The city that fought Flock

It was about to be a long night in Huntington, West Virginia. Mayor Patrick Farrell stood before 10 members of city council in a white dress shirt and dark blazer studded with an American flag pin. Behind him sat his constituents and residents from neighboring towns. Some had their arms crossed, while others held a steady glare in his direction. Less than a week before the July 13th meeting, a 33-year-old named Jackie Harper had been shot and killed in Huntington. It was the kind of crime Farrell had promised to get under control. But a breakthrough in the case just days after the killing suggested something promising to Farrell. Harper’s suspected killer, said the mayor, had been found in another state — and it was Flock cameras that helped track him down. The network of automated license plate reader technology, Farrell said, had also helped find a suspect in another tragic double killing earlier in the year of a beloved middle school basketball coach and his brother, a city worker. “Take that in just this year, and then take it back to all of the cold cases that we have,” Farrell said, referencing an unsolved case from more than 20 years ago where four teens were killed in Huntington on their prom night. Shortly after the gruesome shooting, police said they suspected it was linked to crack cocaine dealers from Detroit. To this day, officials still point to a stubborn flow of drugs from Michigan as the central scourge of the community. The prom night murders remain unsolved. “Think about what might have happened had we had this technology,” Farrell pleaded. For the next seven hours, that’s what dozens of residents of Huntington and surrounding areas imagined as they stepped up to the microphone to address the city council. Their vision of a Flock-filled future sounded far more bleak. Individuals’ rights to privacy would be trampled. They would be stalked and surveilled. Perfectly legal day-to-day activities could be subject to abuse by Flock itself or rogue police officers with access to its recordings. Sometime after 2AM, a few speakers simply read from George Orwell’s 1984, passing a copy of the book back to the next person in line who wanted it, committed to keeping councilmembers up and looking into their own crystal ball as long as they could. Several members of the city council shared their concerns. Language in the proposed contract was not as tight as they would have liked to protect the city, potentially opening it up to lawsuits, a few warned. And given how strongly opposed so many residents seemed to be — both at the meeting and in private outreach in the days leading up to the vote — even if the technology might be helpful, was it really necessary to vote right now? [Image: Noah Jasper Gibson poses for a portrait outside Po-Boy’s Tires. Farrell told the officials that he was inspired to bring Flock to Huntington after speaking with other mayors at a conference who said the tool was the key thing that helped them to reduce crime. “Have you spoken with the mayors of any cities who have canceled their contracts with Flock?” one councilmember asked. “I have not,” said the mayor. But amid hours of argument against the contract, the majority of the council remained unconvinced. They approved the resolutions that would let Farrell enter Huntington into business with Flock, 6-4. After an initial vote rejecting a motion to table the contract indefinitely, a camera recording the live stream of the meeting began to shake. “Is that thunder?” the council chair asked. Someone off-screen responded, mentioning the constituents watching in an upstairs auditorium. “That’s your taxpayers.” Huntington, several locals tell me, is a place where people would give you the shirt off their back. Every interview during my visit seems to end with a lengthy list of restaurants to try and a firm request that I reach out if I need help with anything else at all. It’s a fairly spread-out city dotted with a popular downtown food hall, quaint shopping areas, a city park, and anchored by Marshall University, which is led by the former CEO of Intuit. A state delegate I meet, Ryan Browning, describes it as a “small town” with a “big city feel,” and he lights up talking about the local summer concert series and his favorite cafe that turned him into a coffee drinker. On the weekend I visit, everyone seems to be walking around in kelly green in preparation for Marshall’s Division 1 NCAA football team’s home opener, at a stadium that can host more than 38,000 people — just about 7,000 shy of the city’s own population. “I think what makes Huntington a very special little pocket of West Virginia is the people in the community and how they’re just ready to roll up their sleeves,” Holly Smith Mount, a Marshall alumna and city councilmember who voted against the Flock contract, tells me. Part of that is the fact that the city has “had our share of tragedies,” she says. It’s grappled with a series of large floods, a plane crash in the ’70s that killed 37 members of the Marshall football team alongside coaches and staff (and became the subject of the movie, We Are Marshall, starring Matthew McConaughey), and a drug epidemic that has rattled the community for years. The Cabell-Huntington Health Department found in 2015 that drug overdose was the third-leading cause of death in Cabell County, which encompasses much of