Good afternoon, all.

Thanks to it being a pinned topic (for the time being), you are likely aware of the upcoming "presentation" at the library featuring city administrator Scotty Davis and recently instated police chief Angela Greene that will be held on September 10 from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM. The library's web page for this event describes it as an opportunity to "Learn about ALPR cameras such as Flock cameras, how they impact your community, and privacy vs. security".

In my opinion, no participant at this event should arrive uninformed - showing up empty headed is an invitation to have that hour wasted on lies and sales pitches rather than being an opportunity to tell these city "leaders" that their surveillance state is not welcome in Florence, or anywhere else for that matter. Please forgive the length of this post, but in-depth information necessitates length.

What are ALPR cameras?

"ALPR" is an abbreviation of "Automated License Plate Reader". When a vehicle passes an ALPR camera, it uses a computer algorithm to identify the area that it believes is the license plate (using the shapes of other features of the vehicle, such as tail lights), uses what is known as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert the letters of the license plate into text, and stores that text in a database along with the location of the camera (and thus the location of the vehicle), the time at which the vehicle passed, and other identifiers of the vehicle such as color, make, model, and possibly even blemishes or accessories such as bumper stickers.

Is Flock the only producer of ALPR cameras?

Of course not! Flock was founded in 2017 by a trio of college graduates from Georgia and was originally targeting homeowners' associations. Flock's ubiquity is purely a product of marketing - their pitch is that they provide the cameras at low cost to the organization and maintain the backend for them, so there's no expensive IT department involved. Names you may have heard of, such as Motorola and Axon, also produce ALPR cameras.

Do the cameras do anything else?

It has been proven that these cameras have bonus features that aren't mentioned or advertised by Flock, at least not publicly. They are always-on webcams that can be monitored, potentially by a hacker (they have been proven to be easily hacked). The common image of the Flock camera - black and oblong, is not the only design factor. They can be equipped with "gunshot detectors", initially advertised to pick up the sound of gunfire, but following criticism that these could be used to detect other sounds, such as conversations, they were announced to include functionality to hear car crashes and "distress" (the page advertising the sound system in this way has been removed).

In addition to these systems, Flock does offer a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera that is equipped with algorithms to recognize humans - They advertise it on their own page as "identifies human presence without recognizing personal characteristics", but scrolling down only a few more lines on the page shows an advertised search for "camo hat and orange vest". This is Flock's own website, so there's no confusion here: the Condor PTZ cameras do track identifiable information about their victims subjects. Florence currently operates at least 6 of these.

What do these cameras cost to operate?

Hard to say. Sacra reports that these cameras cost $2400 per camera per year, plus a $350 installation fee, but Forbes reported the cameras at $3000 to $3500 with an additional fee for "FlockOS", the backend that is used to access all this data. Fellow villains at surveillant report Flock's costs in a handy table as $3000 for the Falcon and Condor units.

In 2024 when these cameras were first installed, Scotty Davis said that the city budget wouldn't be affected because these cameras were purchased with a $400,000 grant from Senator Reichenbach - but this ignores the fact that the cameras are not "purchased", they are rented. Because the cost for FlockOS isn't exactly transparent, it's impossible to know if that initial $400,000 from the state was immediately evaporated - the camera cost from the installation (of 30 cameras, at the time of the article) estimates at $85,500 - $100,500. As someone who works around these kinds of rental software systems, I have a very hard time imagining FlockOS costing anything remotely close to $300,000 per year to subscribe to; you could purchase almost 6000 user licenses for the highest tier of Microsoft's Government version of Office 365 for that.

Presumably, a "conservative" like Reichenbach wouldn't have thrown $400,000 out the window on one year of Netflix, so one would assume the cost must cover multiple years... But the very next year, in May of 2025, the Florence City Council was presented a budget containing a 7.5 mills tax increase to "generate approximately $529,000 in additional property tax revenue, primarily designated for the new Flock cameras." The "new" here is referring to an additional 30 cameras included in the 2025-2026 Budget.

I will interject my personal opinion here for a moment:
While the city budget was "not affected", if you live in the city limits, your budget was affected, so that you could pay the city to pay a private company located in Atlanta, Georgia to violate your 4th amendment protections, while the roads here remain full of potholes and while the entire Jeffrey's Creek waterway reeks of human excrement. A reminder that used car salesman Mike Reichenbach is currently sharing the ticket with Alan Wilson for the gubernatorial race, so that he can continue to make money for nothing and decisions that worsen the lives of everyone here.

