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Two Days After OKC Renewed, an Oklahoma Police Chief Killed His Own Flock Contract Mid-Meeting

The Marietta City Council called a special meeting on August 20, 2026 with one item on the agenda: whether to engage Flock Safety. Police Chief Brett Harris opened it asking the council to keep the five trial cameras. Then a Flock representative, joining by Zoom, told the room the company retains camera data indefinitely. Harris stopped the meeting. “Folks, we're not moving forward any further. Marietta Police Department, Marietta city limits won't have Flock cameras,” he announced. The department, he explained, had agreed to a 30-day limit: “They're retaining data indefinitely, and that's exactly what our spectators complained about - that the data doesn't disappear like they say it does.” The council voted the measure down unanimously and the room applauded. Resident Jeanette Perez, who had spoken against it earlier: “We're slowly losing our fundamental rights by agreeing to these search and seizures.” Harris's closing line was “This system is not for Marietta, Oklahoma.” Read it against what happened in Oklahoma City forty-eight hours earlier. Same vendor, same product, same state. One council was told in open session that retention runs forever and voted it down on the spot. The other renewed 5 to 3 and was told it could not see the list of 109 agencies that receive its data. The question this raises for OKC is not whether other towns are ahead of us. It is what our council was told about retention before it voted. In fairness: Harris said afterward he is researching other sensor technology “that is supported by the community,” so Marietta rejected Flock, not every tool.

Flock’s Own Search Menu Lists “Vagrancy,” and Police Picked It 1,200 Times Through One Town’s Cameras

Flock’s search menu has a category for being poor in public. Police picked it more than 1,200 times through the cameras of one small Illinois town.

Records from Plano, Illinois, obtained by Sam Biddle for The Intercept, show agencies across Illinois, neighboring states, and a Georgia town 600 miles away querying Flock under the heading “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.” On January 31, Norcross, Georgia police ran a search from a smartphone that reached 6,098 separate Flock camera networks. The Tennessee Fusion Center searched more than 17,000 cameras under that same category, appending its own reason: “Suspicious person at planned protest site.” LaGrange, Georgia searched over 6,000 networks about someone leaving a house “with a significant amount of traffic,” and more than 15,000 about someone “lingering at a stop sign around midnight last night.” West Palm Beach logged a query about an “outside agency dropping vagrant off.” Most of these searches carried no case number at all, which means they were not attached to any investigation. Flock did not respond to a request for comment.

Flock did not invent this category, and that is the worse fact. “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” is a federal offense class, FBI NIBRS Group B, defined as the violation of a law prohibiting persons from “remaining in an area or place in an idle or aimless manner” or “going from place to place without visible means of support.” Flock’s search-reason menu is the federal crime list, so nobody at the company had to decide that vagrancy was worth a national camera query. It was on the menu the day the product shipped. In 1972 the Supreme Court struck down exactly this. Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville voided a vagrancy ordinance for vagueness because it criminalized ordinary conduct and placed “almost unfettered discretion in the hands of the police.” The statute is gone. The discretion is back, attached to more than 120,000 cameras, exercised from a phone, with no judge in the loop.

Oklahoma City signed up for this category without ever naming it. The Master Services Agreement defines the system’s Permitted Purpose as “crime awareness, prevention, and prosecution,” a phrase that appears nowhere in Oklahoma statute, and one that covers a loitering query without any stretch at all. The August renewal added keyword blocks on immigration and reproductive-health searches. It added nothing about Group B, because a blocklist naming two topics leaves the rest of the menu alone. And the safeguard the council was actually sold was a required stated reason for each search. The Intercept has now published what stated reasons look like in cities that hand over the log: lingering at a stop sign around midnight. A free-text box is not a limit on anything. It is a place to type.