Huntington. Following a 2018 study, Johns Hopkins University researchers said the county had the highest opioid overdose rate in the state. But because of that, it’s also a place with a lot of tenacity. “I know a lot of people who are barely making it, even including myself, a lot of Gen Z people,” says Noah Jasper Gibson, a young musician I meet while he’s protesting Flock. “Even though their situation’s hopeless, they’re still making the best of it. They’re still out protesting after working 12 hours. They’re still donating their money when they have almost nothing left to give … I think it’s the spirit of those who strive for more that makes Huntington what it is.” Longtime Huntingtonian Brian Trippett, who goes by the moniker “The Front Porch Conservative” on his local streaming talk show, says there’s “a certain amount of lovable curmudgeoniness to our city.” That might explain why Farrell, when asked after the vote on the Flock contract about his constituents’ reactions, described those who opposed it as part of “a very loud and vocal minority.” On the other side, he added, “is the silent majority.” He said he’s heard from hundreds who support the contract. There may well be hundreds, if not thousands, of Huntingtonians who’d rather bring Flock to town than not. But on my brief visit, I see far more than a few people who oppose it, and most people I meet struggle to put a finger on who this silent majority is. A councilmember who voted in favor of the resolutions, Rob Archer, tells me that he encounters more Flock supporters in person than he sees online, but he also regularly meets constituents who disapprove of it. One group of Huntingtonians is betting they can prove Farrell wrong by putting it to a vote. They’re aiming to get enough signatures — at least 10 percent of registered voters — for a ballot initiative that would effectively void the Flock contract and bar the government from replacing it with a competing service. [Image: Flock automated license plate reader cameras have been popping up across the country. As of mid-September, the Huntington Community Action Group (HCAG) said it had 1,600 signatures after a little over a month of canvassing. It aims to collect 4,000, giving it some buffer for the roughly 2,700 needed to force a city council vote on their proposal. Success would start a clock on a process that could put the proposed ban to a citywide vote. If the city council rejects or alters the ordinance, as expected, it will get put to a vote within a year. If there’s no election that year, it would get its own ballot. It’s “one of those popcorn emoji moments,” Mount says. She finds it exciting to see the democratic process in action. “I don’t want to sit there ‘til four in the morning again,” she says, “but I will if I have to. I absolutely will if I have to.” It was the first Tuesday of July, less than a week before the marathon city council meeting, and Mount paid a visit to the Huntington Police Department with her fellow Democratic councilmember Tia “Fix” Rumbaugh. Mount and Rumbaugh, alongside other city councilmembers, had been invited to the police department for a tech demonstration. In a letter from the city’s chief data officer on June 25th, Flock’s name was not mentioned. It invited the members to “an informational meeting” about two resolutions dealing with the “proposed purchase” of a suite of devices for the police force. Members would receive a “detailed overview” of what the tools could do, and the anticipated data security and privacy protections that would come with them. By the time of the demonstration, there had been reports about police misuse of the database, and neighboring cities employed the technology, but the nationwide crescendo of pushback that broke out this summer had not yet peaked. So on Tuesday, July 7th, Mount and Rumbaugh went in relatively fresh to the demo, where they were joined by Republican councilmember Todd Sweeney, Police Chief Phil Watkins, his deputy, and a screen full of Flock employees ready to present how their technology could help Huntington fight crime. Over a slide deck, Flock representatives discussed the scale of its reach in other police departments and described the basics of each of its technologies. Flock’s most well-known tool is its automated license plate reader (ALPR), which uses AI to help identify vehicles by specific characteristics, as well as partial or full license plate numbers. What makes Flock’s offering unique is its nationwide network, which lets local police departments search not only their own cameras, but those of others who have opted in. Police can track a single vehicle often in real time, which they say can be a valuable tool, especially in time-sensitive cases like kidnappings. The city didn’t pursue a bidding process for the contract, Rumbaugh recalls being told, because no other tool can replace what Flock offers. But as reports at law enforcement agencies across the country have demonstrated, Flock’s unique selling point can also make it uniquely vulnerable to abuse. Officers have been reportedly caught using Flock to track exes or harass residents who have not been suspected of committing a crime. Following a national uproar, Flock updated some of its policies and defaults to safeguard its systems from this kind of abuse. But critics like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) say the