Oconee County advances ordinance restricting flock cameras

Our Take

Credit to FOX Carolina's Ashley Listrom for covering a story that doesn't get enough local airtime: county governments actually writing rules around ALPR dragnets instead of just rubber-stamping vendor contracts. Oconee County advancing an ordinance to restrict how Flock cameras are deployed and used is the kind of friction this technology desperately needs. Most jurisdictions sign the lease, slap up the poles, and never revisit the terms.

What matters here isn't just that officials are talking about "restricting" cameras, it's the precedent. Flock's pitch to small counties is always the same: low cost, high convenience, minimal oversight. When a county board starts asking who can access the data, how long it's retained, and whether neighboring agencies get a backdoor into the feed, that's democracy actually doing its job instead of deferring to a surveillance vendor's sales deck. Every ordinance like this is a template other counties can borrow.

We'll be watching to see if Oconee's final language has teeth or just reads well in a press release. In the meantime, check our camera map to see what's already been installed near you, and visit our take-action page if you want to push your own county toward real accountability instead of quiet expansion.