On Tuesday night, the city council of my small town of Irmo, South Carolina, voted to install 22 new Flock cameras. That’ll bring the total up to 33. With a population of only 12,000 or so, it means there’ll be one Flock camera for every 300 residents. That means there will be
more Flock cameras
in my town than police officers. The city council — the governing body consisting of the mayor and 4 councilpersons — voted for Flock expansion despite presentations from residents about the dangers of what they described as the creeping surveillance state.
The vote for the cameras was a hot topic in
local news
and
South Carolina social media
. The city council expected a lot of people to show and asked folks to sign up early if they wanted to talk. Since I work for a publication that has been on the cutting edge of reporting on the
myriad problems
with Flock cameras, I decided I should probably speak. I spent Tuesday refreshing myself on 404 Media’s reporting and wrote a presentation for the council.
Meetings like this are happening in hundreds of communities across the country and I want to give 404 Media readers a snapshot of what they’re like. There’s a nationwide debate on whether cities and towns want Flock cameras or not and this was my experience speaking at one of the small ones.
There was a hard 3-minute time limit and I had written three pages. I found details about Irmo’s Flock searches in the logs of other states, talked about the specific data security concerns with the cameras, and attempted to explain all the mistakes and false arrests Flock had caused. Three minutes goes by fast, and I ran out of time before I could say everything I had planned.
I wasn’t the only person who decided to speak. More than 10 other citizens went to the podium and spoke out against the cameras. “Is Irmo such a dangerous place that current law enforcement tools are not sufficient to keep the citizens safe without the use of this dangerous and controversial technology?”