protections do not go nearly far enough, and that the expansive use of such tools threatens to degrade civil liberties. Still, as Flock shared the crime-fighting possibilities in Huntington, the promise seemed almost irresistible. “The picture that was painted in the presentation was beautiful,” Mount says. She coached at the middle school and was friends with the fellow coach who was killed in the shooting earlier this year. “I couldn’t help but think, If we had this, would that not have happened?” she says. She got choked up during the presentation. Flock, she says, assured her they could absolutely help prevent such crimes. “And I thought, if this is the silver bullet that we need to fix the problems with drug trafficking … show me where to sign.” Rumbaugh, however, had begun typing on her phone under the table, trying to find out more about the company. She saw reports about vandalism of the cameras, and anticipated residents furthest to the political left would be most upset. This was about to be a partisan fight, she thought. Yet seeing Mount, a fellow Democrat and ally on city council, have such a visceral positive reaction made Rumbaugh worry she was out on her own. “My state of mind was, ‘This is going to be a problem,’” Rumbaugh says. “‘Everybody is going with it, and I am outnumbered.’” When, Rumbaugh recalls asking the city and police officials, would this technology come up at city council? If it were up to Farrell, she recalls them answering, it would have already been done. The next day, the council released its agenda for the following Monday’s meeting, and the Flock resolutions were on it. If passed, they’d allow the city to enter into a contract. Though Mount left the tech demo dreaming of what-ifs, more practical questions soon settled in. As a self-described “data and tech nerd” with a nursing informatics degree, she began researching the company and its claims about resolving and deterring crimes. She was unimpressed by Flock’s own studies of its impact, wanting a longer observation period and independent, peer-reviewed assessment. Could it have really caught her friend’s alleged killer before the act? The suspect had a criminal history but wasn’t currently wanted for a crime, so he was unlikely to be on a hot list flagging his whereabouts before the shooting. “So how would they have known?” Mount asks. [Image: Huntington Community Action Group members setting up their table for a drive-through canvassing event at Po-Boy’s Tires. ”Flock has consistently responded to requests from West Virginia State Delegates and Huntington city leaders to explain how Flock LPR technology works and to address common questions and concerns. We have been transparent about what the technology does and does not do, and we will continue providing factual information to lawmakers and the public,” Flock spokesperson Courtney Terlecki said in a statement. Terlecki called Flock’s technology “an investigative lead” that “captures point-in-time images of vehicles in public places,” and said that in West Virginia this year, its automated license plate readers sent alerts about 21 missing people and over 900 stolen plates or vehicles. Terlecki also pointed to two other cases in West Virginia where Flock was credited with finding a missing child and locating a murder suspect in another state. As Mount’s analytical side began sowing skepticism, she and Rumbaugh were also hearing from constituents. First, from the regulars who are highly engaged in local politics. Then, from constituents who rarely reach out. “The floodgates opened,” Mount says. “I have never received as many correspondences from constituents on any other topic.” Though she eventually stopped counting, Mount estimates she got over a hundred messages on the subject, with “less than a handful” in favor of Flock. Rumbaugh says the level of fear reminded her of the pandemic. “I think our residents feel like they just have no control over it, and not having control is terrifying,” she says. Rumbaugh, meanwhile, was poring over the initial contract language with growing trepidation. “I was like, ‘Red flag, red flag, red flag,’” she says. The privacy policy pointed to a URL that she worried could be changed at any time, rather than a static commitment. Legal conflicts would be resolved on Flock’s home turf of Atlanta, rather than in West Virginia where the technology would be installed. And while the city attorney addressed some of her concerns, she still worried about the impact of the technology and the safety of her constituents’ data. At some point between the demo and the city council meeting, Mount and Rumbaugh spoke on the phone. Rumbaugh recalls Mount sounding distressed. She felt misled by Flock. Rumbaugh realized she may no longer be alone in her fight, but the resolutions were still likely to pass. “It felt like entering a losing battle,” Rumbaugh says. “But that doesn’t mean that you stop.” Shortly after 4PM the Friday before the vote, a Facebook post from ACLU-WV investigative reporter Kyle Vass lit another match. