Palm Bay Council Defunds Flock Surveillance (4-1 Vote) | Sept 3, 2026 Recap
The short version: Palm Bay's city council voted 4-1 to pull funding for Flock ALPR cameras, a rare win for residents pushing back on mass surveillance.
Our Take
Credit to YouTuber Thomas Gaume for getting this on tape: a 4-1 council vote in Palm Bay to defund Flock Safety's automated license plate readers. Most of these fights end with cameras quietly renewed year after year. A clean majority telling a surveillance vendor "no more money" is the exception, not the rule, and it's worth paying attention to how it happened.
What makes this notable isn't just the vote itself but the fact that it happened at all. Flock contracts usually get rubber-stamped on consent agendas with little public debate. When a council actually puts defunding on the table and follows through, it means someone in that community did the work of showing up, asking questions, and making the privacy and cost tradeoffs impossible to ignore. That's the playbook other towns should be studying.
Palm Bay residents can check whether other ALPR cameras are still running nearby on our camera map, and anyone who wants to push their own council toward a similar vote should start with our take-action guide.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Thomas Gaume, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.