Cancel the contracts.
Take the cameras down.

For a company as large as Flock, the actual evidence that their cameras prevent or help solve crime is astonishingly thin. The one peer-reviewed evaluation of a major ALPR expansion, published in the Justice Evaluation Journal in 2025, found no reduction in violent crime. The wider evidence base is similarly underwhelming.

It doesn't particularly seem to help solve crime, either. The Atlanta Community Press Collective checked: between 2021 and 2026, the city's camera network grew roughly eightfold, from about 3,300 cameras to over 28,600. Clearance rates over that period, from the FBI's own crime data, did not improve at all. Homicide clearance actually fell, from 53.4% to 48.0%.

This drastic ineffectiveness is likely because these cameras constantly lead law enforcement officers astray. This year Business Insider obtained police records from Roseville, California, showing that, of 1,427 Flock alerts sent to officers over two years, 71% of them were false positives from incorrect plate reads.

Which raises the question: what could the hundreds of thousands of dollars we spend on Flock cameras be used for instead? A randomized trial in New York City found that better street lighting cut nighttime crime by about a third. And the National Institute of Justice rates focused deterrence, the approach of concentrating on the small number of people driving most of the violence, rather than surveiling everyone, as "promising" across 24 separate studies.

Public officials want to look "tough on crime." The most effective way to get them to cancel a Flock contract is to give them ideas for what public safety initiatives they could brag about with the money they've saved.

To be clear, we're glad that this audit happened, and that abusers of the system were caught. But it raises harder questions than it settles.

Nobody has said what they actually looked at. Whose plates were queried? How many people? Over how long? Were any of those residents told that their movements had been pulled up by someone with no reason to do it? None of that has been made public.

An audit is a snapshot, and only of what it can see. It was an audit of only the county’s own database. It can't tell you what an officer in another state did after using Cherokee's cameras through Flock’s national lookup. And no audit catches a camera livestreaming to the open internet with no password; that leaves no log at all, because nobody had to log in.

Plenty of cameras in the county have no audit requirement at all. Georgia law requires law enforcement agencies to run these audits. The camera owned by your local HOA has likely never been audited. How do you know it's never been used by a stalker, hacker, or predator?

To be clear, we would prefer Flock had a warrant requirement, but that only addresses a tiny portion of all the problems with surveillance technology.

First of all, we already have rules for Flock searches, and they've repeatedly failed. Georgia law makes it a misdemeanor to query plate data for any purpose other than law enforcement, and yet, our news feeds are flooded every day of another official being arrested for breaking this rule. Four deputies here in Cherokee are among them, and the number nationwide is in the dozens and rapidly rising. How many abusers get away with skirting the rules, due to the fact that nearly half of Flock cameras have no audit requirements at all? Terrifyingly, we have no idea. We don't particularly believe that having a different rule restricting Flock searches would do anything to reign in this constant abuse.

Secondly, a warrant requirement means nothing to those who don't ask for permission. Last December, Benn Jordan and 404 Media found 60 Flock cameras streaming to the open internet with no password. Flock logins have also turned up for sale on the dark web and Russian cybercrime forums. This egregious lack of security isn't exclusive to Flock (see the Axon section below); not a single surveillance company seems to know how to keep our data private.

There is no amount of regulation that makes a mass surveillance network acceptable. Not a warrant requirement, not a tighter policy, not a better audit, not a citizen review board. None of that changes what the system is: a permanent, searchable record on every Cherokee County resident's whereabouts, held on a private company's servers, reachable by thousands of agencies and, as we have repeatedly seen, by people with no permission at all. The record itself is the problem, and the only thing that fixes it is the cameras coming down, forever.

That's true of any single moment... and false for all of them stitched together. No one minds when a neighbor sees you drive past. What a camera network builds is a different thing: a searchable history of everywhere your car has been, held for as long as the network chooses to hold it.

Such a surveillance network literally changes your behavior, without you even realizing. After Snowden's NSA leaks, traffic to privacy-sensitive Wikipedia articles fell about 20% and stayed down for years. No one sent readers a warning; they simply felt that someone might be counting, and quietly read something else instead. Writers refer to this effect as social cooling. Sometimes also called the "panopticon". It's worth a read.

Well, let's start with what's already happened. Four Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office employees have been fired and arrested for misusing this exact database. Statewide, at least 20 officials have been arrested for misusing Flock, which one researcher called “just the tip of the iceberg.” "Doing nothing wrong" might protect you from a system that's working properly. It does not protect you from the people happy to abuse that system.