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, Vass had obtained hundreds of pages of emails between the police department and Flock, going back months. About to leave for a music festival, Vass pored over what he could and posted the rest to his Facebook page for others to mine. It was reshared nearly 700 times. For Mount, “the glass started to crack” with those documents. She realized the city was already talking to Flock by the time the council approved a line item for public safety capital expenditures — the one that would be used to fund the contract. Farrell’s budget requested $1.5 million for “other equipment” pertaining to public safety, on a line that had been blank in the 2026 budget, and just $169,000 the year before. And as Rumbaugh spent hours reading and answering comments on Vass’ post and on her own page, she noticed some of her usual right-wing “trolls” sounding a note of agreement. “When I noticed that these MAGA conservatives were equally upset about Flock, it made me sit up,” she says. “That’s when I knew it was bigger than I had previously thought.” The vote was barreling ahead on Monday. Mount planned to raise a motion to table the discussion altogether. At the meeting, Rumbaugh supported the motion, but it failed. Both were left wondering: What’s the rush? The empty lot of Po-Boy’s Tires didn’t strike me as the ideal place to collect signatures. The used tire shop is on the corner of a residential block and is made up of two structures reminiscent of converted shipping containers painted red. “Po-Boy’s Used Tires” is spray-painted on their sides in big bubble letters in black with a white shadow, and piled-up tires mark an entrance of sorts. Soon after I arrive, some of the HCAG volunteers I’m shadowing begin to trickle in, some wearing bright yellow T-shirts that say “GET THE FLOCK OUT.” They set up a table with fliers and distribute clipboards on which they’ll collect signatures. Then, they get to work. [Image: Dennis Gibson, who describes himself as a “huge conservative,” is no fan of Flock. As the evening traffic picks up, I begin to understand the logic behind this spot. For the next two to three hours, nearly a dozen volunteers stand by the side of the road with signs and clipboards, waving down cars to sign their petition. “Stop Flock, sign here,” one sign says. Another has a cut-out picture of Farrell’s face with a speech bubble that says “Let us spy on you!” On the wide thoroughfare, there’s consistent honking by drivers cheering on the effort. At one point, a police officer on a motorcycle looks bemused as he drives by. Volunteers begin directing a steady stream of cars into the Po-Boy’s lot, handing the clipboards through car windows after asking if they’re registered to vote in Huntington. Signatories come from all kinds of backgrounds. Dennis Gibson is an Army veteran with a long white beard and leather jacket full of patches celebrating the US Army, the Second Amendment, and Harley-Davidson. Standing next to his sleek black motorcycle, he tells me he’s a “huge conservative” who actually voted for Farrell. Now, he believes the mayor to be “a Democrat in sheep’s clothing” due to his support of Flock. Gibson says he’s “totally against” Flock and worries about degrading residents’ privacy rights. For the $2.1 million the city is spending on the technology, he says, they could likely solve more crimes by getting more cops on the street, though several councilmembers have warned me police recruitment has gotten harder. At some point in the evening, a man wearing sunglasses and long hair tied back shows up with what looks, at least from a few feet away, like a cut-down Flock camera. On closer inspection, it’s a hyper-realistic replica that its maker, a carpenter named Josh Pickens, says he constructed in 30 minutes from PVC pipe, cardboard, duct tape, and spray paint. There’s a real solar panel attached to the top, that is actively charging his phone. “The cell phone’s zip-tied to the whole thing so that it can’t be ripped away or anything,” he tells me while standing on a platform where he can hoist the pole into view across the street. “So I can actually record stuff if I wanted to.” Pickens wears a cardboard sign strung around his neck that reads “FUCK FLOCK,” recognizing his craft project might be mistaken for the real thing otherwise. “I figured people need to see what they’re mad at.” Pickens, who lives in a neighboring town, describes himself as apolitical; his last major protest was an encampment for the Occupy movement around 2011. He first learned about Flock last winter, when he saw the cameras in his hometown in Illinois. “I have firsthand experience of feeling uncomfortable as shit,” he says. So when he learned about the vote in Huntington, he says, “I was just like, ‘No, you can’t have that. Not here.’ West Virginia’s supposed to be too wild and wonderful to have this surveillance crap.” Candy Tapp, one of the volunteers in the yellow HCAG shirts, tells me between her clipboard duties that she just recently registered to vote, motivated to sign the petition. “I’m really totally for this,” she says. “I want the police to get off their butts and do their job. They don’t need these cameras to do their job.” When it’s time, she says, “by George, I’m ready to vote.” A few of the volunteers are musicians; they’re holding a “Rock Against Flock” concert the next day, organized to raise awareness for the petition. Michael “Roofus” Riley Jenkins wears a T-shirt littered with holes — I’ll later watch him rip it off his chest mid-performance with his band, Roofus and the Rex. At the canvassing event, he tells me he’s occasionally recognized around town for his sign-off at the marathon city council meeting: “I’m