Residents press Norfolk council to end Flock surveillance contract, citing security and privacy flaws

At the Norfolk City Council meeting on April 14, 2026, a series of public commenters urged councilors to halt and ultimately terminate the citys contract with Flock Group Inc., the private company that operates the automatic license-plate- and street-camera network in Norfolk.

"Pause all Flock purchases in the future and deactivate every Flock camera in the city until they are completely redesigned from the ground up," said Jefferson Bowers, identifying himself with the Tidewater Democratic Socialists of America, who told the council the devices are insecure and collect excessive personal data.

Speakers tied security concerns to specific technical and contractual problems. Alexander OLoughlin said the system operates as "mass surveillance," can be queried by agencies beyond Norfolk and costs about $430,000 a year to operate. Johnny Lillard, speaking as a security professional, warned that audit logs for systems like this can be unreliable: "If the logs can change, so can the truth," he said, describing an analysis that found log entries shifting between downloads.

Samuel Willis pressed the council most pointedly, saying the contract lacks clear deletion and access protections and citing examples from other jurisdictions where camera data was used across state lines. Willis asked the council to invoke contract section 6.2 and immediately end contract number 97430 2023 and to deploy city workers to cover cameras until they are removed. "We are not the customer. We are the product," he said.

Why it matters: Speakers said the cameras record faces, license plates, movement patterns and other data that, when aggregated and shared, can create comprehensive tracking records of residents. Commenters warned that poor security, weak auditability and interjurisdictional data access undermine residents privacy and accountability for law enforcement use.

What council did: No vote on terminating the Flock contract occurred during the meeting. Members accepted the public comments and proceeded with the rest of the agenda; no councilor offered a motion to end or pause the contract in the time covered by the transcript.

Claims and evidence: Commenters cited a range of problems, including alleged changes to audit logs, contract provisions allowing data sharing among customers, and examples of out-of-state data use. They asked the council to suspend purchases, deactivate cameras and pursue contract termination.

Next steps: Speakers said they would return to press the council further; Samuel Willis told the council the crowd opposing the contract would keep growing if the cameras remained in place.