Flock cameras coming down in City of Lebanon

Our Take

Credit to FOX19 NOW in Cincinnati for digging into this one: a city government tried to do its due diligence on a surveillance vendor and got the silent treatment. Fifty-four written questions is not a casual ask — that's a council or staff genuinely trying to understand what they were signing up for before rolling out a network of always-on license plate cameras. When a company can't or won't answer basic accountability questions from the very municipality paying for its product, that tells you everything about how much transparency you can expect once the cameras are actually running.

This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: Flock Safety leans hard on the pitch to cops and city councils, but gets cagey the moment someone asks about data retention, audit logs, who can query the system, or how footage gets shared across jurisdictions. Lebanon deserves credit for actually pumping the brakes instead of rubber-stamping the contract, which is more scrutiny than most communities manage before these things go live.

If you want to see whether ALPR cameras — Flock or otherwise — are already watching your street, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your own city ask these kinds of hard questions before installation instead of after, our take-action page has tools to help you push back.