Verona bagged Flock cameras after vendor resisted removal

A small municipal fight in Dane County, Wisconsin turns out to be a cleaner illustration of the vendor lock problem in networked surveillance than any think piece I have read this year. Verona, a town outside Madison, voted in November to stop using Flock's automated license plate readers. Getting the three cameras actually removed took months, and at one point it took trash bags.

According to reporting by 404 Media's Jason Koebler, who obtained the city's internal emails through a public records request, staff made repeated requests to Flock for removal and got back a work order that scheduled maintenance on the cameras instead. A Flock employee reportedly told city officials they were unsure whether the equipment could be remotely disabled. So in January, Mayor Luke Diaz had crews cover the lenses. The internal email spelled out the plan plainly: "For the time being, if you or someone on your crew has availability to secure black plastic bags (or something else) over the cameras, that would be great." Diaz told the Wisconsin Examiner that Flock "weren't removing them" and that he was "100% certain that they were still working, even after the contract ended." Only after the bags went on did Flock come take the equipment down.

The context behind the vote is what makes this more than a contract dispute. The council ended the program after officers elsewhere in the country accessed Verona's camera data on behalf of immigration agents, and at a November 10 council meeting residents raised concerns about federal targeting tied to immigration status or seeking abortion care. Verona wanted its residents out of that dataset. Flock, per its response in the 404 Media piece, blamed the delay on Verona choosing not to renew rather than terminating mid-term, a distinction the emails suggest the city did not accept.

The honest caveat is that the reporting does not include a technical audit proving the cameras were still transmitting after the contract ended. Diaz's confidence is a mayor's inference, not a packet capture, and the maintenance work order could be a scheduling artifact rather than a stall. What the emails do prove is that a municipality could not, on its own authority, be sure a piece of surveillance hardware bolted to its own poles was off.

The interesting move for other city councils is procurement. If your ALPR vendor's exit clause does not include a hard removal deadline, a customer-triggered disable, and something like proof-of-shutdown, you have signed up to be a Verona. The garbage bag is the workaround. The contract is the actual fix.