Two cities in Minnesota have now demonstrated what happens when a Flock Safety contract is cancelled and the hardware stays up: someone goes outside with a pair of wire cutters.
Plymouth's city council voted to terminate its Flock contract in September. For more than a month the company did not respond to the city's request, The Verge reports, and the cameras stayed mounted and powered. Police Chief Eric Fadden eventually stopped waiting. "After hearing nothing for more than a week, I directed our staff to disconnect the power cords from the cameras in order to be sure that they are not functioning or recording plates," Fadden told The Drive.
About 20 miles away, Dayton had a different problem. Flock acknowledged the cancellation and said removal could take up to 60 days. Then, according to a statement the city posted on Facebook, a maintenance work order was issued in mid-September; the city told the company on 18 September that the programme was on hold and no work orders were to be completed. "Unfortunately, the City's direction was not followed, and the camera was placed back into service without authorization," the city wrote.
Flock's response to The Verge was less about the two towns than about its record: "We are proud of the impact our technology has had in Plymouth," spokesperson Andrew Smith said, without addressing the cameras that were still recording plates after the contract ended.
The pattern is not limited to Minnesota. Henrico County in Virginia moved to end its Flock contract in October over privacy concerns. Dozens of other municipalities have debated or cancelled automatic licence plate reader (ALPR) programmes over the past year, usually citing privacy, data-sharing arrangements with other agencies, and error rates.
What Plymouth and Dayton add to that debate is a procurement lesson rather than a privacy one. A cancellation vote is not the same as regaining control of a system: contracts with surveillance vendors typically bundle installation, maintenance, data retention and removal, and the removal step is the one with the least commercial urgency for the vendor. Cities that have cancelled cleanly have generally done so with written confirmation of a removal date, and in some cases by physically disabling equipment themselves.
Flock's defenders argue the cameras solve crimes, and the company points to cases closed with ALPR data. Its critics now have a simpler argument: if a vendor can decline to leave, the question is no longer whether the technology works, but who actually controls it.
