Grand Chute cancels Flock camera contract but partners with another license plate reader
The short version: Grand Chute dropped Flock Safety but just swapped in another license plate reader vendor, proving the surveillance infrastructure itself is the real issue.
Our Take
Credit to WLUK-TV FOX 11 for catching what a lot of 'win' headlines miss: Grand Chute didn't actually reject automated license plate readers, it just fired one contractor and hired another. The cameras stay up, the plate scans keep flowing into a database, and the town council gets to say they 'listened to concerns' without giving up a single data point of surveillance capability.
This is the shell game towns play when public pressure builds against Flock specifically. The brand on the camera housing changes, but the underlying function doesn't: every plate that passes gets logged, timestamped, and stored, often shared across networks of agencies with little public oversight. Swapping vendors resets the news cycle without resetting the privacy risk. If anything, it shows local officials understand the optics problem but not the substance of why people are objecting.
Residents in Grand Chute and anywhere else watching this play out should treat 'we switched providers' as a non-answer. The real questions are who can access this data, how long it's retained, and whether there's any independent audit of misuse. Check our camera map to see what's actually deployed near you, and if your town is doing the same vendor-swap dance, head to take action for ways to push back on the infrastructure itself, not just the logo on it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WLUK-TV FOX 11, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.