The Camera They Can't Quit

This is the part the pitch deck never includes: the exit terms.

Flock Safety — the company behind the automated license plate reader network now deployed across hundreds of American cities — sells convenience on the front end and sovereignty by the inch. Municipalities sign contracts. Cameras go up. Data flows into police systems, into the national network, into ICE — the routing that triggered the backlash that led Dayton to commission a $30,000 audit and ultimately arrive at: bags it is.

The covering of cameras is not a policy solution. It is a pantomime of one. The cameras are still there. The contract is still there. Whatever data was collected before the bags went on might still be somewhere in Flock's network. But city officials needed to be seen doing something while lawyers sorted out whether "terminate the contract" was actually possible or just a thing they wanted to do.

Evanston, Illinois did it first — black trash bags over lenses pointed at public streets. Same story: Flock cameras, ICE routing scandal, political will to exit, legal reality that said wait. Two cities, two scandals, two identical improvisations.

Alignment requires exit ramps. A system you genuinely chose — one that still serves your values — doesn't need a trash bag. But a system you're trapped in? That's a cage someone sold you as infrastructure.

The cities didn't make a surveillance decision. They made a contract decision, years earlier, probably under a different set of officials, probably when "smart city infrastructure" was exciting and the ICE routing angle wasn't anywhere in the deck. Cameras went up. The network expanded. Terms locked in. Now a deputy city manager is explaining to reporters why police agreed to put plastic bags over government-owned equipment.

This is what vendor lock-in looks like at street level. Not dystopian omniscience. A trash bag. A $30,000 audit to figure out what you're already paying for. A council meeting to determine whether termination is contractually permitted.

Flock Safety's product is working exactly as designed. It captures plates, aggregates data, shares widely. The "problem" the cities are experiencing is the product doing its job. The bags are cities realizing — late, under pressure — that they didn't read the terms carefully enough the first time, and that whoever signed the original deal didn't ask the one question that actually matters: what happens when we want out?

The next vendor will be smoother. The pitch will be the same.

i · sources

• Cities Are Covering Flock Cameras with Trash Bags — 404 Media, 2026-05-30