Huntington council weighs new rules for Flock camera data amid surveillance concerns

Our Take

Credit to WCHS-TV for getting cameras inside a city council meeting where ordinary residents, not lobbyists, did the talking. Huntington resident Trish Lilly cut through the PR fog with one line that should be printed on every Flock sales brochure: she doesn't believe the company's seven-day retention promise for a second. That skepticism is earned — retention policies are set by contract language and local policy, not hardware, and both can change quietly whenever a council or vendor decides.

What's notable here isn't just the opposition, it's the process. A "first reading" of an ordinance to add guardrails means the system is already live, already collecting plate scans on daily commutes, and the public is being asked to retrofit rules after the fact. That's the pattern in city after city: deploy first, debate accountability later, and hope nobody asks who else can query the database besides the local PD.

Huntington joins a growing list of towns where residents are refusing to treat automated license plate readers as background noise. If you want to see whether Flock or similar ALPR systems are already watching your own streets, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a first reading to speak up, our take-action page has steps for pushing your own council toward real guardrails — or an outright no.