Council Votes 3 Times to De-Flock Lynchburg
The short version: Watchful Eye's footage shows Lynchburg City Council voting three separate times to ditch Flock's ALPR system—and Flock is still standing, proving how sticky these contracts really are.
Our Take
Credit to Watchful Eye for sitting through what sounds like a genuinely maddening council meeting. Three votes to remove Flock Safety cameras from Lynchburg and the system is apparently still humming along. That's not a fluke — it's a feature of how these contracts get written and how entrenched the vendor relationships become once a police department starts relying on the data feed.
This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: elected officials hear from constituents, agree the surveillance overreach is a problem, vote to act, and then discover the off-ramp is a lot narrower than the on-ramp ever was. Procedural votes, contract fine print, and department pushback can turn a clear council majority into months of limbo. Lynchburg residents pushing for a real de-Flock outcome should keep the pressure on and not assume a vote is the finish line.
If you want to see whether Flock or similar ALPR systems are running near you, check our camera map, and if your city is having its own tug-of-war with a vendor that won't let go, our take-action page has tools to help you push it over the line.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Watchful Eye, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.