not going to waste your time — I’m kind of hungry. But one last thing. Every single Flock camera has about two to three pounds of copper and about one to two grams of gold. Do with that information what you will.” Jenkins says he doesn’t really have a political affiliation but that his philosophy is best described as “killdozer-esque libertarian socialist.” Or, put another way, “I believe in having gay Muslim immigrants protect their weed farms with guns.” Still, he says the Flock vote was the first city council meeting he showed up to. “This whole situation just kind of lit a fire up under my ass,” he says. One silver lining? He’s found something in common with his Trump-supporter parents. “The only good thing to come out of this is the fact that I can talk to Republicans again.” After the meeting, Jenkins posted a song he wrote on Instagram. “The mayor thinks he sees a vocal minority, but I think we all know the truth,” he sang. “It’s about the money in his pockets. Flock you.” When I attend the concert the next day, he and his band perform from the side of his front porch to a crowd of at least a couple dozen people in what feels like some combination of a backyard party, performance, and protest. “We’re here because the government decided against what the people want,” he shouts into the microphone, punctuated by a drum and shouts in response from the crowd. “And we the people are the ones who are going to take the power back.” [Image: Josh Pickens created a faux-Flock camera with PVC pipe, cardboard, duct tape, and spray paint. Jasper Gibson, who also sings at the concert, tells me he wanted to communicate that all hope is not lost just because of the city council vote. “You have a purpose. There’s a fight that can be had. We can make stuff happen,” he says. From the porch, he introduces a song he says he wrote when he was 14 about “helicopter parents” who are always watching, telling you what you can or can’t do. It applies nicely to the current situation, he says. “You call it backtalk, I call it free speech,” the song goes. Back at Po-Boy’s, the steady honking throughout the evening is certainly loud. The volunteers and signatories are vocal. “I don’t know too many that are for it,” Gina Carr tells me through her window after signing the petition. The volunteers fold up their table and collect their clipboards as the traffic finally dies down. They estimate they collected well over 100 signatures tonight. If they reach their goal of 4,000 signatures, they’ll get the chance to show if they’re the majority, too. “I don’t want my kids to grow up with stories of, ‘Oh, this used to be a great place 50 years ago,’” Jenkins tells me. “I want my kids to experience this as a great place to live now. Because I am a West Virginian. I’m a proud West Virginian. I want to die a proud West Virginian, and I want to raise hell and praise Dale until people actually start to fucking listen to what West Virginians have to say.” Making Huntington safer was always a core pillar of Farrell’s pitch to become mayor. “Public safety is priority number one, and it begins with strong support for law enforcement,” he wrote in a Substack post while running for office in 2024. That includes focusing on the drugs that flow into the city and have fueled addiction among some residents. Earlier this year, while the Huntington Police Department was engaging in talks with Flock, Farrell released a public safety dashboard on the city website. “The people of Huntington should be able to see the same trends and patterns city leaders use to understand what is happening in our community, while understanding that some information must remain confidential for public safety,” he wrote on his Substack. “Transparency should not be an afterthought. It should be the starting point.” Farrell is a clean-cut Huntington native, whose tie-less blazer and button-down look at city council is still a touch more formal than the councilmembers’ attire. He’s the son of a nurse / hospice executive and a judge. “I was raised by a nurse’s heart and judge’s sense of justice,” Farrell told the West Virginia Chamber. Farrell served almost a decade in the Air Force and then pursued his MBA at Duke University, becoming optimistic about the impact he could make through running businesses. When he returned to Huntington, he ran a clean water solutions company and joined several boards, including Marshall University’s board of governors, where he helped recruit former Intuit CEO Brad Smith to lead the institution. City Hall spokesperson Chrisa Hayes declined The Verge’s request to interview Farrell for this article, saying he wouldn’t be commenting on the ballot measure effort. Hayes did not respond to a detailed list of questions seeking comment on this article. Farrell’s vision for Huntington, according to past interviews and campaign materials, is for the city to become a thriving, safe place, where residents feel they need not look elsewhere for opportunity. So when Farrell attended a conference for newly elected mayors in December 2024, just before taking office, he was keen to figure out what other cities were doing to improve public safety. This, he’s said, is the first time he learned about Flock. [Image: HCAG member Candy Tapp talks about how many signatures she collected. To Farrell, it seemed, the thing that cities lowering their crime rates had in common was this