Huntington City Council Approves New Surveillance Program After Marathon Session

Huntington will spend more than $2 million over the next five years implementing a citywide Flock Security system. City council voted 6-4 during a meeting that stretched more than eight hours into Tuesday morning.  

Flock Group sells and manages automated license plate recognition (ALPR), video surveillance, and gunfire locator systems, as well as supporting software to integrate the data gathered by these technologies.   

Tens of thousands of the cameras have been installed around the U.S., including in communities like Morgantown, Fairmont and Parkersburg. But an increasing number of municipalities are canceling their contracts with the company, citing privacy and misuse concerns.  

Mayor Patrick Farrell, along with Police Chief Phil Watkins, made the case for the system as a deterrent against future crimes.  

“This would be a deterrence. If they knew they would come here and commit a crime and they get caught, they wouldn’t do the crime,” Farrell said. “That’s what the people in Las Vegas say. Not a lot of crime because they know they’re going to get caught because there’s cameras everywhere.”  

Farell described how existing Flock systems have already helped Huntington Police apprehend a murder suspect.

 “After the murder suspect came to Huntington, shot Jackie Harper twice in the head, he was going back to Michigan. And luckily for us, some other city had license plate reader cameras that caught the car. That gave us the lead that led to his arrest in Michigan,” he said. “So it helps our law enforcement do its work faster, more efficiently, and that’s the kind of success that I think we need more of.” 

Several council members echoed the desire to give law enforcement better tools to solve crimes.  

But others like council member Holly Smith Mount questioned the narrative of Flock and other ALPR’s ability to deter crime. She recounted leaving a Flock Group presentation ready to approve the contract, but “did a whole 180” after learning more about the company. 

“I want to be extremely clear to everyone: the concern is that this company absolutely misled us in this presentation. It does not deter crime. There is zero evidence that it deters,” she said. “It catches people, sure, yeah, but no, there is no empirical evidence or statistical analysis that it actually deters crime.” 

Smith Mount raised more specific concerns including the rushed nature of the contracting process, the lack of a traditional bidding process and Flock’s own history of misleading municipalities. She disclosed that council members had received an amended version of the more than 100-page contract at 4 p.m. on Friday. 

“We owe it to the people whose money we are about to spend to pump the brakes and examine any other alternative, all the policies,” Smith Mount said. “What happened in other cities? Why did they cancel? Why did they get sued? What did they do to mitigate? What did Flock do to fix it?”  

Digital technology publication 404 Media has reported extensively on Flock systems incorrectly flagging vehicles of innocent citizens and police abusing the system to stalk people, issues that have led at least 30 municipalities to cancel their contracts with the company.  

Smith Mount also voiced concerns about the city’s ability to cancel or exit the contract moving forward if issues do arise. 

“Once they are in, they are in. That’s it. We can cancel the contract all we want, but there is no rip-out clause,” she said. “So I feel like the way the contract is written and the way these resolutions are worded, we are not fully protected from liability.” 

404 and other outlets recently reported Dayton, Ohio has taken to covering its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. 

More than 50 community members spoke at various points during the more than eight-hour meeting, almost all of them opposed the Flock contract.  

The cameras are expected to be installed around Huntington by Sept. 1.