Verona Voted Out Flock. Two Months Later, Crews Bagged the Cameras

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for digging up the council vote, search logs, and internal emails that turn this into more than a local news blip. Verona, Wisconsin did everything right: elected officials looked at the numbers, found nearly a thousand searches tagged federal in a single month plus over 1,600 more from outfits identifying as ICE — after access was supposedly cut off — and pulled the plug on the contract. That's the accountability process working exactly as it should. The problem is what happened after the vote: nothing, for two months, until city workers had to physically bag the cameras like evidence at a crime scene because Flock's hardware didn't care what the council decided.

This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide. A city council votes no confidence in a surveillance vendor, and the vendor's gear just keeps humming along, feeding a database that federal agencies can apparently tap into whether or not local officials consented. Verona's own logs are the smoking gun here — this wasn't hypothetical mission creep, it was documented ICE access to a small-town ALPR network that residents were told was for local crime, not federal enforcement. If a city of fifteen thousand with three cameras can get pulled into that pipeline, the exposure for larger networks is worse.

The lesson for every other town sitting on a Flock contract: a 'no' vote is step one, not the finish line. Someone has to physically verify the cameras are down and the data pipe is closed, and residents should be asking pointed questions about who audits that. Check our camera map to see what's watching your own streets, and hit take action for tools to push your council toward the same reckoning Verona started.