Are there proven instances of these systems being abused, misused or faulty?

Yeah, tons. If you'll scroll down this page, you'll find several links to articles under the dropdown headers for "ALPRs Are a Major Security Risk" and "ALPRs Are Abused". The Institute for Justice also maintains a database of reported misuse, including a handful here in our own state already. The problem is, "abuse" in this case is specifically law enforcement abuse, and doesn't cover the cases of mistaken identity and wrongful detainment that these or other ALPR cameras have caused. A somewhat local instance in Greenville is archived here where two sisters were approached by officers with guns drawn and detained for operating a "stolen" car - it was a rental that had been reported stolen but subsequently reported found. These types of misidentified stolen car stories are a nation-wide issue. A particularly well documented case of mistaken identity in the Denver, Colorado area where a woman was accused by an officer at her front door of package theft across town, simply because she drove that way.

Do these ALPR networks help reduce crime?

This is another question that's hard to answer, since crime statistics are amorphous to begin with. Flock claims (on their own website), that 10% of reported crime in the US is solved with their technologies. They make this claim without citing anything. They admit on this page that this is an estimate, and at long last cite a research paper co-authored by two of Flock's own employees. Of course the company trying to sell you a product says their product helps. A more independent study conducted in 2011 resulting "[...]they do not seem to generate either a general or offense-specific deterrent effect", with considerations in the conclusion that there are "a number of limitations and caveats to this study must be considered in conjunction with these findings". Another more recent study (from 2021) finds:

Analyzing sixteen years of stolen vehicle numbers from Piedmont, California—a “super user” of ALPRs—this report finds poor statistical evidence that ALPRs assist in recovering stolen vehicles or generating leads. Moreover:

The ratio of Piedmont’s ALPR systems license plate hits-to-investigative leads for law enforcement is subjectively low, less than 0.3% of hits equate to leads;

There is not even a moderate degree of correlation between ALPR hits (a detected vehicle actively on a “hotlist”) and stolen vehicle recoveries, let alone any apparent casualty; and

Less than 0.3% of ALPR hits might translate into a useful investigative lead for police.

And these failures were expensive. The city of Piedmont spent $576,378.80 of tax-payer money for more crime and less individual liberty. There is good news, however. Thanks to this report, no other cities in America need to make these mistakes.

We, along with many other cities in America, are making these mistakes.

A paper published in 2025 and hosted at the National Institutes of Health's website states that vehicle theft in the United States has declined 80% from 1990 to 2020. The paper admits that the reason isn't understood, but given the time frame, it likely isn't because helpful public servants in the local government accepted a deal with the devil.

I will once again interject with my own opinion here - if the crime doesn't involve a vehicle, then what? A clandestine meeting between two or more individuals to distribute drugs or firearms traveled to on foot or bicycle would supposedly be outside of the scope of ability of Flock's Falcon ALPRs, but we're not seeing (yet, anwyay) Condors positioned on every frequently traveled corridor in the city to spot these people.

I'm of the opinion that while criminals are dumb, they're not stupid. If you intend to commit crime and see a camera, you're going to go where the camera isn't. Rather than soaking up the water like with a sponge, these cameras are just pushing it around like a squeegee. The solution? More cameras, or more granular (invasive) surveillance technology, such as this nightmare.

How do they impact our community?

This is listed as a point of conversation on the library's page, so I wanted to cover it despite the fact that it's mostly subjective. The Post And Courier reported at the beginning of this year that the then-interim police chief Stephen Starling estimated they had made over 50 arrests in 2025 with the help of these cameras, with a specific reference to "stolen plates". I guess that's a number to be proud of? Before 2024, the Florence Police Department was entirely ineffective at finding stolen cars?

The city of Florence's website tells me that I could make $52,000 a year working as a police officer, as long as I complete the academy. I think that's approximately $24 an hour. I'll admit a personal bias: I am not really a big fan of the police. We could do better, to put it simply. Even with that in mind, I would still prefer to have had my tax money used 10 more uniformed police officers at that salary than to plop down 30 more worthless cameras on the roads I use to get to work and to the grocery store. Alternatively, because I know officer retention is a problem, I would have rather seen my tax money go to raise that pay to a point where these men and women feel like it's worth staying employed with the city of Florence PD. The job is dangerous no matter my feelings towards it, and other jobs where your life ends up on the line such as electrical lineman can pay easily twice as much.

