Still snapping

BROOKINGS — A full house greeted the Brookings City Council at their Aug. 25 meeting in the Brookings as Flock cameras continue to be a hot-button political issue — not only in Brookings but across the state and the nation.

Here in town, the City Council was greeted by a standing-room crowd at their regular meeting including nine speakers during the public comment period all speaking against the cameras and their company’s changing contract regarding data collection.

Along the I-29 corridor in Eastern South Dakota, the Aberdeen mayor and city council backed out of a plan to install cameras made by Flock rival Axon, according to reporting from The Aberdeen Insider. In Codington County — the Watertown area — the sheriff’s office has stopped using the four Flock cameras they previously authorized after repeated vandalism, according to The Watertown Current.

And in a move that reinforces that opposition to the cameras cuts across the normal political divide, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a reliable ally of President Donald Trump, suspended a program to install the license plate readers statewide, according to the Texas Tribune.
The change came, the Tribune notes, after they published a story saying the state had spent $30 million dollars in grants to have localities purchase the cameras.

Drawing a crowd
While there are certainly some people who are against public cameras such as Flock altogether, the growing resistance to the company tends more toward its actions in recent months.

The company changed its terms of service in February, and taken with its public financing data, it becomes increasingly easy to see they are not a company that sells solar powered traffic cameras. They are a data farming company using the powers of government to end-run around possibly privacy concerns.

As Andrew Konechne wrote to the city council in a summary this week:
“Flock Safety raised $275 million in its most recent round at a valuation of $7.5 billion, having raised more than $950 million in total. Brookings pays roughly $21,000 a year. Five thousand agencies paying comparable amounts does not produce a company valued at $7.5 billion.”

With that information in the light, speaker after speaker asked the Brookings City Council to revisit its agreement with Flock at the meeting last week, focusing on five specific arguments. Andrew Konechne, one of the organizers of a public meeting about the Flock cameras, summarized them for the Council — and provided a copy to the Beacon — like this:

1. Commitments the city relied on were deleted or rewritten, without a vote
On February 16, 2026, Flock Safety published new Terms and Conditions. Among the changes:
— The sentence “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data” was deleted.
— Flock’s license to use city data was made “perpetual” and extended to “support and improve Flock’s products and services.”
— Disputes were placed under Georgia law and mandatory arbitration.
— Flock retained the ability to revise these terms again at any time.
Brookings did not negotiate these changes, vote on them or receive notice of them.

2. What Brookings actually signed was a link
The Order Form incorporates Flock’s terms by web address, not by attachment. Whatever the vendor publishes there governs. There is no master services agreement — the document that ordinarily requires customer consent before material terms change. The terms have changed at least three times in nine months, and Flock has excluded its own website from the Internet Archive.

3. What the city gave up is written so broadly it cannot be enforced
Flock may now use Brookings’ data to “support and improve Flock’s products and services.” The original license permitted use only “as may be necessary for Flock to provide the Flock Services to Customer.” At first glance the change may seem technical.
It is not. For a company whose product identifies and logs vehicle locations, more data inherently improves the product — so nearly any use of our residents’ data can be described as improvement.
Ask what Flock could do with this city’s data that the clause would prohibit. We have not been able to think of anything.

4. The oversight our community was promised was stripped of its contents
Flock marketed “immutable accountability” and an “indefinitely available audit trail.” In December 2025, after residents began obtaining search logs through public records requests, Flock’s Vice President emailed police customers that network audits “will no longer include officer name, specific plates searched, vehicle fingerprint” — or the stated reason. He named the trigger in writing, and it was not misuse. It was the records requests.
The Washington Post has documented at least 69 police officials accused, charged, or convicted of misusing license plate readers, most tracking women they knew. Those cases were built from officer names, searched plates, and stated reasons — the three fields that were removed.
An audit log that does not record who searched, what they searched, or why is not an audit log.

5. Calling these “license plate readers” substantially misrepresents what they do
Flock’s own marketing advertises that its system identifies a vehicle “even without a plate.” A license plate reader that works without a license plate is not a license plate reader. Flock trademarked the term “Vehicle Fingerprint” for this capability. A fingerprint identifies a person; they chose the word.
We were sold a plate reader. What we got is a vehicle identification system that tracks and logs the locations of our community members.

Craig Jorgenson, another organizer of the meeting, spoke at the meeting both about the citizen frustration with the Flock cameras, but also with the level of transparency locally.

“One cost the system comes at is it cannot know criminal from innocent traffic until the data is already captured. I presented a number of questions to this body in February. After that meeting and with assistance from members of the council, I posed a number of questions to Chief Drake about how the Brookings Police Department is using the system. Every question I asked about how Flock operates in Brookings was met with either a rejection to provide that information or sales information from Flock’s own website — some of which was factually inaccurate at the time.”

In Sioux Falls vs. Brookings
A recent article in The Dakota Scout highlighted the issue in Sioux Falls, while also providing a stark contrast in releasing information to the public.

According to the Scout: “The technology is already being used in Sioux Falls, where the Police Department has had 34 Flock cameras throughout the city since 2022, according to the city’s website.”

“The cameras capture license plate and vehicle information but do not use facial recognition technology, according to the department. They also cannot be used to issue speeding tickets, parking citations or citations for running a red light.”
“From Jan. 1 through July 30, the cameras were connected to 65 arrests, according to the department.”

“In the preceding 30 days, the system recorded nearly 4,800 hits against law enforcement hotlists, according to the department’s public dashboard.”

That information was either provided to The Scout or readily available on the city’s website.

Here in Brookings, attempts to acquire the same or similar information have been stonewalled.When The Beacon asked the city for comment, it was referred to Police Chief Michael Drake. Drake initially agreed to an interview with

The Beacon, and then, after two weeks of rescheduling, declined to comment, saying he did not want to say anything before he presents information to the full city council and the public on Sept. 22 — well more than a month after the initial request.

Various citizens who spoke, both at the initial meeting and the city council meeting described requests for information from the city — for the total number of cars recorded in a month, for instance; or for simply the times their own license plate had been read by a city Flock camera — but that information was not provided.

Looking forward
Drake is scheduled to present information about the cameras to the council at public at the Sept. 22 meeting. The group presenting at the last meeting asked the council to convene a study session at a minimum; ideally, they all said, they’d like to see the cameras gone for good.

Meanwhile, the headlines continue to roll in from across the country.
In Florida on Monday, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered Flock cameras pulled from state roads. In Indiana, also on Monday, a former sheriff’s deputy was indicted for querying one license plate more than 2,000 times in his last months of employment. In South Carolina, also on Monday, a pair of deputies were fired for using the county’s Flock cameras to track — among others — their spouses.