Marinette cancels its Flock camera contract — full special meeting, 9-0 vote
The short version: Marinette's Common Council voted 9-0 to kill its Flock Safety contract, proof that a unanimous local government can still say no to permanent surveillance.
Our Take
Credit to Northwoods Progressive for sitting through the full, unedited special meeting so the rest of us don't have to — and for capturing something genuinely rare: a city council reversing course on ALPR surveillance by a 9-0 vote. Most Flock fights end with a split council shrugging and renewing the contract because it's easier than explaining to constituents why they're killing a 'public safety tool.' Marinette didn't take the easy road.
Unanimous votes like this don't happen by accident. They happen because residents showed up, asked hard questions about who can query the data, how long it's retained, and whether a private company should have a standing camera network cataloging every car in a small Wisconsin city. Flock's pitch is always the same — solve crime, find the bad guy — but councils are slowly catching on that the tradeoff is a permanent log of everyone's movements, searchable by any agency with access, with almost no independent oversight of misuse.
Marinette joins a small but growing list of towns that looked at the fine print and backed out. If your city has these cameras, or is being pitched on them, check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and use our take-action resources to push your own council toward a vote like this one.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Northwoods Progressive, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.