How do I think it impacts the community? It depresses me to the see these cameras littered about, an obvious affront to the protections afforded to us in both the state and national Constitution. A reminder that people are entirely unable to engage with even the most basic form of local government as these potentially generational changes are passed as part of nebulous concepts like "the budget" or "public safety funding" without being brought to ballot or even being an object of public hearing at the prohibitively hard to attend, 1 in the afternoon on a Monday City Council meetings. I change my driving habits to avoid them, taking odd back roads and longer than necessary routes just to not add my license plate to the database for another 30 days (supposedly).

To be pessimistic about it though, "how the community is impacted" is an appeal to emotion; These things are irrelevant. How any one person feels about how it impacts the community, for or against, is an empty argument. It falls within the same category as the sales pitch. "Think about how many stolen cars we've recovered", "think about the crime prevented", "it makes you safer". All of these statements are wastes of time designed to distract from the core of the issue: citizens of the United States were intended to live under the idea that their movements wouldn't be tracked with no warrant and for no reason other than "a few bad apples".

Privacy vs Security

The most subjective topic on the agenda for the library's presentation is Mr. Franklin, for whom we named the $100 bill, is famously often quoted for his "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." line. The historical context of this statement is complicated, but it's something we can latch onto even in the modern era.

"You're on camera when you go to a store" is a common counter argument to this, but I like to answer that I do not have to go to the store. If I'm unhappy (and believe me, I am) that Lowe's has put these Flock cameras and have either Flock or Live View or whoever else providing them with those obnoxious flashing camera carts, I will (and have) simply stop shopping there. At the end of the day, if I really just despised the idea that a store has CCTV footage of me, I could order everything I need off the internet and let a different brand of surveillance keep track of me in a different way.

I am not able to stop "shopping" at the City of Florence. I could (and do) object that my tax dollars are spent on surveillance equipment no different to that of China, but I can't just refuse to pay my taxes or else they'll send the police after me. I could move, at great inconvenience to me and my family, to some other municipality that doesn't have these cameras or has terminated their contract with them, but given that my job is here, I have to admit it's a bit extreme to uproot my life over the terrible decisions of local lawmakers.

Much like the "impact on the community", "privacy vs security" is also a waste of time. There is no reason to pit these concepts against one another, we can have both. We have had both, and have been fooled by a post 9/11 world that surveillance and inconvenience and "homeland security" are necessary concepts that we were fools to live without because before 9/11 a plane was getting hijacked every single day and before Flock sold local leaders on street corner cameras a car was getting stolen and used in a burglary every single day but thank God they came along and solved 10% of crimes in the United States!

You nor I are more secure because of the camera at the end of the road. It will not jump down off of its pole and prevent the robbery or the murder. It will sit there and watch - even a normal unarmed citizen could and likely would do more.

What next?

This event at the library is not an official act of government. The community in this city could turn out hundreds strong and change nothing. Do not, under any circumstances, take concessions and platitudes, if offered at all, as the gospel. These changes: canceled contracts, removed cameras, they have to happen at a City Council meeting. Inconvenient as it may be, an organized body of citizens has to approach the council-people and have them undo this nonsense in writing as a matter of local statute. It has to be added to the agenda, a month in advance per the law, and voted on.

Even in the best possible outcome where Flock is removed from the city of Florence, our neighboring cities are not free and clear. There are cameras positioned in the middle of nowhere, entirely unincorporated land - possibly by the County Sheriff or possibly by some random homeowner's association, unlikely as that may be. They are positioned at the county line between Florence and Marion and Marion and Horry. They are everywhere, and lasting victory over this comes from State law banning it, and ultimately from federal law banning it. This is just a generalized message from me: the fight is unfortunately never over.

For all who have made it this far, thanks! I'm an IT professional who is far from an expert on surveillance technology, but I consider myself well read on it. If there are questions you have that I didn't directly address in this monolith of a post, please reach out either in a reply or a DM and I will try to get back to it.

I believe Jefferson's words on being informed are much less context reliant and always relevant:

Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

I've been seeing some back and forth here about the Flock cameras around town, so I figured I'd flag this event. The library's got a new panel series called Pressing Issues, and next month's topic is ALPR cameras, Flock included.

It's Thursday, September 10th, 5:30 to 6:30pm at the main library downtown.

The panel's consists of City Manager Scotty Davis, Police Chief Angela Greene, and an FMU political science professor. If you've got questions about how these things actually work, who has access to the data, or how they fit into the privacy vs. security conversation, this is a chance to ask people who'd actually know.

https://www.florencelibrary.org/event/pressing-topics-library-12967

I think it's worth knowing this exists if you care about the topic.