Harrisonburg City Council unanimously voted this week to terminate the city’s Flock Safety contract. The city will cover the surveillance cameras with trash bags until the company removes them and consider an ordinance prohibiting other mass-surveillance companies from signing contracts in Harrisonburg.
Charlottesville City Council terminated its Flock Safety pilot program earlier this year due to concerns over data protection, misuse and local control. In late 2024 the city installed 10 cameras, one of which was near the University of Virginia grounds.
Some of Staunton’s Flock Safety ALPR camera systems have been taken off-line, but not all.
Virginia Department of Transportation uses speed zone cameras near roadwork areas and vehicle sensors at intersections to capture images or videos of vehicles that violate red lights. The cameras are used to monitor speed in areas where speeding has been a problem.
Norfolk’s ALPR system remains operational following a ruling by a federal court in 2026 that upheld the constitutionality of its ALPR technology. Let’s look at the case Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, given the recent campaign against Flock Cameras.
The Judge Mark S. Davis ruled that Norfolk’s Flock ALPR does not constitute “searches” under the Fourth Amendment because it takes discrete and noncontinuous pictures at different locations. It also has gaps in its coverage.
This is the part that I’m most interested in: privacy and “public-see.”
Let’s begin by examining the “source code” for American privacy.
The Bill of Rights’ Third Amendment and Fourth Amendment do not state that you can never be watched or searched in your home. The government has a set of strict tools that they can use to monitor you. The law enforcement is expected to prove their case. The law does not say that the police cannot follow or watch you in public. The government is expected to bear the burden of proof and prove probable cause.
The rule is that you are innocent until proven to be guilty. In a time when reputation is not abstract but is how people earn their living, “innocent” is now “until alleged guilty by association, or being near the guilty parties, and failing to act!”
It is interesting to see how this issue has united both sides.
Conservatives are concerned about privacy and law enforcement, but they also want a strong police force.
The progressives are still in ” defunding the police ” mode, and they see law enforcement as becoming increasingly “fascist.”
The no-borders group on the left thinks that ICE is using the cameras to gather up its new underclass of servants. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stated, “They’re coming after our bus boys and abuelas.”
John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute, and Paula Jones’s lawyer who fought against Bill and Hillary Clinton, said about Flock cameras, “A camera can take a picture of a car.” Flock’s AI platform can identify a vehicle and categorize it, compare an observation to stored records, create alerts, identify links, and help police reconstruct the location of that vehicle. AI transforms a photo into the building block for a suspicious society.”
What happens when lawlessness not only is tolerated but is promoted?
This is an extrapolation from the exercise of prosecutorial judgment, which has been part of American justice for a long time. It’s easy to forget that the practice of prosecutorial discretion was always individualized, and dependent on a variety of factors.
In a memo titled the Cole Memorandum, dated August 29, 2013, President Barack Obama told U.S. Attorneys not to enforce federal prohibitions on marijuana possession in states that have strong regulatory systems for marijuana.
Before then, if an elected official didn’t agree with a particular law (such as Jim Crow), they would either propose legislative changes or fight to declare it unconstitutional.
No more. It seems like law enforcement is able to make up this stuff as they go, and that’s how we got where we are today.
No matter if it’s the “J6ers” or the “Black Lives Matter” crowd, a large portion of the “We the People”, believe that the reason we’re under the eye of the law is because of our identity and not for any law we’ve broken.
It’s this issue that needs to be resolved. Not whether there are cameras. Too late. AI is not the issue. Too late.
We need to return to a society that has clear laws protecting each other’s right. It is worth writing a separate column to explain what these are. We must make sure that the laws are applied equally to the rich and poor, outsiders and people in power. Not only in a society where the law is used to “get their way.”
This is the danger that exists: those who want lawlessness to continue will use our soft-core anarchy to strip us of most of civil rights, in exchange for restoring “order.” That’s the way KGB chief Vladimir Putin won Russia’s presidency a quarter-century ago.
It’s not a problem, but a feature, as they say in the gaming community.
Joe Thomas is the Virginia correspondent for The Daily Signal. The Daily Signal has given permission to republish this column.
Email the Norfolk City Council at:
Kenneth Alexander: mayor@norfolk.gov,
Martin Thomas Jr.: martin.thomas@norfolk.gov,
Courtney Doyle: courtney.doyle@norfolk.gov,
Mamie Johnson: mamie.johnson@norfolk.gov,
John Paige: john.paige@norfolk.gov,
Thomas Smigiel Jr.: thomas.smigiel@norfolk.gov,
Jeremy McGee: jeremy.mcgee@norfolk.gov,
Carlos Clanton: carlos.clanton@norfolk.gov,
