Flock ‘Objects to Our Removing Their Equipment’: Emails Reveal Why a Town Put Bags Over Its Cameras

Our Take

Credit to 404 Media for digging up the email trail on this one. A town votes not to renew its Flock Safety contract — a decision that should be the end of the story — and instead gets a company pushing back on how, or whether, its cameras get pulled down. The optics alone are bad: a surveillance vendor "objecting" to a community removing gear it no longer wants watching its streets. Bagging cameras instead of yanking them is the kind of workaround you'd expect when a vendor treats public rights-of-way like leased territory rather than something a town council can simply say no to.

This is exactly the dynamic we keep flagging: these contracts are written to make disengagement painful, and the company's incentive is to keep every pole active as long as possible, regardless of what elected officials or residents decide. When "no" doesn't cleanly mean the cameras come down, that's not a technicality — it's a governance problem. It also raises the obvious question of how many other towns are stuck in similar limbo, cameras bagged or otherwise still standing, because pulling out isn't as simple as it should be.

If your town is weighing a Flock contract, or trying to get out of one, read the full 404 Media piece and see if there's a camera near you on our map. And if you want to push back before your city ends up in the same bind, our take-action page has the tools to get started.