networked surveillance technology. He heard about it again at another meeting of the mayors in the summer of 2025, the first year he was officially in office. Around that fall, he told local TV station WSAZ in an interview that he approached Watkins, the Huntington police chief, about exploring using Flock’s technology. Farrell told WSAZ that Watkins did nine months of due diligence, rebuffing the idea that the process was rushed. In a lawsuit filed after the city council vote, the ACLU claimed City Hall had still skipped relevant steps to put the process in place. But the mayor maintains that he’s been listening. “I am not surprised that people have very sincere concerns about privacy,” he told WSAZ. “For eight and half hours I had ears open” at the city council meeting, he said, hearing 50 people speak out. But “just because you come to city council and you speak out, doesn’t mean you speak for the majority of the city,” he said. Throughout the interview, he referred to a separate group of constituents: the silent majority. Farrell said he’d privately heard from religious leaders and business people who perhaps find the technology “creepy” but understand its potential benefits and accept the trade-offs. But when I speak to even supporters of the mayor, they don’t seem to personally know many of those people. “I haven’t heard anybody really clamoring for this,” says David Williams, better known around Huntington as Alligator Jackson, the moniker of a popular Facebook page where he posts updates about local happenings. He can’t think of many people who support the contract, except for “one guy who messaged me all the time. He ain’t that silent.” Williams describes himself as a friend of the mayor’s and initially says he’s neutral on Flock coming to Huntington. He sees the fight as a continuation of past squabbles between the mayor and more liberal residents over issues like funding a homeless shelter or an animal refuge. “I think it more or less threw the proverbial gasoline on the fire and ignited it,” he says. But as we speak, Williams, too, admits he’s “not in favor” of the technology. “We’ve been getting by without it,” he says. “I think it’s a little bit overkill, especially with everything that’s going on… why do we want to get into something that everybody else is trying to get out of?” Williams, like many others I spoke with, worries about a slippery slope of allowing expansive surveillance to become the norm. His first concern was that Flock could be used to track down residents for minor traffic violations in an effort to raise money through tickets. Williams said Farrell assuaged this concern in a private meeting, saying he was laser-focused on using the cameras to crack down on “cartel-level drug activity” in the city. Flock could be used to track down drug traffickers as soon as they cross into Huntington. “It just seems all iffy to me,” Williams says. “It’s just a slippery slope.” He and many others wonder: Why the rush? Williams is a recreational therapist who works regularly with people experiencing addiction, and he says Huntington’s problems with drugs span well over a decade. While his “Alligator Jackson’s Inside Huntington WV” page now shares a mix of local news, restaurant openings, and community events, he started it around 2011 to warn residents about an addiction epidemic he’d seen firsthand. “They’re acting like there’s a keen sense of urgency, and I don’t understand what the sense of urgency is because that would’ve been great 10, 15 years ago. But now it’s not as bad as what it was,” he says. Jason Arthur, chair of the city council’s public safety committee who voted to approve the contract, believes “not as bad” is still unacceptable. “My mindset is operation zero,” he says. Yes, the city’s own public safety dashboard shows violent crime was down 30 percent in the first six months of the year compared to 2025, but that’s not good enough. “Is one murder better than five murders? Absolutely, but it’s still a murder.” Farrell insists that though the Flock contract is multiyear, it’s funded annually, so the city council could simply choose to stop funding it after one year if it doesn’t work as expected. But at least under the current budget, the money allocated for the Flock contract couldn’t simply be rerouted to other issues like funding the animal shelter, says Arthur, because it was set aside specifically for law enforcement equipment. Arthur and Archer, the city council vice chair who also voted in favor of the contract, both say they’ve heard from this quiet faction that Farrell insists exists. Arthur says he listens to the residents who show up at city council, but like the mayor, cautions they aren’t necessarily representative of all of Huntington. “When I make decisions like this, especially with public safety, I think of the people that are voiceless,” Arthur says. “So I’m thinking of our elderly, I’m thinking of our children.” [Image: Noah Jasper Gibson, Michael “Roofus” Riley Jenkins, and Bobby Adkins III pose with their guitars. Archer says most of the emails he’s gotten about Flock have been negative, but the opinions of people who approach him in person are varied and often lean more positive. As an associate principal and wrestling coach at the local high school, Archer says he can instantly tell when someone approaches him at a game or event to bring up Flock. “They walk up and say, ‘Hey, man.