City of Canton
Canton City Council
What we know
Automated License Plate Readers
On September 2nd, 2021, the Canton city council voted 5-1 to switch the city's license plate reader vendor to Flock: six cameras, costing $15,000 a year. It auto-renews unless Canton submits a notice of non-renewal by August 8th, 2027. Yet Canton can walk away whenever it likes: the agreement's "Agency Satisfaction Guarantee" says an agency "not fully satisfied with the service or solution may self-elect to terminate their contract" at any time. After the cost of removal, Flock would owe Canton a prorated refund for the remainder of the term.
Condor Video Cameras
In October 2024, the city council awarded Flock the "park security camera bid", which has since led to 21 Condor cameras being installed in public parks, costing $70,250 a year. It's worth noting that these are the same types of cameras that were found streaming uncensored footage of parkgoers to the open internet last year with no password.
National Surveillance & ICE
In the 31 days from July 14th to August 13th, 2026, 3,145 outside law enforcement agencies ran 1,010,793 searches against Canton's cameras. That is 32,606 searches a day in a city of about 35,000 people. 318 of these searches cite immigration enforcement as the reason, with descriptions varying from "ICE request" to "287g Investigation". ICE doesn't seem to need a Flock account when local departments will happily run national searches on its behalf.
AI Analysis
In September 2025 Canton approved a $75,000 agreement to join the County Sheriff's Peregrine intelligence platform... but that's its own can of worms.
Make your voice heard
Canton doesn't publish individual council email addresses anywhere we can find. The mayor's is listed below. For your ward councilors, head to the city council page, find which of the three wards you live in, and contact them on the site's built-in form.
| Role | Name | |
|---|---|---|
| Mayor | Bill Grant | bill.grant@cantonga.gov |
| Mayor Pro Tem | Farris Yawn | |
| Councilor | Dwayne Waterman | |
| Councilor | Darrell Rice | |
| Councilor | Bryan Roach | |
| Councilor | Travis Johnson | |
| Councilor | Shawn Tolan | |
| Police Chief | Marty Farrell |
Read the draft letter
Written for Canton specifically. Change it. A sentence in your own words about what bothers you is worth more than the rest of it.
I am writing to ask you to cancel the city's contract with Flock Safety and have the cameras removed. As deflockcherokee.com has documented: Flock cameras don't accomplish what they're sold to do. The one peer-reviewed evaluation of a major plate reader expansion found no reduction in violent crime. It doesn't help to solve crime, either: Atlanta's camera network grew eightfold between 2021 and 2026, to over 28,600 cameras, and their clearance rates didn't improve at all. They get misused. Four Cherokee County Sheriff's Office employees have been fired and arrested for unlawfully searching the county database. Every month, more and more officials are being arrested for misuse: the number state-wide is at least 20. They get it wrong and distract our police. Roseville, California's own review of 1,427 Flock alerts found 71% were misreads. The same money has better uses for public safety. A randomized trial found that better street lighting cut nighttime crime by about a third. And the National Institute of Justice rates "focused deterrence" (concentrating on the small number of people driving violence, rather than photographing everyone), as "promising" across 24 studies. Inside the public safety budget, the same money could fund detectives to clear the cases residents already report, training, or victim services. Canton is able to leave the Flock contract whenever it likes. Section 6.2 of the agreement, the "Agency Satisfaction Guarantee", lets an agency that is not fully satisfied terminate at any time, effective immediately. The only cost is removal and labor, capped at $500 per camera, and Flock owes the city a prorated refund of the rest of the term. Please cancel the contract and remove the cameras. Respectfully, [Your name] [Your street, city, ZIP, so they can see you are a constituent]
More Sources
City of Canton → Legistar calendar: every council item with its attachments → Public Safety Citizen Advisory Board, 15 Sep 2021: the move to Flock → Council minutes, 15 Dec 2022 (park cameras first floated) → Council minutes, 17 Oct 2024 (park bid awarded) → Council minutes, 12 Dec 2025 (rollout reported complete) → AJC, 22 May 2019: Canton OKs pole-mounted plate readers →
Fill in what we don’t know
If you live in Canton and can add anything to this page (a correction, an email reply, a contract, a date, a dollar figure, a copy of something a clerk sent you), email deflockcherokee@proton.me and it goes up with your source attached.