Monongalia County holds media-only informational session on Flock cameras
The short version: West Virginia police briefed reporters, not the public, on expanding Flock camera use in Monongalia County — a telling choice about who gets to ask questions.
Our Take
Credit to WBOY 12 News for even getting in the room. A "media-only informational session" on a county's license plate reader buildout is a strange way to inform the people actually being tracked. If Monongalia County residents want to know how many Flock cameras are going up, who can query them, how long the data sits in a database, and whether neighboring agencies get access, the public should be the ones asking — not a press pool fielding a curated briefing.
This is part of a pattern we track constantly: Flock Safety expansion sold to communities as a quiet administrative upgrade rather than a policy decision deserving a public vote. Automated plate readers log every car that passes, build a searchable travel history on anyone, and routinely get shared across jurisdictional lines with little oversight. West Virginia is now one more state where that infrastructure is going in largely on law enforcement's terms.
Residents in Monongalia County and beyond deserve the same access reporters got — real answers about retention policies, audit logs, and data-sharing agreements, not a press-friendly summary. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and visit our take-action page if you want to push your county commission toward actual public hearings instead of media-only ones.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WBOY 12 News, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.