Plymouth, Minnesota Police Chief Has Flock's AI Surveillance Cameras Unplugged After the Company Allegedly Ignored the City's Cancellation
BREAKING: Minnesota police chief personally orders Flock's AI surveillance cameras physically unplugged after the company allegedly “ignored” the city's decision to cancel its contract.
Context
It shows how hard it can be for a city to walk away from an AI surveillance vendor once its cameras are installed, a growing issue as more towns rethink these contracts.
Flock Safety sells license plate reading cameras that use AI to log and search passing vehicles, and many US police departments use them. Several cities have voted to drop the service over privacy concerns. Posts on X identify the city in this story as Plymouth, Minnesota, and say its council voted on Sept 22 to end the contract.
Deep dive
Polymarket (@Polymarket) posted on Nov 1 that a Minnesota police chief personally ordered Flock's AI surveillance cameras physically unplugged after the company allegedly ignored the city's decision to cancel its contract. The post drew more than 100,000 views and about 2,900 likes.
Other posts on X, citing news coverage, identify the city as Plymouth, Minnesota. They say the city council voted on Sept 22 to stop using Flock's license plate readers, that the city suspended its Flock accounts and sent formal notice, and that after more than a week without a reply from the company the police chief had the cameras unplugged. One post adds that the cameras were still standing with no pickup date. These details come from those posts and their linked coverage, not from a statement by Flock.
A separate post with about 640,000 views described a similar dispute in nearby Dayton, Minnesota. It says Dayton voted 5 to 0 on Aug 25 to cancel its Flock contract, that Flock later reinstalled two cameras and put them in service anyway, and that the city had told the company the program was on hold. Flock's response to either city was not found in the scanned posts.
What to expect next
Watch for Flock to respond publicly and say when it will remove the hardware and what happens to data already collected. More cities that are reviewing these contracts may write clearer exit and data deletion terms. State lawmakers in Minnesota and elsewhere could take up rules on how AI license plate readers are used and how long their data is kept.