And there doesn't even have to be someone abusing the system for you to be fearful. The the silent cost is that the camera itself makes you meeker and duller. Like a perfect panopticon, there's no need for a prison guard.

And the elephant in the room: "wrong" is not a fixed category, and you don't control who defines it. In April 2025 a deputy in Texas ran a Flock search across more than 83,000 cameras to stalk a woman seeking an abortion in states where it's legal. Every plate read sitting in a database today will be searched under whatever the rules are in ten years, by people you will never meet, for reasons you will never be told. Today it's abortion; in ten years it might be because you bought a gun, or attended a protest, or offended the wrong person.

In terms of raw capability... yeah, probably. A phone knows more about you than any camera on a pole. But the comparison doesn't quite hold up:

Pulling phone data requires a warrant; Flock does not. This is what two Supreme Court cases, Carpenter in 2018 and Chatrie in 2026, established. Police need a warrant to pull your location history from your phone. Plate reader networks are searched thousands of times a day with no warrant and, unless someone decides to audit it, no record anyone reviews. We've been fighting for phone privacy for two decades now, and have won some impressive legal victories; we'll fight Flock for that long, if that's what it takes.

You choose where to bring your phone. You can leave it at home, deny an app location sharing, or switch to a more secure device. You cannot decline a license plate, and it's illegal under Georgia law to obscure it it to license plate readers.

And "something worse exists" is not a reason to accept everything wrong with Flock. Most of us are universal privacy advocates; if your phone bothers you, why not join us?

People have the right to record their own property. But yes: Ring is an awful company and you should buy your security equipment from someone that won't happily hand your data over to anyone without your consent.

We're not being hyperbolic, by the way. In July 2022, Amazon admitted that Ring had handed over customer footage to police eleven times that year with no warrant and without asking the owner, under a bullshit "emergency request" exception Ring judges for itself; no judge or customer involved, just Bezos. In 2023 the FTC fined Ring $5.8 million after finding its employees could watch, download and pass around customers' videos, and that it failed to stop attackers who seized control of over 55,000 US accounts. Sound familiar?

And it's worth knowing: Ring announced a partnership with Flock in October 2025 and canceled it in February after the backlash. These surveillance networks want to merge, and public pressure like ours stops them.

Your doorbell camera is yours, it points at your porch, and if it's not from a ghoulish company like Ring, you decide who sees the footage. A plate reader network points it at everyone, all the time, and we don't remember ever being asked.

You know how every adhesive bandage is a Band-Aid, and every plastic food container is Tupperware? “DeFlock” means taking down all instruments of mass surveillance.

Our focus is intentionally broad, because Axon is arguably the bigger presence in Cherokee. The Sheriff's body cameras, car cameras, two drones and the Connect Cherokee registry of 612 private cameras all run on Axon products, and the drone footage ends up in Axon's own evidence system.

Yet "DeFlock" remains our chosen rallying cry for resisting mass surveillance. Partly because it's catchy (we're not above that), and partly because Flock is quite the blunder of a company name. It sort of gives the game away that surveillance companies see us as the sheep of a flock rather than actual humans with privacy rights. Long after the final Flock contract is shredded and their final camera is buried, and the fight has moved onto Axon, Vigilant, and whatever other Orwellian companies have crawled out of hell, "DeFlock Cherokee" will still be our name.

Oh, and one thing all these surveillance companies have in common: none of them can keep the footage safe. In December, 404 Media found at least 60 Flock Condor 24/7 video cameras sitting on the open internet with no password, and thirty days of archive footage. The FTC fined Ring $5.8 million after attackers took over more than 55,000 accounts. And Axon was forced to admit that flaws in their IP cameras could be chained together to grant attackers full access and control over their network. Not a single surveillance company knows how to keep their data safe, and in an era where hacking is easier than ever, we expect the problem to get worse.

Woah, wait: you're telling us that the company whose CEO brags "our product is used, on occasion, to kill people", and whose co-founder said "I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible" and "technology is an incredible alternative to politics"... is bad?

Seriously, though, the sheer damage Palantir has done to society could fill a much, much larger website.

So why DeFlock? Because Palantir does not have 194 cameras in Cherokee County. Flock and other camera surveillance companies are the particularly egregious head of the ugly surveillance hydra that is growing in our county, on our budgets. And the hydra is more interconnected than you'd think: Peter Thiel's Founders Fund is what backed Flock, and "Gotham", Palantir's platform for "predictive policing" (think Minority Report), gobbles up Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. If you want to stick it to Palantir, cut out its eyes.