Americans are cheering for vigilantes who take down Flock cameras

Americans have declared war on Flock cameras. They’ve protested them, damaged them, and destroyed them. This is only the beginning.

The spontaneous and decentralized nature of the vigilante protests is also what makes them difficult to suppress. There isn’t a uniform method of disruption; people have done everything from unplugging, smashing, stealing, and spray-painting the surveillance devices to taking less destructive actions like physically blocking the cameras for hours. Some of the culprits have been caught, but that clearly hasn’t dissuaded others from taking matters into their own hands.

Support for those taking drastic measures to get rid of the cameras has also become commonplace online. Last week, a police sheriff in Lumpkin County, Georgia, took to Facebook to announce a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever destroyed a Flock Safety camera installed near a local park. “I hope you’re happy with this. It was to keep our kids safe,” Sheriff Stacy Jarrard said in a video, admonishing the unknown perpetrators while unintentionally confirming what many people already knew: Police are using the cameras to do a lot more than simply give out speeding tickets.

The response was not what he was expecting. Jarrard’s post has since received more than 30,000 comments, the vast majority opposing the cameras and many mocking the police and even praising the vandals. “Looks like a Constitutional wind blew it over,” taunted one commenter. “Looks like somebody fixed it for you guys,” wrote another. Others congratulated the culprits, saying those taking direct action to remove the cameras in towns and cities across the US are “doing the lord’s work.” In response to the backlash, Jarrard changed his tone, posting a new video that admitted the need for privacy measures, but stopped short of promising the cameras would be taken down. “We need more safeguards in motion,” Jarrard said. “I’m going to listen to you.”

A few weeks earlier, in suburban New York, police reported a rash of vandalism against Flock cameras in Long Island’s Suffolk County, where four of the cameras had been unplugged, spray-painted, and run over with a car. An article about the incidents in the conservative publication New York Post also attracted a mass of comments opposing the cameras and supporting the people who destroyed them. “They’ve tried to put them up by my house, but someone keeps running them over,” one reader commented on the Post article. “I bet they have gone through a dozen, so far. Thanks to whoever is doing it.”

Support for Flock vigilantes has gone beyond internet comments. In one recent case, an Air Force engineer accused of cutting down 13 Flock cameras in Virginia has received over $44,000 for his legal defense from supporters via GoFundMe. In another, felony charges against an alleged Flock vandal in Ohio were dismissed after a grand jury declined to indict the suspect.

The fact that so many people seem to not only oppose the cameras but openly support those stealing and destroying them is a historically significant milestone for the anti-Big Tech movement. Activist historians often refer to this approach as a “diversity of tactics” — the idea that movements become stronger when they tolerate those taking extralegal direct action and reject narratives that divide them into “good” and “bad” protesters. As author Margaret Killjoy recently argued in a piece about Flock vandalism: “Social movements are effective specifically when there is solidarity between their broader base and the people who are committing criminal direct action. When social movements stand behind their criminals, they win.”

Flock camera destruction isn’t just popular — in some cases, it has also proven highly effective at getting rid of them. Earlier this month, police in Winona, Minnesota, said they would not reinstall the city’s eight Flock cameras after all of them were stolen, citing “growing concerns about trust in policing.” On August 3rd, following two incidents where Flock cameras were destroyed, police in Burnet County, Texas, announced that they had removed all Flock cameras from the area.

Like the widespread resistance to AI data centers, support for anti-Flock vigilantism is part of a rapidly growing public sentiment that cuts across geography and political allegiances. The cameras, which have been heavily criticized for their widespread abuse and for being deployed without public hearings or community approval, have quickly become another populist flashpoint of a growing bipartisan movement against tech industry excess. From coastal urban sprawls to rural areas in deep-red states, the message is clear: Folks absolutely despise these things and want them gone by any means necessary.

“Nonviolent direct action is a recognized and established tactic, and it’s unsurprising that we are seeing some people are resorting to that,” Alex Marthews, national chair of the nonprofit civil rights group Restore the Fourth, told The Verge. “They’re doing so because the whole structure for approval of surveillance technologies like this has been set up to minimize peoples’ control. Everything gets arranged by public safety people for public safety people, with an explicit intent of shutting the public out. … What do they expect to happen?” (Flock Safety did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.)

While Flock was initially advertised as an automatic license plate reader system (ALPR), in practice the AI-powered cameras are frequently used by police to track individual vehicles and people based on a wide range of identifying characteristics. In the past month alone, 18 cops in Georgia have been arrested for misusing Flock cameras. A steady stream of media stories has exposed police officers around the country who were stalking their romantic interests, spouses, and other innocent people using the cameras.