The document that produced this story is the document Oklahoma City has refused three times. Plano gave a reporter its Flock audit log, and the log answered every question in this article: who searched, what reason they typed, whether a case number existed, and how far past the town’s own cameras the query reached. Oklahoma City has denied that same file three times under three different labels: not a law enforcement record (OCPD-10080), an OCPD system the City cannot access (ORR-4292), and a law enforcement record we may withhold (OCPD-10716, denied July 28). The department’s own denial confirms the log exists. So the question is no longer whether OKCPD can produce what Plano produced. It is why a town of twelve thousand in Illinois can show residents what its cameras were used for, and Oklahoma City will not.

The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.

A City Canceled Flock, Took Its Own Cameras Down, and Flock’s System Sent a Crew to Put Them Back

On August 11, 2026, Grass Valley, California canceled its Flock contract. City staff took every camera down the next morning. Twenty-five days later, residents watched a utility crew put them back.

Police Chief Alexander Gammelgard’s cancellation letter cited “novel Fourth Amendment issues,” California’s Senate Bill 54, and a system that had “evolved to include much more powerful computer-intelligence tools” with expanding cross-jurisdiction networks. The city sent termination notice by email and by certified mail, and says Flock never acknowledged it. Over the weekend of September 5, residents spotted a crew replacing cameras around town and called the police on their own vendor. In the department’s words: “Some of the cameras which were no longer showing connection - because we took them down - have been serviced and replaced. We’ve learned and dealt with at least two.”

Flock’s explanation is not a denial, and it is worse than one. Because the cameras suddenly went offline, the company says, its automated maintenance system read them as equipment failures and generated replacement work orders. “Those work orders have now been canceled, and we are expediting the remaining steps to process the termination and ensure no additional maintenance or replacement activity occurs.” Take that at face value: a city voted to end mass surveillance, and the surveillance re-installed itself because a server could not tell a cancellation from a hardware fault.

Oklahoma City signed a contract that describes this exact behavior. The Master Services Agreement on file with the City Clerk states that Flock cameras carry “built-in alarms to alert our Support Team if a camera is not performing at optimal standards,” and that when one stops performing, Flock will “create a Work Order to send a local installation technician to either fix or replace the equipment at NO charge to the Oklahoma City PD.” Maintenance is “managed by Flock Safety and executed by Flock Safety trained technicians.” When a customer leaves, it is “Flock Safety’s local installation technicians” who “come out to remove all of the vendor’s supplied hardware.” The cameras on OKC poles are not the city’s to take down. They are Flock’s equipment, watched by Flock’s alarms, serviced on Flock’s schedule. Honest caveat: OKC negotiated one exception during procurement, and Flock agreed to train bucket-truck-certified city employees to move fixed cameras without voiding the warranty. Moving a camera is not ending a program.

Grass Valley is not the first city to find that out. Eugene, Oregon terminated on December 5, 2025 and asked Flock to remove the cameras by December 12. Flock replied that it would not begin until January 26. Eugene stopped waiting and pulled them down itself on December 18, with Police Chief Chris Skinner naming the problem: “Those cameras don’t belong to us by contract.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin the readers were still standing four months after the council revoked the agreement, so the city sent its own personnel to cover them with garbage bags. Verona did the same. So did Evanston, Illinois and Dayton, Ohio. A company that could staff municipal committee meetings to defend the product, one Oshkosh resident observed, could not send a staff member to come collect it.

This is why the second demand is not a formality. Ending the contract is a council vote. Removing the cameras is a thing Oklahoma City would then have to make a vendor do, on a timeline the vendor sets, with hardware the city does not own and cannot lawfully keep. Any OKC termination should name a removal deadline, a consequence for missing it, and written confirmation of decommissioning by serial number. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor. (CBS Sacramento; The Union; The Guardian.)

