Residents urge Stoughton council to halt Flock ALPR program and adopt binding surveillance policy

At the July 14 Stoughton City Council meeting, a string of public commenters urged the council to immediately stop collecting data for the city’s Flock Safety automated license‑plate reader (ALPR) program and to adopt a binding surveillance policy before signing any future contracts.

Suzanne Larson, who identified herself as a former public servant and investigative journalist, told the council she had distributed a packet she called “receipts, the case against Stoughton’s ALPR program,” and asked, “Who has institutional control of our police department?” Larson said the vendor’s data architecture can come to dictate how investigations are done and asked the council to “1 discontinue Flock immediately” and “2 adopt a binding surveillance policy requiring council approval for any surveillance system, 30‑day public comment, warrant requirement for searches, 30‑day data retention, 0 federal sharing, and annual transparency reports.”

Kristin Forte Hyrgis, a Stoughton resident, said the framing by police that cameras are simply “the world we live in” risks normalizing surveillance and warned that such tools are often used disproportionately against Black, Brown and LGBTQIA communities. She said she submitted her full statement for the record and asked the council to examine why her online comment had been flagged as inappropriate.

Another commenter said he had seen an audit in Columbus, Ohio, showing thousands of immigration‑related searches within a Flock network and cited a city statement to the Stoughton public safety committee that sharing data with other agencies can mean the local department loses control of the chain of custody. “I implore you to take action and do whatever is in your power to deactivate the cameras now, cover them up, whatever you have to do,” he said.

Additional commenters echoed those themes. Sharon Myland Bartlett said she was concerned about how the purchase and placement decisions were made and noted peer municipalities have unplugged or removed similar cameras. Karen Laum cited a June 2026 American Civil Liberties Union report on surveillance‑company partnerships with police and warned that modern ALPRs with AI capabilities have “functionality, reach and implications far beyond what we have seen in the past.” Carrie Killman urged the council to cover the cameras and to invite the ACLU of Wisconsin to present at an upcoming public safety committee meeting.

None of the speakers asked the council to take immediate action other than to disable the cameras or to place a policy hold; the meeting record shows those comments were made during the public‑comment period and that the ALPR program itself was not on the council’s agenda that night. The council moved on to its regular agenda after public comment.