'A company that lies': Council member votes against Flock rules

Our Take

When a sitting council member goes on the record calling a surveillance vendor "a company that lies," that's not a throwaway line — it's a signal that trust in Flock Safety's pitch is cracking even among local officials who initially bought in. Credit to WSAZ NewsChannel 3 for getting that quote on camera. Huntington's move to pass a "guardrail" ordinance suggests the council itself doesn't fully trust the company to self-regulate its own network of automated license plate readers, which says a lot given how these contracts are usually sold as turnkey, no-brainer public safety tools.

Guardrail ordinances are a step in the right direction, but they're only as good as their enforcement, and they don't undo the core problem: once a city's plates are being logged, timestamped, and stored, that data has a way of outliving whatever policy language got it approved. Retention periods creep, sharing agreements expand, and audits happen only when someone bothers to ask. A council member willing to vote no and say the quiet part out loud is exactly the kind of scrutiny this technology needs more of, not less.

If you're in a city debating whether to bring Flock in — or trying to figure out if it already has — check our camera map to see what's nearby, and use our take-action resources to push your own council toward real guardrails before the cameras go up, not after.