Frequently asked questions

That is the promise, and it is a fair one to weigh. Supporters — including Sheriff Chitwood — say the readers run against “hot lists” of stolen cars, wanted vehicles, and missing persons, that data is cleared after 30 days, and that misuse means firing and referral to the State Attorney.

But the cameras do not photograph only suspects. They photograph everyone, and log every law-abiding driver in order to find the few. A tool built to watch all of us, all the time, is a different thing from an officer following a specific lead. The question is not whether it ever helps — it is whether that help is worth building a permanent record of where every resident drives.

Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing — it is about not having to justify your ordinary life to the government. Where you worship, which doctor you visit, which gun shop or rally or lawyer's office you park outside: none of it is anyone's business by default, and a free country keeps it that way.

“Nothing to hide” also assumes the data is never misused. Across the country, officers have been caught using these systems to track ex-partners and political opponents. The safeguard against abuse is not trusting that it won't happen — it is not collecting the data in the first place.

Flock says its readers do not run facial recognition and capture vehicles rather than faces. That is worth noting — but a plate is tied to a name, and a running log of one car's movements identifies a person just as surely. The privacy concern is the location history, whether or not a face is ever matched.

More people than most residents assume. The data lives on the servers of a private, out-of-state company, and agencies across the country can query the network. Nationally, reporting has documented plate data flowing to federal agencies. Here at home, records show Volusia deputies ran a search against camera data captured in Sparks, Nevada — evidence that the sharing reaches far beyond the promise that our data stays local.

A single glimpse of your car in public is one thing. A system that records and stores everyone's movements, continuously, and lets the government retrace them later is something the Founders would have recognized instantly — the modern version of the general warrant. The writs of assistance that let the Crown search colonists without cause were among the grievances that sparked the Revolution.

The Supreme Court has already grown wary of exactly this. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court held that long-term location tracking can be a search requiring a warrant, precisely because aggregating everyday movements reveals the “privacies of life.”

Public safety matters — which is why the trade-off deserves an honest, public accounting rather than a quiet purchase. Independent research on ALPRs has found modest and inconsistent effects on crime, and departments rarely publish before-and-after data to back the claims. We are not asking anyone to ignore crime. We are asking that a mass-surveillance system be justified in the open, governed by written rules, and approved by the people who pay for it.

No. Contracts renew, budgets are voted on every year, and policies can be written or ended by the same officials who approved them. Cities from Austin, Texas to Ithaca, New York have paused or ended their Flock programs after residents showed up and asked hard questions. New Smyrna Beach can do the same — and with three seats on the 2026 ballot, residents have unusual leverage right now.

It is being contested. A Florida law firm has argued that Flock's contracts may violate state law — the company operating, in effect, as an unlicensed private-investigation business under Chapter 493. Whatever the courts ultimately decide, the fact that the legality is a live question is one more reason our officials should not have signed on without public debate.

We are New Smyrna Beach and Volusia County residents — not a national organization and not a political party. This is not about being for or against the police; it is about the rules a free people set for their own government. Good officers deserve clear policies and public trust as much as residents deserve their privacy. We are independent and volunteer-run, and not affiliated with Flock Safety or the DeFlock open-source mapping project, whose public data we cite with thanks.