Protesters gather outside Huntington City Council over Flock Safety

Our Take

Credit to The Herald-Dispatch for getting cameras on the ground as Huntington residents gathered outside City Hall to voice their opposition to Flock Safety. Local TV news rarely covers ALPR pushback with this kind of straightforward, on-the-street framing, and it matters that a mid-sized city's council chamber is feeling heat from its own constituents rather than just hearing a sales pitch from a vendor.

This is the pattern we track again and again: a city quietly signs a Flock contract, nobody outside the police department and council knows the cameras are going up until they're already bolted to poles, and then residents find out after the fact that their daily movements are being logged into a searchable database shared across jurisdictions. Huntington's protesters are doing the work that should happen before a contract is signed — asking who gets access to the data, how long it's retained, and whether a private company's network of plate-reading cameras should be deciding who counts as suspicious in their town.

If you want to see whether Flock or similar ALPR systems have already landed near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a protest to be your first warning, our take-action page has concrete steps for raising this with your own council before the cameras go up, not after.