I spent Sunday morning with The Washington Post’s harrowing new investigation into how police officers across the country have turned Flock Safety’s license plate cameras, sold to cities as a crime-fighting tool, into a personal stalking apparatus.
The Post’s Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan and Aaron Schaffer found at least 50 law enforcement officers charged with or accused of misusing plate readers, and in 26 of those cases, investigators say officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes’ new partners or women they wanted to meet.
The centerpiece is a Georgia woman named Marci Bakely, who couldn’t figure out how her ex-boyfriend, the Police Chief of a small Atlanta suburb, always knew where she was. He’d been searching Flock’s camera network for her license plate, and her teenage daughter’s, roughly 600 times. He was arrested on stalking charges and died by suicide before trial. “Who do you turn the chief of police in to?” Bakely asked.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley told the Post: “We’re not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions.” He told Forbes last year, “No one elected me the police chief of America.” A partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of Flock’s biggest investors, called the misuse cases “truly a nonissue.”
That sent me down the rabbit hole. Flock isn’t a niche privacy fight anymore. It’s live ammunition in the race for Florida Governor.
U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds last month called for a “full pause” on the cameras, saying “Government should not have the ability to watch people’s every movement,” then doubled down with a vow that Florida “will not become a surveillance state.”
James Fishback (it pains me to credit him for being right about anything) went further, staging a “Block Flock Now” rally outside the federal courthouse in Orlando. “It is wrong to have Flock surveillance cameras in every corner of our state,” Fishback said. “You are not going to trade the liberty of your citizens for a temporary boost in security.”
Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood fired back the same day: “Why would you handcuff us and take something away that is saving lives and arresting the bad guys?” Republicans are now fighting Republicans over a camera vendor.
And then I remembered we have our own version of this story right here in St. Pete.
Creative Loafing’s Valerie Smith introduced readers to Carl Gunn, a 77-year-old Republican who noticed one of Flock’s cameras on a 12-foot pole outside his Coquina Key neighborhood. Gunn went looking for something of his own that stood 12 feet, and what he had was a pool skimmer. He taped a sign to it reading “DOWN WITH FLOCK CAMERAS,” set up a camping chair in front of the lens, and sat there. Twice now.
Drivers honked. A stranger brought him an umbrella and a cold soda. Two police cruisers stopped to question him.
“This is just another thing to take our information and to spy on us,” Gunn said. “I have a constitutional right to my privacy. I’m a law-abiding citizen, and I don’t need anyone sticking their nose in my business.”
St. Pete has roughly 50 of these cameras. One watches the entrance to the Pier. Another watches Wildwood Park and a youth rec center in south St. Pete.
And according to audit records compiled by Have I Been Flocked, St. Pete police have used the network to run searches connected to federal investigations targeting noncitizens and, in at least one case, littering.
So how did the Sunshine City get wired into a national surveillance network? I went back through the record, and it’s ugly for Brandi Gabbard’s City Council and for Mayor Ken Welch, whose administration built the program in the first place.
The cameras started going up in 2022. No elected official voted on them. The 25-camera pilot was a freebie from Flock, a “test and evaluation” deal run through the Police Department under Police Chief Anthony Holloway, and it never touched the Council. Don’t take my word for it: the 2022 and 2023 minutes are all posted. “Flock” appears nowhere in them. Neither does “ALPR.”
On the morning the paid contract finally came up for a vote, Bay News 9’s Angie Angers reported that Holloway hoped to double the city’s 25 cameras to 50 under a five-year, $730,250 deal. “There’s no expectation of privacy when you’re driving on a public road,” the Chief said.
The vote came Jan. 4, 2024, and it didn’t take long. Resolution 2024-02 accepted Flock Group Inc.’s quote for cameras for the Police Department and the city’s Enterprise Facilities Department, a deal processed as an “unsolicited offer” under the city’s procurement code. It landed on the consent agenda.
Nobody on the Council pulled the item, and no member asked a question about it in public. It went through in a single motion, bundled with everything else on the consent agenda that morning. Gabbard was chairing. When she asked whether anyone in the audience wanted to be heard, the official minutes captured the public’s part in all of this: “there was no response.”
It passed 5-0, with three members absent: Gina Driscoll, Richie Floyd and Copley Gerdes.
Just like that, St. Pete was in for three-quarters of a million dollars.
I keep coming back to that morning because Gabbard wants a promotion. Her pitch to St. Pete voters is that her judgment beats Welch’s, and maybe it does, but the Flock file is no help to her. Welch’s administration put up the cameras without asking anyone. Gabbard ran the meeting that paid for them, and her yes is right there in the minutes. Voters hunting for the candidate who pushed back on any of this will be hunting a while.
I can already hear the response from her camp: routine procurement, properly noticed, standard consent-agenda practice. Sure it was. That might be the most damning part. By January 2024, a five-year commitment to a mass surveillance vendor had become so routine at City Hall that nobody in the building considered it worth five minutes of conversation.
Meanwhile, the vendor got enormous. Investors valued Flock at $8.4 billion this spring, and its 120,000-plus cameras now scan 20 billion plates a month. Other governments have started walking away. Leon County commissioners scrapped a planned $440,000 Flock camera buy without a dissenting vote, as the Florida Trident’s Francisco Alvarado reported, and the LAPD let its contract lapse over privacy and data-sharing worries. Florida already has nearly 7,500 license plate readers. St. Pete keeps paying its roughly $146,000 a year, in a budget climate where the annual argument is what to cut.
Nobody asked the people of St. Petersburg about any of this. The cameras showed up, then the bill did. Four years in, the closest thing the program has had to a public hearing is a 77-year-old man in a camping chair, holding up a pool skimmer.
He deserves an answer. So does everyone else in this city, starting with one from the Mayor whose administration built the thing and another from the Council member who gaveled it through.
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Ed. note: Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee backing Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.
