Four Towns Cut Flock Loose in Five Days, One Found Cameras Live Again
The short version: Five days, four towns, one gut-check: even after officials vote to dump Flock, the cameras don't always go dark on their own.
Our Take
Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for tracking what happens after the vote — because that's where this story usually gets dropped. Four communities moving to end Flock Safety contracts in less than a week isn't a coincidence, it's a trend line. Elected officials are finally catching up to what residents have been saying for a while: a private company running a license-plate dragnet on every street corner isn't 'just a tool for police,' it's a standing surveillance network with almost no local control once it's installed.
The detail that should stick with you is the town that canceled its contract and then found the cameras still live. That's not a conspiracy, it's just how these systems are built — vendor-managed hardware, vendor-managed data, and a termination letter that doesn't flip a physical switch. If a city council can vote to end a program and the cameras keep watching anyway, that tells you who actually holds the keys to the surveillance infrastructure in your town, and it isn't the people you elected.
This is exactly why we keep pushing people to check what's actually deployed near them instead of trusting a press release in either direction — cancellation announcements included. Look up your area on the map, and if you want to push your own city council to do more than vote and hope, our take-action page has the steps for making a cancellation actually stick.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net), published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.