Manatee Commissioners unanimously vote against installing Flock Cameras at county facilities

Our Take

Credit to 10 Tampa Bay News for covering a story that doesn't get enough airtime: a local government actually saying no to Flock Safety. Manatee County commissioners heard residents raise the obvious concerns — data sharing with outside agencies, the potential for abuse, and the lack of real oversight once these cameras go up — and they voted unanimously to reject installing them at county facilities. That kind of unanimous pushback is rare, and it shows what happens when residents actually show up to meetings and ask hard questions before the contracts get signed.

This matters because the usual pattern is the opposite: a county or city quietly approves a Flock deal, cameras go up fast, and only later do people learn how the data gets used, who can query it, and how long it sits in a database. Manatee got ahead of that cycle instead of cleaning up after it. Every jurisdiction that pumps the brakes and demands answers first makes it a little harder for blanket ALPR surveillance to become the default assumption everywhere else.

If you want to see whether your own county or city has Flock cameras already running, check our camera map, and if you'd rather follow Manatee's lead than wait for it to show up on that map, our take-action page has what you need to start asking your own commissioners questions.