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?

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.

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.

“I couldn’t help but think, If we had this, would that not have happened?”

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.

”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.