Stoughton City Council unanimously votes to terminate agreement with Flock Safety

Our Take

Three months. That's how long it took Stoughton's city council to look at Flock Safety's camera network and decide it wasn't worth keeping, according to WMTV's reporting. A unanimous vote to terminate isn't a split decision or a budget quibble — it's a council admitting the whole arrangement failed to pass muster once the public and elected officials actually scrutinized it.

This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: a police department or vendor sells a city on 'just a tool for solving crimes,' cameras go up with minimal public debate, and then residents start asking who's watching the watchers, how long the data sits in Flock's servers, and whether anyone bothered to check if it violates state privacy law or local ordinances before the ink dried. Once those questions get asked out loud, in front of a council that has to answer to voters, the political ground shifts fast.

Stoughton deserves credit for actually reversing course instead of just promising 'more oversight' down the road — that's rarer than it should be. If you want to see whether a similar camera network has quietly gone up near you, check our camera map, and if your own city council hasn't had this conversation yet, our take-action page has tools to help you force it.