Residents voice opposition to new Flock cameras in Greenville

Our Take

Credit to WNCT-TV 9 On Your Side for capturing something we see over and over: ordinary people showing up to city council, on their own time, to object to a surveillance system most of them never got to vote on. Flock's ALPR network usually gets installed through a quiet vendor contract or a police department budget line, not a public referendum. When residents finally learn cameras are logging every car that passes a given intersection, the reaction in Greenville looks a lot like the reaction we've documented in dozens of other towns — confusion first, then anger that the decision was made without them.

The public comment period is one of the last real checkpoints before these systems go live, which is exactly why it matters when people use it. A handful of speakers questioning cost, data retention, and who gets access to search results can slow a rollout down long enough for real oversight language to get written into a contract — retention limits, audit logs, restrictions on out-of-state data sharing. Once the cameras are up and the council has moved on to the next agenda item, that leverage disappears.

If you're in Greenville or anywhere else wondering whether Flock has already reached your neighborhood, check our camera map before your next council meeting — and if you want to organize the way these residents did, our take-action page has the playbook for public records requests and speaking at local government meetings.