07/17/2026
🔎 WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?
Ancient Rome asked it first: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Two thousand years later, Huntington is being asked to install the watchmen before anyone's answered the question. So before one more camera goes up, let's look at what happens in cities that already said yes because this isn't hypothetical. It's a track record, and it's a warning.
Here is what "trust us" has actually looked like, city by city:
→ Oshkosh, Wisconsin: Flock's own chief security officer told the city council, on the record, that the system doesn't build a map of a person's movements. The council voted yes. The very next morning, Flock admitted it does — for up to a month at a time.
→ Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Officer Josue Ayala searched a woman's license plate and her new boyfriend's 179 times, typing "investigation" as his justification every time. The internal affairs detective assigned to investigate him — Detective Terangi Chapman — was later charged too, for using the same system to track his own victims.
→ Albany, Georgia: Five police officers were arrested simultaneously after an audit found they'd used Flock data for purely personal reasons, unrelated to any case.
→ Columbus, Ohio: A city audit found over 15,000 searches of its Flock data connected to possible immigration enforcement, despite a city policy banning it outright. Dayton, Ohio found over 7,000 and shut its system down entirely.
→ San Jose, California: Public records suggest the police department gave federal agencies a "side door" into its Flock network, with search reasons logged as vaguely as "CBP" and "ICE."
→ Norfolk, Virginia: A university study found the heaviest
concentration of cameras clustered around census tracts that are majority Black — including the area surrounding the region's only historically Black university.
→ Los Angeles: An internal audit found the LAPD's cameras generated a 32% false-alarm rate on stolen-vehicle alerts — roughly one in three flags was wrong, and each one sent armed officers to pull over an innocent driver. On July 11, 2026, LAPD finally let its Flock contract expire over exactly these civil liberties concerns.
This is not a handful of bad apples. It's a pattern, and the company's own numbers admit it: 39 Flock contracts were terminated by cities nationwide in just the first five months of 2026.
Here's the good news, and it's real: every one of these examples ends the same way, with people finding out, speaking up, and forcing change. Oshkosh rescinded its contract in a single day – the fastest reversal on record. LAPD walked away from one of Flock's largest government partnerships. Class-action lawsuits are already underway in California. The watchmen are being watched – because residents, lawyers, and journalists refused to look away.
Ask yourself why Bloomington, IN, Harrisonburg, VA, Dayton, OH, Newport, KY and dozens more are rethinking their use of Flock and ending contracts.
That's exactly the fight Huntington is in right now. We, as part of the legal team, are actively reviewing every avenue available under West Virginia law – from open-meetings violations to how this contract was placed on public property in the first place – because the same accountability that worked in Oshkosh and Los Angeles can work here too. This isn't about outrage for its own sake. It's about the patient, unglamorous work of records requests, legal filings, and organized citizens that has, city after city, actually turned these contracts around.
So here's the question Huntington gets to answer that Rome couldn't: who watches the watchmen? We do. Together – residents, business owners, and lawyers, standing in the same room, asking the same questions, and refusing to accept "trust us" as an answer ever again.
— Glazer Saad Anderson L.C.
