Florida County Finds 11 Unpermitted Flock Cameras With No Owner

A county-wide order to pull down Flock Safety license-plate cameras in St. Lucie County, Florida, has instead turned up a problem no one anticipated: 14 cameras were operating without the required local permits, and officials say they cannot determine who installed 11 of them, according to Ars Technica, which cited reporting by The Washington Post.

The discovery followed a directive to remove Flock cameras tracking vehicles on county roads. Instead of a straightforward teardown, the sweep exposed a gap in oversight of devices capable of logging the movements of every car that passes them.

Who owns the cameras that nobody can identify

Of the 14 cameras found, three were claimed by the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office, which installed them without the permits county rules require. The sheriff's office has not explained why it skipped the permitting process, and it did not immediately respond to a request from Ars Technica to clarify whether it ever accessed data the cameras recorded.

The remaining 11 cameras have no confirmed owner. St. Lucie County Commissioner James Clasby told a local news outlet that the uncertainty itself is the problem. "There's potential for non-law enforcement to have cameras out there, and I'm not OK with that," Clasby said, according to Ars Technica's account of the local reporting.

Why unowned license-plate cameras worry residents

License-plate readers like Flock's compile searchable records of where a car has been and when, data that can reveal a person's home, workplace, medical visits, or relationships over time. When a camera's owner is unknown, residents and county officials alike cannot say who can query that data, under what rules, or with what oversight.

Resident Ty Grant told The Washington Post, as reported by Ars Technica, that not knowing who controls the footage is unsettling even for the one camera that has already been taken down.

"That makes me feel very unsafe," Grant said.

For Grant, the point is less about any single device than about accountability: if cameras can appear on public roads without anyone claiming them, there is no clear path to find out how the footage is used or who might misuse it.

How Florida police have misused Flock data before

St. Lucie County's permitting gap lands amid a broader pattern of documented abuse of Flock systems by Florida officers. The Washington Post's reporting, cited by Ars Technica, found that Fort Pierce officer Josepher Crutchfield accessed a Flock database 382 times while stalking an ex-girlfriend, and that another officer, Christopher Goodson, conducted nearly double that number of searches while looking for his estranged wife. In Pinellas County, two officers were arrested over invasive Flock tracking: Travis Stanton was found searching for a minor, and Karl Gwynne was tracking a woman he wanted to date. Nationally, the Post has identified at least 50 similar cases of police misuse, according to Ars Technica's report. Flock Safety has said it has added safeguards meant to prevent such abuse, but experts quoted in the reporting say those measures are not effective.

What happens to the cameras now

St. Lucie County is giving the owners of the unpermitted cameras 30 days to remove them, with no penalty attached, the report states. Interim county administrator Mayte Santamaria said the county has posted "bright red" notices on the devices to alert whoever installed them. One camera has already come down, confirmed by a Post reporter on the scene, but officials still do not know whether any of the remaining devices are actively recording.

For cameras still standing when the deadline passes — as late as October 20 for some, per the report — county spokesperson Erick Gill said "staff plan to start placing plastic bags over the cameras." The makeshift fix would block the lenses but would not resolve the underlying question of who put the cameras there in the first place or what has already been collected.

What is a Flock camera and why does it need a permit

Flock Safety manufactures automated license-plate reader (ALPR) cameras that photograph passing vehicles and log plate numbers, location, and timestamp data into a searchable network used by thousands of police departments nationwide. Local permitting rules, like those in St. Lucie County, exist so that jurisdictions can track where such surveillance equipment sits on public right-of-way and who is responsible for the data it gathers. Without a permit record, there is no official log of who installed a camera, raising the central question in St. Lucie County: with 11 devices unclaimed, no one, including the sheriff's office, has said who has been watching, or who might still be able to look.