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, here it comes,’” he says. But he’s often surprised by where they stand. “It is not a Democrat-Republican issue. It is a personal issue ... You don’t know what you’re going to get, who’s for it and who’s against it. You can’t tell.” But for all his conviction, Archer says he, too, has concerns. When I ask about the people who read from 1984 at the city council meeting, worried that they were about to bring “Big Brother” to town, Archer doesn’t resist the analogy. “I worry about it too,” he says. “I’m not sitting here saying ‘I 100 percent back this.’” Even so, he thinks Flock could be a “force multiplier” for the dwindling number of police hopefuls he watches try out on the high school track field every year. He believes it might have helped catch the prom night killer, whose impact still ripples through the schools. With some safeguards in place, Archer believes, it’s worth a shot. About a month after Huntington approved its contract with Flock, the company was in the hot seat again in West Virginia — this time, though, it had a far colder welcome from the jump. Flock’s director of government affairs Kevin Kane faced a skeptical crowd at the state capitol building in Charleston, where he sought to address state lawmakers’ concerns about the technology during an interim session hearing. By the end, lawmakers seemed to only walk away with more concerns. “I remember going like, ‘Why is he not answering the question?’” Republican state Sen. Patricia Rucker tells me at her office in Charleston in September. She pulls out a sheet of scribbled notes from the hearing. “Require warrant to access certain info. With exceptions for emergencies,” she’d written beneath a cursive header titled “Model Legislation.” “I personally do not want this used for speed checks!” A few days after the hearing, Flock released its policy updates, including newly mandated multi-factor authentication across its user base. That statement, three state lawmakers charged in a letter to Flock’s CEO, appeared to contradict Kane’s sworn testimony. “Do you guys require two-factor authentication to log into the system?” Republican delegate Ryan Browning asked. “Yes,” Kane answered, saying he didn’t know when that began, but “it’s been a standard practice for a long time.” That was one of several alleged inconsistencies or misleading statements. The lawmakers requested a detailed list of information about Flock’s policies, safeguards, and technical capabilities. Flock gave a lengthy response that defended Kane’s answers as “the conduct of a witness drawing an accurate distinction, not obscuring one.” But the lawmakers again slammed it as “a two-page exercise in corporate reframing.” After another tense round of letter exchanges, the lawmakers told Flock they expect a prepared witness to testify under oath at their next public meeting on November 9th. Republican delegate Tristan Leavitt tells me at his office in the Charleston capitol building that it’s “extremely likely” the state will pass legislation around surveillance technology next year. “We have responded to West Virginia lawmakers’ questions in writing, promptly, and remain committed to working directly with state officials,” Flock’s Terlecki said in a statement. “Flock has offered to participate in the November 9 briefing, and we welcome the opportunity to address questions openly and correct any misunderstandings.” Among the three Republican state lawmakers I meet, each has a different core reason for their skepticism of Flock. Browning sees the ability to track vehicles across locations as a tool that could encroach on civil liberties and privacy, including Second Amendment rights if, say, a camera tracked the comings and goings at a gun shop. “If it’s used to gather data on a high crime area, et cetera, then it could be used as a valuable tool,” he says. “But if you’re using it to just constantly collect and store data that could then be later used to target groups, then it’s a problem. And whether that be the LGBTQ community, or gun owners, or whatever the ideological change is, then it can be a massive problem.” [Image: A HCAG member reaches out to commuters in the community. Rucker is staunchly opposed to allowing a tool to perform searches that in other contexts would require a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. As a first-generation American citizen born in Venezuela, Rucker says she knows government surveillance first-hand. Some of her relatives there will only communicate with her in “coded language,” she says. Flock’s lofty aspirations of eliminating crime strike her as less rosy than the company likely intends. “If we want to consider a society where no one would ever get lost, and no one would ever get hurt, and there would be no way that someone could hurt another individual, what type of surveillance would that take?” she asks. “I’m not going there.” Leavitt is more confident that the Fourth Amendment concerns could be addressed through careful policy and isn’t even particularly concerned with Flock’s (since-disbanded) pilot with federal agencies, though he asked about it in his initial letter. He’s more concerned about what he sees as purposefully obtuse answers from Flock. “It doesn’t matter what my ideological views are or your ideological views are. If they are going to legislative