impact, or community pushback was hard to ignore.
Every one of these cancellations chips away at the industry's favorite talking point: that once a city signs up, Flock becomes permanent infrastructure nobody questions again. Fitchburg shows that's not true. Contracts expire, councils change their minds, and officials who actually read the fine print on data sharing and retention sometimes conclude the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That's the whole game — making these systems contestable instead of invisible.
If you want to see whether your own city or county has signed on to this network, check our camera map. And if Fitchburg's vote has you wondering how to push a similar conversation in your own town, our take-action page has the starting points.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WMTV | News, Weather & Sports, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.