Morgantown City Council member claims commissioners ‘misunderstand’ role in Flock debate

Our Take

WBOY 12 News captured something we see over and over: a jurisdictional shell game over Flock cameras. A city council member says commissioners misread their own role in the debate, commissioners presumably push back, and somewhere in the middle four Monongalia County residents showed up just to say they don't want their plates logged and stored by a private surveillance vendor. That's the pattern — officials argue about procedure while the actual policy question, whether this technology should exist on public roads at all, gets lost.

This matters because "who approved it" and "whose jurisdiction is it" are the wrong questions if nobody's asking whether county residents consented to having their daily movements tracked and warehoused. Flock's pitch to local governments is always the same: crime-fighting tool, minimal oversight needed. But once cameras go up, the data doesn't stay local — it's searchable by other agencies, sometimes across state lines, with little public visibility into who's pulling records and why. Council members squabbling over lanes of authority isn't accountability; it's a distraction from the fact that almost none of these systems got a real public vote before installation.

Credit to WBOY for showing residents actually pushing back in real time — that's the part that should get amplified, not the inter-governmental bickering. If you want to see whether Flock or similar ALPR systems are already running in your area, check our camera map, and if Monongalia County's fight sounds familiar, our take-action page has steps for turning up at your own county commission meeting before the cameras go up, not after.