AI camera plan advances in Huntington as two ordinances propose guardrails and penalties
The short version: Huntington's council is racing to pass Flock Safety guardrail ordinances after the vote already went through — a familiar pattern of surveillance first, oversight as an afterthought.
Our Take
Credit to WCHS-TV for covering this the right way: showing that even elected officials are scrambling after the fact to write "guardrails" for a surveillance system the council already approved. Councilmember Tia Rumbaugh's instinct is right — "this isn't a joke" — but the sequence here is backwards. Cities keep signing Flock contracts first and figuring out data retention, access limits, and audit trails later, if at all. That's not governance, that's damage control.
Two competing ordinances, submitted without even comparing notes, tells you how rushed and reactive this process is. Real oversight means public hearings on the policy before cameras go up, hard caps on how long plate data is stored, strict limits on which agencies can query it, and automatic audits — not a scramble to retrofit rules onto a system that's already operational and already capturing every plate that rolls through Huntington.
This is the same playbook we've tracked in city after city: approve first, debate guardrails later, hope nobody notices the data-sharing agreements buried in the fine print. If you want to see whether Flock has already landed near you, check our camera map, and if Huntington's fight sounds like your town's next move, our take-action resources can help you get ahead of it instead of chasing it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WCHS-TV, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.