bodies or public bodies who have a responsibility because they’re entrusted by the voters of their area to make decisions, you give them straightforward information,” he says. As the legislature waits to officially regroup in January, Browning says nothing is stopping Flock from taking more action on its own. “If you were really genuine about wanting to be a good company, you would be the ones trying to model your technology around the rights of our citizens, not waiting for a legislature — which meets 60 days out of the year and makes laws 60 days out of the year — to come in and regulate.” By mid-September, it’s been two months since Huntington’s city council approved the city’s Flock contract. The company has since faced national scrutiny over a relentless drip of stories about alleged police misuse, prompting the company to update its data access and retention policies, and its CEO to issue a mea culpa over his past approach. Flock planned to cut about 18 percent of employees as of October, according to Reuters, after an earlier voluntary buyout program. But some cities that have ousted Flock have simply replaced it with similar surveillance systems from competitors like Axon. At this point, the fight isn’t just about one company — the path forward for an entire technology is at stake. As Huntington’s city council reconvenes, Farrell still hasn’t signed the contract with Flock, even though he’s been given the power to do so. First, he says, he’d like the government to pass guardrails on the technology’s use. That’s what the council assembled to discuss on this late summer day, with a scheduled vote on an ordinance proposed by the mayor. If passed, it would lay out the acceptable and prohibited uses of data collected by Flock or similar technologies. Authorized uses: homicide, missing persons, stolen vehicles, active warrants, officer safety, and more. Prohibited uses: traffic enforcement, immigration enforcement not required by a federal warrant or court order, “Revenue generation,” and “Personal curiosity,” among others. The police chief would be expected to maintain a list of authorized users, and officers would be prohibited from sharing accounts. The data would be deleted after 30 days, and there would be quarterly audits for compliance. Officers found to misuse access could face administrative sanctions, which could include a referral for criminal investigation. [Image: Mayor Patrick Farrell has been key to Flock’s entrance into Huntington. “I am assuming good intentions by everybody, and I’d like all of you to as well,” Farrell begins his remarks, clarifying that it would apply to all public safety technologies, not just Flock. He shares residents’ concerns and disdain for mass surveillance, and this ordinance will help safeguard their privacy. Huntington is lucky, actually, he says. Other cities had to enact safeguards after the fact. Huntington is getting to craft them before. This time, he’s read up on those mayors who paused their Flock contracts. Several of them did so to put those guardrails in place, he says, but intend to resume them. Democratic councilmember Sarah Walling grills Farrell on terms of the contract and ordinance. How could consistent tracking of public locations that can be strung together not be considered warrantless surveillance? Farrell says all of the cameras will be pointed at public places, and the courts would agree that’s okay. “We’ll see,” says Walling. Rumbaugh asks why the ordinance doesn’t include the ability to charge officers who abuse the system with a misdemeanor. Will officers who abuse the system really go from zero to 100 by committing a felony? Walling doubles down on the point: Is one unauthorized search a felony? Five? Farrell says he doesn’t determine that as the mayor. He leans on a standard line, that “if we can trust these men and women that have sworn an oath to protect us with firearms, I think we can trust them with cameras.” “This is a company that lies,” Walling objects. “It lied to our legislatures, it’s lied to cities across the country, we have at least two states that have said that state money can’t be used for them. It can’t be used on public highways. How on Earth is Huntington, West Virginia, able to make the assurances that Flock is not going to misuse our data when it’s absolutely done it in other places without any repercussions whatsoever?” The meeting is shorter than the one back in July, but the result is similar. After roundly negative comments from the public, the ordinance passes 7-2. Walling had earlier said the ordinance was “better than nothing,” but apparently changed her mind and votes no. Rumbaugh also votes no, and Mount isn’t present. When the vote is finished and the floor opens for general comments from the public, a 67-year-old Army veteran eventually steps up to the microphone. “It’s my very first time ever doing this,” says Steve McDilda, wearing a yellow “Get the Flock Out” shirt and gripping both sides of the podium. His tone is that of a father trying to talk some sense into a child. “You really have no idea what you’re about to do. You’re about to give away your rights.” He’d heard that there’d been some talk of a “silent majority.” He says we’ll see about that. Once the people of Huntington get the chance to vote, he says, “you’re going to really find out.” In fact, he says. “You’re going to have an awakening.”