Verona Voted Out Flock. Two Months Later, Crews Bagged the Cameras [0gQa5krszB9]
A Wisconsin city voted to end its Flock Safety contract in November, and by mid January the cameras were still recording, so public works went out with black plastic bags. We pulled the council vote, the search logs, and the internal emails into one write-up with every document linked: Verona has a population of around fifteen thousand and had three license plate readers. The Common Council voted against renewal in November, and the reason was not crime statistics. The Wisconsin Examiner reported that Verona's own network logged 974 searches tagged as federal in October alone, plus another 1,628 run by organisations identifying themselves as ICE, after federal access had supposedly been cut off. The council president said Flock was not trustworthy no matter what guarantees it offered. Another member said the company had assured the city the data belonged to Verona, and they could not believe it. Notice went out the next day. Then nothing happened for two months. A resident was emailing the council in January asking why the cameras were still standing. The mayor asked whether the city could simply take them down and hold them at City Hall. When an officer called Flock first, the company objected to the city removing its own equipment, and the representative asked to disable the cameras remotely was not sure whether that was possible or how to do it. Hence the bags, and an internal note under the subject line "RIP Flock Cameras" telling officers not to report them as vandalised. Flock removed the hardware on February 4th, then told 404 Media it can remotely deactivate cameras at any time on request. That gap between a vote and a shutdown is the part nobody writes into the contract. A council can end a surveillance program on paper while the hardware keeps reading plates for another eight weeks, and the only leverage the city had left was a roll of bin liners. The full breakdown covers the search log numbers, the records request emails in order, what Flock told 404 Media afterwards, and the specific contract language a council should demand before it votes: Presented by: - the only verifiable zero-trust VPN service - the only verifiably private email service Sources: #Flock #ALPR #Surveillance #Privacy #Wisconsin #LicensePlateReaders #PoliceTech