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Residents urge Norfolk to terminate Flock Safety contract, citing privacy and equity risks
Summary
Multiple residents called on Norfolk City Council to end the city's contract with Flock Safety, arguing the system's cameras and cloud-based data create oversight gaps, disproportionate surveillance of communities of color, and risks of third-party access.
Dozens of residents used the council public-comment period to press elected leaders to terminate Norfolk's contract with Flock Safety and remove license-plate reader cameras deployed around the city.
Alex O'Loughlin warned council that the deployed system is more than license-plate readers: "What is physically deployed is not just license plate readers. The hardware mounted across our city, our high resolution cameras pointed at our streets... A continuous video feed is not a single purpose record." He said vendor control over software updates and record retrieval means the system's capabilities can expand without visible changes to the streetscape.
Speakers across the evening told variations of the same concern. One resident cited an example in Dayton, Ohio, where, they said, thousands of requests for Flock camera data were made by immigration enforcement despite local assurances. Lisa Moravia warned that Norfolk's system includes views of schools, parks and playgrounds and said termination is warranted because the system "has no oversight by design, allowing anyone with a contract to request data from any of its cameras." Another speaker referenced the city's contract number (97430/2023) and urged council to vote to terminate the contract and take down the cameras.
Parents and school advocates raised particular alarm about cameras at or near school sites and urged that school surveillance be contained in-house rather than routed through a vendor cloud subscription. Hunter Fulk asked that school systems be monitored by closed-circuit systems managed by the school, arguing that children cannot consent to broad third-party data collection.
Council did not take immediate action on the cameras during the public-comment period; residents asked for a council vote to terminate the contract and for the city to clarify oversight and access policies for existing camera data.
Why it matters: Speakers said the system collects continuous, high-resolution video and suggested that even if the stated purpose is license-plate reading, the stored data can be used for other analysis and shared with third parties. Residents argued that placement and use of cameras disproportionately affect communities of color and people experiencing instability.
What's next: Residents asked the council to place the Flock contract on a future agenda for an explicit vote to terminate and to publish detailed policies on data access and auditing.
