Part II: Harrisonburg and Other Cities Tell Flock to Fly Away

Amid mounting concern about the misuse of personal data from Flock Safety cameras, the college community of Harrisonburg, Virginia, has joined the growing ranks of American communities rejecting that company’s pervasive surveillance of motorists.

The Harrisonburg City Council voted unanimously to end the city’s contract with Flock Safety, shut down its automated license plate readers, and cover the cameras with trash bags until they can be removed. The council also adopted a policy encouraging future councils to consider privacy, data security, equity, and public trust before deploying similar technology. Residents are continuing to press for a binding ordinance that would require public scrutiny of any future mass-surveillance proposal.

Harrisonburg Mayor Deanna Reed acknowledged that Flock cameras can help solve crimes. But she concluded that its risks outweighed its benefits.

“We might not share the data, that doesn’t mean that somebody can’t get a hold of what we have,” Reed told a reporter at WHSV, a local television station. “The safest thing to do is just not use it at all.”

That is a sensible response to a technology that does far more than snap an occasional picture. Flock’s artificial-intelligence system records license plates and vehicle characteristics, allowing police to reconstruct a person’s movements and search for vehicles by color, model, dents, and bumper stickers. Networks linked across jurisdictions can transform scattered observations into a detailed account of where someone worships, works, seeks medical treatment, associates with others, or attends a political protest.

Then there is the problem of accuracy.

A Business Insider investigation found that Flock’s software misread plates in 71 percent of the stolen-vehicle and felony alerts it sent to police in Roseville, California, during 2023 and 2024. Records showed that the cameras also produced blurry images, missed vehicles, and sent delayed alerts. Roseville’s unusual camera positioning may have contributed to the errors, and its police said none of the false alerts resulted in a stop or arrest because officers independently verified the information.

Other communities have not been so fortunate. Flock errors, sometimes compounded by failures of police verification, have led innocent drivers elsewhere to be stopped at gunpoint, jailed, and even mauled by a police dog.

Harrisonburg is part of a genuinely bipartisan revolt. Charlottesville ended its Flock pilot program over concerns about data protection, misuse, and local control. In Bandera, Texas, opposition came from residents steeped in a conservative tradition of personal liberty and distrust of government overreach. Across the ideological spectrum, Americans understand that tools to combat serious crimes can easily expand into routine, warrantless monitoring.

Police should use targeted investigative methods to pursue people reasonably suspected of crimes. They should not assemble a searchable record of everyone’s movements just in case someone might later come to the attention of authorities.
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Harrisonburg has made the right call. Other communities should follow its lead and tell mass surveillance to get the Flock out.

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