During the past week, ahead of the issue returning for the council’s reconsideration on a date yet to be confirmed, both police leadership and an anti-Flock activist hosted public meetings about the cameras and the company behind them.
Flagstaff Police Chief Sean Connolly and two deputy chiefs, Collin Seay and Charles Hernandez, met with community members at the Market of Dreams on Fourth Street on the evening of Thursday, Oct. 16. Also present were Coconino County Attorney Ammon Barker and five out of seven members of the city council: Mayor Becky Daggett, Vice Mayor Miranda Sweet and Councilmembers Lori Matthews, Anthony Garcia and David Spence.
With more than a majority of the council present, assistant city attorney Marianne Sullivan (legal advisor to the police and fire departments) had to explain to the public that the members of city council could not speak or participate without violating open-meeting law.
“I did not want this to be a gathering of us having a conversation in community where we talk at you, where we set up a PowerPoint and we’re rigid,” Connolly said at the outset. “I almost want this to be a listening session, a way for us to absorb concerns as we move forward.”
“You have every right to question us,” he added.
In his opening remarks, Connolly reiterated his belief that Flock’s system of cameras and software — which records the license plate and back of every vehicle that passes and allows officers to search for specific vehicles or be notified if a vehicle passes a camera — makes the police department more resource-efficient and more effective at providing justice for victims of crime.
“This is not a tool to track innocent people. This is a tool to find people that have victimized members of our community,” the chief said.
For approximately two hours, meeting attendees questioned Connolly, Sullivan, and Flagstaff’s chief information officer, C.J. Perry, about the use and details of Flock’s hardware and software. Though clearly passionate, the conversation also remained calm and respectful. The sole exception was when one attendee, midway through the meeting, accused Connolly of lying and walked out.
A common theme emerged from the discussion: most of the people who spoke said they believed police leaders were sincere in their goals of serving victims and solving crimes but did not believe Flock shares those intentions or deserved the same trust.
“Generally speaking, they don’t have a great reputation,” one attendee said of Flock. (Meeting attendees were not asked for their names, and did not volunteer them.)
That person cited the case of Boulder, Colorado, where the police department learned after the fact that its Flock records were accessible to the U.S. Border Patrol. Flock’s CEO, in response to the revelation of this undisclosed “pilot program” with the Department of Homeland Security, said, “We clearly communicated poorly.”
Another attendee noted that Flock is “not known for following their internal guidelines with any great rigor.” Earlier in 2025, Flock changed its data-sharing policies after reporters discovered that Flock records from states with laws explicitly prohibiting the sharing of such data were accessible to other agencies across the U.S.
Yet another person at the meeting, who explained that he was a former public-sector cybersecurity professional, said, “I don’t have a problem with you trying to embrace the latest technology, by any means. There are a lot of tools out there, some better than others.”
But, he continued, “I’ve looked into Flock in the past. I wouldn’t trust them with any of my data, based on their prior performance.”
License plate cameras of one kind or another might be here to stay, that attendee acknowledged. Still, he resented the way Flagstaff had implemented the technology: “I have a problem with not being given the choice, and I have a problem with the time frame.”
That was another major theme of the meeting. Attendees were disappointed or angry that the city council had approved the original contract with Flock via its consent agenda in June 2024, without public discussion or community feedback.
Although Connolly and Perry both said they were open to feedback on possible changes to, for instance, the length of time Flock captures are stored on the company’s servers before deletion, one commenter expressed frustration with being asked about how the technology should be used, rather than whether it should be used at all.
Another suggested that city council should cancel the existing contract, then invite public participation in a discussion about whether to reinstall the system.
“The time for that conversation is at the point where we’re not at the barrel of a technological gun,” he said.
Connolly responded that he could not speak for the council, and that the conversation in the room was not necessarily representative of how other members of the community felt about renewing or canceling the contract. But he did make some clear promises about ethical “red lines” that the department, under his leadership, will not cross.
