Surveillance in the Lowcountry? The future of Flock cameras in South Carolina

Our Take

Credit where it's due: ABC News 4 did the unglamorous work that too few local newsrooms bother with anymore — filing two dozen-plus FOIA requests and actually reading the invoices. What they found is a familiar pattern to anyone who's been tracking this industry: quiet, incremental spending that adds up to a serious surveillance buildout before most residents even know it's happening. $1.3 million and counting, spread across departments, with renewal fees baked in for years to come. That's not a pilot program. That's infrastructure.

South Carolina is now facing the same question dozens of other states have wrestled with — whether to let this expand unregulated or put guardrails on it before the network matures into something unaccountable. Pending legislation matters here, but so does the fact that most of this spending happened with minimal public input. Departments don't need a town hall to sign a Flock contract, and by the time a community notices the cameras, the data-sharing agreements are already in place with agencies well outside the county line.

If you're in the Lowcountry or anywhere else in South Carolina, don't wait for your local paper to file the FOIA request for you. Check our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked expansion, our take-action guide has concrete steps for engaging your city council before the next renewal check gets cut.