Campbell, Appomattox Counties Cut Ties With Flock Cameras

Our Take

Credit to WDBJ7 for covering a story that doesn't get enough airtime: local governments actually reversing course on Flock Safety. Most of our coverage here tracks the relentless expansion of these camera networks county by county, so when two jurisdictions in Virginia — Campbell and Appomattox — decide to cut ties, it's worth pausing on. Whether this was driven by cost, performance, public pressure, or quiet discomfort with what these systems actually do, the fact that elected officials are willing to unwind a contract at all cuts against the industry's usual narrative that once Flock is in, it's permanent.

That narrative matters because Flock and similar vendors have built a sales pitch around inevitability — every police chief, every county board gets told this is simply what modern policing looks like now. Stories like this one puncture that. They show these are policy choices, not law of nature, and policy choices can be reversed when residents and officials ask hard questions about who's accessing the data, how long it's kept, and whether a dragnet of every passing car actually makes a community safer or just more surveilled.

We don't yet know the full reasoning behind Campbell and Appomattox's decision, and we won't speculate beyond what WDBJ7 reported. But we'd encourage anyone in Virginia, or anywhere else, to check whether their own county is running these cameras on our camera map, and if you want to push your local board toward the same kind of reconsideration, our take-action page has a place to start.