Reidsville police ends flock contracts

Our Take

Score one for local accountability. As WFMY News 2 reports, Reidsville's decision to end its Flock Safety contract didn't happen in a vacuum — it came right on the heels of Rockingham County commissioners making it harder to greenlight new ALPR deployments. That's the sequence we like to see: elected officials ask harder questions, and a police department's surveillance contract suddenly looks a lot less permanent.

It's a reminder that these camera networks aren't inevitable. Flock's pitch to small departments is often frictionless — sign here, cameras go up, data flows to a private company's servers — and the public rarely gets a real say until someone on a county commission or city council decides to slow the process down and ask what's actually being bought, and at what cost to residents' privacy. Reidsville backing out shows that scrutiny works, even after the ink is already on the page.

Every contract that gets pulled is a data point for organizers elsewhere pushing back on their own city halls. Check our camera map to see what's tracked near you, and if you want to push your own local officials the way Rockingham County's commissioners did, our take-action page has a starting playbook.