Board of County Commissioners 2 p.m. Regular Meeting & 6 p.m. Public Hearing 8-25-26
The short version: Pinellas County's Board of Commissioners livestream is a reminder that ALPR contracts and surveillance budgets get decided in rooms like this, not in press releases.
Our Take
Credit to Pinellas County Meetings for keeping the public record open with full livestreams of the Board of County Commissioners' regular session and public hearing. We haven't seen a detailed agenda breakdown, so we're not going to guess what was said about license plate readers or Flock Safety contracts specifically — but meetings exactly like this are where the real decisions on surveillance spending, camera placement, and data-sharing agreements get made, usually with far less scrutiny than they deserve.
This is the pattern nationwide: a line item buried in a consent agenda, a five-minute public comment period, and suddenly a county has signed on to a network of always-on license plate cameras feeding data to police departments and, in some cases, federal agencies. Florida counties have been especially aggressive Flock adopters, which makes it worth actually watching these hearings rather than skimming a headline later.
If you're in Pinellas County or anywhere else in Florida, check our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you, and if you want to push back before the next contract renewal sails through on a commission agenda, our take-action page has the tools to make your voice part of the record too.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Pinellas County Meetings, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.