“I’m not sharing with federal agencies, and if it happens, I’m shutting it down,” Connolly said.
Pressed by a questioner regarding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the arm of the Department of Homeland Security that has become the vanguard of President Donald Trump’s attempts to implement “mass deportations” in major cities, Connolly reiterated that he would shut down the department’s Flock system if ICE accessed the data or Flock shared the data with ICE.
Brendan Trachsel, who has emerged as a leader of efforts to remove Flock cameras from Flagstaff, also attended the Thursday meeting, questioning Connolly about the police department’s data-sharing agreements with other agencies. And on Monday, Oct. 20, Trachsel hosted his own meeting at the downtown library.
(Trachsel is running for a seat in the Arizona Legislature as a member of the Green Party, but he did not speak about his campaign during Monday’s event.)
At that gathering, Trachsel presented to around 20 attendees about what he had learned about Flock over the last seven months, while acknowledging that many questions about Flock’s technologies and internal operations remain unanswered.
“It’s a very limited information landscape, currently,” he said.
Trachsel emphasized that Flock’s artificial intelligence models are key to making its vast volume of data searchable, and that images captured by all Flock cameras are used to train and refine those models.
“This AI system is truly the core of all of this,” he said. “Because without this, the cameras up on the poles and the microphones up on the poles will all just be nothing more.”
The integration of AI allows police to conduct natural-language searches, similar to the way AI chatbots allow users to ask questions or give prompts in natural speech.
And he spoke about the difference between “one-to-one” data-sharing agreements, which local agencies can exercise significant control over, and Flock’s national lookup tool, which he called the most likely way the system could be abused or misused. Trachsel cited a letter by Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, released to the press Oct. 16, in which Wyden wrote that abuse of Flock’s national lookup system is “inevitable.”
“It is my view that Flock has built a dangerous platform in which abuse of surveillance data is almost certain,” Wyden stated in the letter, addressed to Flock’s CEO. His letter also revealed additional, previously unreported access of Flock data by federal law enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
The Flagstaff Police Department currently has “one-to-one” data-sharing agreements with about 50 other Arizona law enforcement agencies. Through those agreements, officers in other agencies can search for vehicles recorded in Flagstaff by make, model, color or other identifying characteristics, such as bumper stickers, in addition to license plate numbers.
The department also participates in the national lookup system, through which officers at any other participating agency may search for a full license-plate number and see that vehicle’s last recorded location, but no other information. Additionally, the national lookup system provides local agencies with direct access to national-level “hot lists” of stolen or suspicious vehicles from the FBI and National Crime Information Center.
“We already see how open to abuse it is, compared to one-on-one sharing,” Trachsel said.
He noted, too, that questions about whether Flock’s system potentially violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches are still being actively litigated in U.S. courts.
“We’re in the gray area, right now, when it comes to the constitutionality of this system,” he said.
Flock continues to complicate the situation by announcing new features and capabilities — sometimes, directly contravening earlier promises. Despite claiming in the past that license plate cameras do not collect personally identifiable information, Flock is now marketing a data integration tool that can automatically connect license plates to other public records as well as data obtained from private brokers.
It has also announced that police will be able to collect video, not just still images, from existing cameras, and that their gunshot-detection microphones will be able to listen for “human distress” going forward.
Just on Monday, Flock announced a new partnership with Amazon’s Ring, maker of popular doorbell cameras. The move drew renewed criticism of both companies from privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
With changes to Flock’s suite of products happening so quickly, Trachsel said, cities and communities are effectively left playing catch-up to try to understand how buying into any one part of the system could compromise privacy more broadly.
Citing the new revelations in Wyden’s letter, he said, “How much more do we not know?”
That question is one of many the Flagstaff City Council will have to weigh when it finally decides whether Flagstaff should join the small but growing list of municipalities that have canceled contracts with Flock.
At least until then, Flagstaff’s Flock cameras will remain online.
© 2025 The Arizona Daily Sun (Flagstaff, Ariz.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