Flock Offered to Sell a City Five Years of Data From Cameras the City Did Not Know Were Collecting It

Sheboygan, Wisconsin learned what its Flock cameras had been collecting when a Flock salesman offered to sell it back to them. Earlier this summer a company representative emailed the city's Engineering Department, not its police department, offering five years of traffic speed and movement data captured by Sheboygan's own fifteen cameras. City officials say Flock never told them the cameras produced that data at all. Sheboygan covered the cameras in late August, and its Common Council votes September 8 on terminating the contract. Police Chief Kurt Zempel, who credits the cameras with removing violent offenders and recovering stolen property, said Flock's conduct was “inconsistent with the terms and expectations of the City's contract” and that it undermined trust. Mayor Ryan Sorenson named the cause directly: “an erosion of trust from Flock itself and how they were using our data.” Kenosha put Flock on its own September 8 agenda the same week. (TMJ4; WHBL.)

Read that against Oklahoma City's contract, because this was not a rogue salesman. Section 4.3 of the Master Services Agreement OKC signed in 2023 grants Flock a “non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right” to anonymized versions of customer data, both to train machine-learning algorithms and to build “other Flock offerings.” A traffic-analytics product assembled out of municipal camera feeds is an other Flock offering. Sheboygan is that clause arriving in an inbox with a price on it, and Oklahoma City signed the same clause.

Flock's own marketing settles what the derived layer is for. The company's transportation page sells “24/7 count, class, and speed data” together with public safety alerts, “all from one device.” A Flock blog post markets Traffic Analytics to “commercial property owners, asset managers, and multi-location retailers,” built on “anonymized data on vehicle volume, speed, and dwell time, alongside license plate reader (LPR) technology.” On its public trust page, the same company states that “Flock does not sell customer data” and that it gives customers “full data ownership, auto-deleting data after 30 days.” Both of those things are on Flock's website right now.

The same day, a sheriff put the mechanism on the record by name. On September 4 Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling ordered every Flock camera in the county taken down, and his stated reason was not the plate reads. It was that Flock “generates a separate data set from information collected by its cameras and markets that dataset to other government and private customers through its ‘Traffic Analytics’ product.” His office believed retention was thirty days. Schmaling says Flock holds the aggregated layer “for up to five years, separate from and in addition to the 30-day retention period.” That is an elected law enforcement official naming the product, naming private customers, and stating the five-year figure independently of Sheboygan. His conclusion: “This is not what we agreed to, and it is not what the public was led to believe,” and his office would not “participate in a system that appears to use public safety as a justification for mass surveillance.” In fairness, and it matters here as much as it did in Marietta: Schmaling said “Flock failed the public” but that “the technology did not fail the public,” and Racine intends to keep using ALPR through a different vendor. Racine rejected Flock, not the category. (TMJ4; CBS 58.)

The word doing the work is anonymized. Strip the plates off, and the speed, volume, and dwell-time layer stops being customer data in Flock's taxonomy. That is how a company can sell a commercial traffic-analytics line built on city cameras and still say it does not sell customer data. Section 4.3 is what makes that layer Flock's to keep and license in perpetuity, long after the deletion clock has run on the footage. The retention promise was never the whole promise: it covered the plate reads and left everything derived from them outside the frame. That distinction is the entire product, and no council has been told about it from the podium. Honest caveat: Sheboygan's sales email itself has still not been published, so the terms of that specific offer rest on the city's account of it, and the email is worth a records request on its own. The five-year figure no longer rests there, because Schmaling states it as his own agency's finding. What is not in question is the contract language, on file with the OKC City Clerk, or Flock's marketing copy, published by Flock. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.

Eleven Wisconsin Agencies Shut Flock Off in One Day, After Another State's Records Law Made Their Investigations Public

Wisconsin protects active investigation records from disclosure. That protection did not survive the network. On September 4, 2026, Fond du Lac County Sheriff Ryan Waldschmidt and the police chiefs of Fond du Lac, North Fond du Lac, Ripon, and Waupun suspended all Flock products immediately, and the Winnebago County Sheriff's Office did the same alongside the Neenah, Menasha, Fox Crossing, Winneconne, and UW Oshkosh departments. Eleven agencies, one day. Crews put covers over the camera lenses in Fond du Lac County that afternoon. The reason was not a hack and not a rogue officer: search records from their own Flock systems, including records tied to active investigations, had been released to the public by law enforcement agencies in other states answering open records requests. Fond du Lac learned about it afterward. In the sheriff's office's words, those decisions “were made without our knowledge or consent.” Winnebago County opened an internal review to work out which of its investigations were exposed. (WBAY; FOX 11.)

