Columbia Heights approves removing Flock cameras
The short version: Columbia Heights voted to rip out its Flock cameras, proof that local pressure can actually reverse a surveillance rollout once it's already installed.
Our Take
Credit to KARE 11 for covering the Columbia Heights vote, because this is the story we need more of: a city council that installed Flock cameras, listened to residents, and then actually pulled them back out. Cameras getting covered up or removed before the vote even happened tells you the political winds had already shifted. That almost never happens with surveillance infrastructure — usually it's a one-way ratchet where "temporary pilot programs" quietly become permanent fixtures nobody remembers approving.
What makes this notable isn't just the outcome, it's the sequence. Somewhere between installation and this vote, enough people in Columbia Heights decided that a network of cameras logging every car that passes, searchable by police departments across the country, wasn't a trade they wanted to make for their small city. That's the fight in a nutshell: these systems get sold as a narrow tool for one specific problem, then quietly become a permanent, searchable record of everyone's movements, shared well beyond the agency that installed them.
If you want to know whether your own town has made this trade, check our map for nearby Flock deployments, and if you'd rather not wait for a removal vote after the fact, our take-action page has the tools to get ahead of it at your next council meeting.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KARE 11, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.