Plastic bags cover license plate reader cameras in Jacksonville

Our Take

Credit to First Coast News for catching this one: the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office apparently decided the best way to tell the public its Flock ALPR cameras are offline was to literally throw plastic bags over them. It's a visual gesture, and we get why JSO wanted to reassure residents after whatever triggered the shutdown. But a bag over a camera is not a deletion of data, not a policy change, and not an audit. It's theater.

Here's the problem with taking "it's bagged, so it's off" at face value: these systems don't disappear when they're covered. The mounting hardware stays up, the vendor contract likely stays active, and nothing stops the bags from quietly coming off the next time there's a political excuse to flip the switch back on. Plastic bags are reversible. Public records requests, retention audits, and binding council votes are not. If Jacksonville wants to actually earn trust, the city needs to publish what data was collected, who had access to it, how long it was retained, and under what terms — if any — the cameras could be reactivated.

This is exactly the pattern we track across the country: departments quietly deploy Flock networks, face pushback, and respond with cosmetic fixes instead of real accountability. Check our camera map to see what's actually running near you, and if Jacksonville's bagged cameras are in your backyard, use our take-action resources to push for permanent removal, not a plastic patch job.