Greenwood City Council set to hear public comment on city’s use of Flock cameras
The short version: Greenwood residents get a rare chance to publicly question their city council on Flock ALPR use, a small but important local check on unchecked surveillance expansion.
Our Take
Credit to 5NEWS for flagging this one: a city council agenda item inviting public comment on Flock Safety license plate readers is exactly the kind of local accountability moment that too often gets skipped. Most communities wake up to find these cameras already bolted to poles, with no vote, no debate, and no chance for residents to weigh in before their movements start getting logged and stored in a database.
Greenwood doing this in the open — even belatedly — matters. Flock's pitch to city councils is always the same: stolen cars, missing persons, violent crime. What rarely gets mentioned in that pitch is data retention policies, who else can query the system, or how easily these networks get linked into statewide and even nationwide surveillance webs. Public comment periods are one of the few moments where residents can force those questions into the record before contracts get renewed on autopilot.
If you're in Greenwood or anywhere else with Flock cameras nearby, check our camera map to see what's already tracking your area, and visit our take-action page for tools to push your own council toward the kind of transparency this meeting is supposed to deliver.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of 5NEWS, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.