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Residents demand end to Flock surveillance contract as police chief defends safeguards
Summary
At the April 23 Pensacola City Council meeting residents urged the mayor to cancel the city’s contract with Flock Safety, saying the license-plate reading cameras invade privacy and were paid for with opioid-abatement funds; the police chief described access controls, audit plans and a forthcoming public policy and said the system has assisted criminal investigations.
Several residents urged Pensacola’s mayor and City Council on April 23 to end the city’s contract with Flock Safety, the private vendor supplying AI-powered license-plate readers placed around town. Guillermo Alfonso, one of multiple speakers during the Leroy Boyd Forum, told council members the cameras “track your every single everyday movements” and that recent reporting shows law enforcement used the system to track protesters in other Florida jurisdictions.
The issue dominated public comments. Alex Hatley said the contract was approved without a council vote and accused the mayor of using opioid-abatement settlement money to pay for the system; he said the cameras “continue to violate our rights and invade our privacy.” Multiple speakers cited research by advocacy groups and news outlets alleging national-scale data sharing and misuse.
Why it matters: speakers argued the system creates a searchable record of residents’ movements, raising Fourth Amendment and civil-liberties concerns; they also called for transparency after previous city spending from opioid-abatement funds drew criticism.
The city’s new police chief answered public concern in a subsequent presentation. The chief said the department currently limits local access to the Flock dataset, describing an audit process that requires officers to document a public-safety nexus and a case number before querying the system. “I can determine who has access to the cameras in the city of Pensacola completely,” he said, and added that audits will make access traceable. He asserted the tool has assisted in locating suspects in violent-crime and drug interdiction cases and cited examples where automated plate readers contributed to arrests.
Asked whether the Flock system could be hacked, the chief said the vendor has publicly stated the cloud infrastructure has not been hacked and that his understanding is the company would certify that under oath. Other speakers disputed that account, calling attention to incidents where logins or camera streams were leaked in other cities. A resident noted the company left some cameras exposed via livestream in a prior incident, which he described as a compromise of individual camera feeds rather than a centralized breach.
Council members pressed the chief on operational controls. The chief said access is role-based: only officers with an active, documented investigation can query the system; access can be limited to as few as two local users. He also said he will post a draft policy after legal review describing how the city will use license-plate-reader data and the audit procedures.
What’s next: the council did not take formal action to cancel or modify the contract at this meeting. Residents called for either the mayor or the council to terminate the contract and asked the council to adopt binding restrictions on the use of any future opioid-abatement or settlement funds so that allocations come before the council for approval.