Follow the mechanism, because it is the whole story. Flock's search logs move across the network to every participating agency. A record generated in Fond du Lac therefore also sits inside agencies in other states, and what happens to it there is governed by those states' disclosure laws, not Wisconsin's. When a broader law compelled release, Wisconsin's active-investigation exemption was simply not the rule that applied. The Fond du Lac agencies' joint statement: “The loss of control over our own investigative data, combined with concerns over how quickly Flock's technology has expanded beyond traditional plate-reading systems, has led Fond du Lac County law enforcement agencies to conclude that continuing the program at this time is not appropriate.” Winnebago County: “Protecting the integrity of investigative data and maintaining public trust are paramount.”

Flock's answer is three true statements that do not address the complaint. The company said the public databases carrying the search data “are in no way affiliated with Flock,” that Flock “did not release any data,” and that “Customers own and control their data and Flock does not sell it.” Every one of those can be accurate and none of them is responsive. Nobody accused Flock of pressing send. The objection is that Flock built the architecture that copied Wisconsin's investigative records into agencies in states where the law required handing them over, and then told each customer it was in control. This is the exact failure Eric R. Atstupenas, general counsel of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, described weeks earlier: “data in a wide network is governed by the weakest policy in it and accountability diffuses.” A lawyer for police chiefs named the mechanism in August. Eleven Wisconsin agencies lived it in September.

Oklahoma City is in that network, with 109 partners and no public list. Chief Bacy would not name the 109 agencies for Councilwoman Hamon on August 18, which means nobody here knows which states OKC's search records currently sit in. On the Wisconsin mechanism, the rule that governs an OKC search record is not Oklahoma's open records law. It is whichever partner state's law is broadest. And there is a sharper edge for this city specifically: OKCPD has denied residents its Flock audit log three times, while records of that same kind are what other states' laws compelled agencies to hand over. The question that raises is not rhetorical and it is answerable: if OKC's searches are already public somewhere else, the department is withholding from Oklahomans a record another state gives away. The renewal runs to 2027. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.

Flock's CEO Is Now Asking for "Compromise." That Is What a Company Says When It Is Losing.

Garrett Langley has spent August on a media tour asking the country to split the difference. “When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they're prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise,” he told Fox News. On the 46 cases the Washington Post documented of officers accused of using Flock to stalk wives, girlfriends, and exes, he told CBS News “I apologize. It kills me that she went through that,” and then, in the same breath: “I don't think that Flock created police abuse. I think we're the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.” Read that twice. The company that built a searchable record of everywhere everyone drives is claiming credit for discovering that police misuse it.

Two details in this story matter directly to Oklahoma City. First, Flock cut its default retention from 30 days to seven and began requiring a case code before access. Those are company-wide product changes made in response to national criticism, not concessions any one city negotiated. Second, and this is the part to sit with: TechCrunch reports both changes can be overridden, with longer retention available through a setting called Evidence Mode. The ACLU's response names the problem exactly: “Whether this is a real change or just another Flock PR move, however, will depend on how its 'Evidence Mode' operates.” Oklahoma City's council was told about a retention cut and new access controls when it voted to renew on August 18. None of it is in the contract. It lives in a vendor's product settings, and the vendor has already built the switch that turns it off.

The political ground is also moving in both directions at once. Bernie Sanders posted “STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. STOP FLOCK.” Three House Republicans introduced a bill barring the federal government from buying automated surveillance systems using facial recognition, biometric IDs, or license plate recognition, “including a Flock Safety camera.” That is the coalition this issue keeps building, and it is why the answer here has never been a better-supervised dragnet. Compromise is what you are offered when the other side has started losing votes. The demand has not changed: do not renew, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.