“People are seeing these cameras in their communities. They are hearing stories of police using them to stalk people. They are reading stories of the tech being used to target immigrants and people exercising their First Amendment rights — and folks are connecting the dots,” Chris Gilliard, an independent privacy researcher and author of the forthcoming book Luxury Surveillance, told The Verge.

There still isn’t any scientific data measuring the opposition to Flock nationwide, but smaller polls conducted by research groups and local media outlets show overwhelming opposition to the cameras. According to a recent poll by Spry Research in rural Tennessee’s Knox County, 58 percent of voters say they oppose Flock cameras, and half believe they violate the Fourth Amendment. And in an online poll by NBC News affiliate WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island, 83 percent said they opposed the deployment of Flock cameras in their city or town.

Politicians are beginning to catch on, including those from red states. Last month, a trio of House Republicans led by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) introduced a bill to prohibit the federal government from purchasing Flock cameras or similar technology. Republicans in Pennsylvania and West Virginia have put out statements opposing the cameras, with the former urging constituents to call their representatives and tell them to “Stop the Flock.” Legislation that would put warrant restrictions on Flock cameras or ban them outright has been proposed in multiple states, including Maine, Michigan, and Texas. And a man who was running for a seat in the Tennessee House of Representatives was recently arrested after allegedly shooting four different cameras with a gun.

Marthews says the bipartisan opposition to Flock across the country confounds the idea that privacy and civil rights are the exclusive purview of left-leaning communities.

“The MAGA base does not like this stuff. They do not like being intruded upon in matters intrinsic to their everyday life,” Marthews told The Verge. “If you’re talking about rural areas, you’re going to be driving everywhere. They don’t have a choice about whether to drive, and therefore they don’t have a choice about whether Flock is sucking up all this information about everywhere they go.”

Dozens of cities and counties across the US have now terminated, rejected, or declined to renew contracts with Flock Safety since the beginning of last year. In total, more than 130 cities have rejected ALPR systems, according to the site DeFlock, which maintains a map revealing the locations of Flock cameras across the country. Opposition to the technology is even impacting the real estate market — some homebuyers are using the DeFlock map to avoid buying property in areas where the cameras have been deployed. Even Flock CEO Garrett Langley has been forced to soften his stance toward anti-Flock activists. He recently apologized for comments in a previous interview where he referred to DeFlock as a “terroristic” group. He has also announced changes to the software.

Viet Trinh, a historian and professor of ethnic studies at Ohio State University who testified against Flock cameras in a recent hearing, says the public and performative nature of Flock vandalism is another aspect of its viral popularity.

“It’s not just that they see the camera and take it down. Even when the people who destroy these cameras are caught, there’s a public intrigue to it,” Trinh told The Verge. “The fact that nobody likes these cameras and that there’s someone out there willing to do something about it captures the public imagination.”

Gilliard doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that the vigilante actions against Flock cameras are occurring simultaneously with widespread protests against power-hungry data centers. In a sense, they are simply the most convenient and visible targets of a growing populist anger against Silicon Valley and its ongoing obsession with forcing AI and surveillance into every aspect of our lives. “It’s easier to deface a camera than it would be to smash Claude or ChatGPT,” said Gilliard.

Despite the recent momentum, advocates like Marthews worry that too much of the pushback is limited to Flock itself. Even now, competitors like Axon smell blood in the water, and they’re moving in to capitalize on the widespread public scrutiny of the company. It highlights what privacy advocates see as a critical vulnerability in the current tech backlash movement — the tendency to focus on one or two highly villainized companies instead of the technologies and systems themselves.

“A lot of this seems like anti-Flock rather than anti-surveillance,” said Gilliard. “Unfortunately as with most things, people often don’t feel moved unless a thing affects them personally. I think it’s an important moment because reformers are talking more and more about ‘guardrails,’ when the proper solution is abolition.”

Whatever form the pushback might take in the future, Flock has made clear that the popular anger against the tech industry isn’t confined to one political party — and those taking action aren’t being constrained by what is legal.

“There is this visceral understanding that this technology is a surveillance tech that more or less criminalizes anyone who drives a car or sits in a car,” said Trinh. “People who are on the right and normally support these punitive measures imagine that they don’t apply to them. But I think what’s happening with this tech is there’s now a very intuitive understanding that in this case, everyone is a criminal.”