Asheville and Oconee County voted to end their Flock contracts days apart
In the liberal Blue Ridge Mountain city of Asheville, N.C., progressives fear the Trump administration could use Flock Safety cameras to spy on political dissidents, transgender residents and undocumented immigrants. In the foothills 95 miles south, Republicans in conservative Oconee County, S.C., view the same AI-enabled license-plate readers as a threat to constitutional privacy rights and have even read aloud from the Federalist Papers at tense public meetings.
Asheville police installed their first Flock cameras in February 2025, which didn’t require a vote of the City Council. Eleven cameras went up within a quarter-mile of locations with high rates of violent crime. The devices burst into the public consciousness in April at “Nerd Nite,” a local gathering touted as an opportunity to discuss “random stuff while drinking.” At a brewery in the River Arts District, patrons listened with alarm as a hacker known as “Colonel Panic” described Flock cameras and governments “perfecting the art of watching you.”
The City Council was preparing to vote on accepting a $1.14 million federal grant to open a “real-time intelligence center” where officers could review photos from Flock and video footage from police body cameras, drones and other devices. After the Nerd Nite presentation, union organizer Jen Hampton recalled asking the room: “What do y’all think if we all showed up at City Council and said, ‘Hell no, we don’t want this?’” The Council approved the grant.
A motley crew of abortion-access activists, hackers and public-records experts spent the summer organizing in an encrypted chat. “Nobody wants to be surveilled,” Hampton said, including conservatives “out there in the hollers.” She added, “Doesn’t matter what your political leaning is.” Word spread. “Big Brother is watching you” signs appeared near cameras. One camera was fitted with a cover called a “Flock sock.” Others were spray-painted, cut down or struck by cars.
Asheville’s mayor, facing a challenge from Roney, scheduled a vote in late August to disable the cameras. Restaurant worker Bobby Skelton, wearing a battle vest with a “Nazi Lives Don’t Matter” patch, stepped to the microphone and delivered a rant against “mass surveillance.” Skelton said he was surprised to find himself aligned with the political right. “I disagree with probably every Republican on the face of the planet,” he said.
Asheville resident James Risner told the Council that law enforcement in the Atlanta area had held his husband at gunpoint after a license-plate reader flagged the Lyft they were riding in. “It is frankly very tough to talk about,” he said.
Asheville police credit Flock with helping recover hundreds of stolen vehicles, find children abducted by relatives, and advance investigations, including after a July 4th-weekend shooting. The City Council voted 5-2 to end the Flock contract. The two dissenters, the Council’s two Black members, said their constituents in public housing worry about crime. At one such housing-authority complex, Pisgah View, resident Carolyn Vandruff, a retired flagger for a construction crew, said she doesn’t care about the privacy implications, as long as the four nearby cameras help prevent and solve the drug deals and other crime she sees from her front porch. Ella Santos, the housing authority’s CEO, said Flock and a new police partnership helped lower violent crime 38% so far this year, compared with the same period over a five-year average. The authority’s 10 Flock cameras, owned by the county, aren’t being removed, she said.
Ninety-five miles south, in Oconee County, where about three in four voters supported Trump in 2024, a parallel backlash was under way. In a region dotted with Southern Baptist churches, county leaders have historically focused on small government, constraining taxes and supporting police. County Council Chairman Matthew Durham, a self-described constitutional conservative who works as a nuclear-reactor operator, learned from residents in March that the county had Flock cameras, some in place since 2022. But Durham was soon being stopped by constituents angry about the cameras. Flock had signed contracts with law enforcement without local votes, he said, which only fueled the blowback. He posted on Facebook: “Your county government should protect your rights, not help other entities surveil you. We’re about to have that conversation in Oconee County.”
Valerie McCarthy, a leader in the Oconee County Republican Party, began filing public-records requests from her home office, sitting next to a copy of the Constitution and a teddy bear wearing a Trump T-shirt. In August, she was alarmed to learn from the sheriff’s department that it had suspended an officer for a day in 2022 for using Flock to investigate colleagues. Her friend, Lauren Ballard, a fellow Christian conservative, launched a DeFlock chapter. “I just felt spiritually motivated to do something,” Ballard said.
They formed an unlikely alliance with Abe Connally, a retired computer programmer and Democrat who had already mapped 25 Flock cameras in the county. Connally, accustomed to being the local “crazy leftist” on many issues, noticed that opposing Flock suddenly got his emails answered by council members. The trio started posting together online to raise awareness. They highlighted cases of police misuse elsewhere, such as officers stalking romantic partners, and explained how Flock’s system can create “heat maps,” showing where a vehicle has been over time. They combed through contracts and audit logs. “It gives me goosebumps that people can still find something in common and work together,” McCarthy said.
Last month, Durham introduced the “Protection From Mass Surveillance Ordinance,” which doesn’t mention Flock by name but would pull funding from municipalities that continue to use the company’s cameras. McCarthy, Ballard and Connally met in person for the first time at a Sept. 1 hearing and sat together, practically giddy. Clemson students from the conservative Young Americans for Liberty held signs reading “Make Orwell Fiction Again.” The measure passed a second reading 4-1. Afterward, the three new political allies celebrated outside in the pine-scented night air, saying the ordinance’s passage was only a first step and that their campaign would continue. On Tuesday, the ordinance passed a final vote, and the next day Durham began unplugging and putting plastic bags over the county’s cameras. The fate of others rests with municipalities.
Although local crime has been falling since before Flock cameras arrived, Sheriff Mike Crenshaw said his department’s five cameras have helped solve “70-plus” cases, including the kidnapping of a 9-year-old girl, a carjacking of a Clemson University student and a homicide. “I hope we can get to a point legislatively on a national level that law enforcement can use this technology as intended,” said Crenshaw, who would support requiring warrants to access vehicle data. “This is not a Democrat or a Republican issue.”
In Seneca, the county’s largest city, Police Department Investigator Mike Teramano showed a Wall Street Journal reporter how Flock works. Standing at his office computer, Teramano searched for his own license plate, instantly generating a map showing where he and his partner had driven past Flock cameras in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia in the past 30 days. Meanwhile, a window on his screen showed that other law-enforcement agencies, some from as far away as Michigan, were constantly searching Seneca’s network. In the past month, Seneca’s department’s four cameras captured more than one million vehicle reads in the city of 9,500. That included 197,000 unique vehicles, meaning many were photographed multiple times.
Durham, the council chair, conceded Flock’s usefulness, but the scope of such searches troubled him. “We have restraints on government for a reason,” he said.
The opposition has spread into statehouses and Congress. Independent U.S. Senate candidate in Montana Seth Bodnar on Monday posted a video of himself shooting a Flock-style camera. Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said he would “welcome” a ban. Republican governors in Texas and Florida moved to restrict them, and a bipartisan group in Congress introduced the “Flock-Off Act” to bar local governments from buying them with federal funds.
Asheville resident Taylor Nicks, 48, said he was troubled to learn that the recording device outside his coffee shop was installed without local input. “It seems like data centers and Flock cameras are the only things we can agree on,” he said. Roney, the Asheville council member, said: “Appalachian people don’t trust the government for a lot of reasons.” Durham, the Oconee chairman, put it this way: “Government has got to be restrained.” He called the question “a 90-10 issue.”
Flock CEO Garrett Langley has acknowledged the criticism but said the company continues to grow. Flock recently added safeguards to prevent misuse.