No public record of Flock cameras being approved in Greenport
The short version: NEWS10's WTEN found Greenport has a signed Flock Safety contract but no public record showing the cameras were ever actually approved.
Our Take
This is the pattern that keeps showing up town after town: a police chief or administrator signs on the dotted line with Flock Safety, cameras go up on utility poles, and only later does anyone ask whether elected officials or the public ever actually voted on it. WTEN/NEWS10's digging in Greenport is a good example of basic accountability journalism — they didn't just take the department's word for it, they went looking for the paper trail and came up empty on the approval side while confirming the contract itself exists.
That gap matters. A signed vendor agreement is not the same thing as democratic sign-off. When ALPR networks get installed through staff-level decisions rather than open council votes, residents lose the chance to weigh in on data retention, sharing with other agencies, or whether they want this kind of tracking infrastructure in their town at all. It also makes it harder to hold anyone accountable when the system is misused, since nobody can point to a public record of who approved what.
Credit to WTEN for pressing on this. If you want to see whether cameras like these are already running near you, check our map, and if your town hasn't had a public vote on Flock either, our take-action page has steps for pushing that conversation into the open.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WTEN, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.