A Town Shut Off Its Flock Cameras. Flock Turned Them Back On.

What happened in Littleton

Littleton, Massachusetts, is a town of about 10,000 outside Boston. After residents objected to Flock’s automatic license-plate readers going up earlier this year, town officials voted in May to shut down the six cameras on public roads, and Town Meeting defunded the program. That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t. Last week, a Littleton police detective logged into the system to confirm the cameras were still off — and found that Flock had restored power to five of them, without telling the town. The Police Department’s own notice this week describes the response: officers ordered the cameras remotely powered down again, disabled system login access, and confirmed a Flock work order to remove the cameras from the utility poles as soon as possible.

Flock’s explanation is the alarming part

Flock’s account, as reported by the Boston Globe, is that power was restored to the cameras under the company’s “standard operating procedure,” because it was unaware the town did not intend to turn them back on. The police chief was told that, given how much camera vandalism and tampering Flock deals with nationally, a camera coming back on unexpectedly would not necessarily be treated as unusual on Flock’s end.

Sit with that. The default state of a Flock camera is on. A town has to not only vote it off, but keep re-explaining that it meant it — and even then the vendor’s routine can quietly switch it back. The town controls the vote. Flock controls the switch.

This is a pattern, not a glitch

Littleton is not the first. In Evanston, Illinois, the city covered its cameras and issued a cease-and-desist after Flock reinstalled them without authorization. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, two cameras were installed without notice after a batch had been removed — the city called it “a breach of trust” and terminated its contract. Flock’s chief legal officer told the Globe the Cambridge cameras went up on an existing work order and it was not “a nefarious thing.” In Massachusetts alone, at least nine cities and towns — Cambridge, Framingham, Salem among them — have ended Flock contracts in the last year.

Why this matters for New Hanover County

The single most common reassurance we hear about the county’s $219,000 contract is that the commissioners can cancel it at any time, without cause. That is true on paper. Littleton shows what it is worth in practice: a vote to stop is not a guarantee the cameras stop. We have seen this before — Verona, Wisconsin ended its contract and the cameras kept running for months, with Flock objecting when the town moved to take down equipment on its own poles.

The lesson is not that cancellation is pointless — it is that control has to be real, and written down. Before New Hanover renews or expands anything, the questions to settle are simple: who physically controls the off switch, who owns the poles and the power, how fast must the vendor remove hardware on demand, and what happens if it doesn’t. A contract that lets the vendor decide when a camera is “supposed” to be on is not control. It is a subscription that argues back.

The town controls the vote. Flock controls the switch. Those are not the same thing.

What you can do

• Ask the commissioners the operational question at the Aug 17 meeting: if the county votes to end this, who guarantees the cameras actually go dark — and how fast? Here’s how to speak.
• Read the cancel-anytime clause in context — the full contract, line by line.
• Sign and share the petition — these questions deserve answers on the record.

Sources

• Boston Globe — “Littleton shut down Flock surveillance cameras… Flock turned them back on” (Aug. 6, 2026) — bostonglobe.com
• Evanston RoundTable — Flock reinstalls Evanston cameras (2025) — evanstonroundtable.com
• On the site: a town voted Flock out and still couldn’t get the cameras down · the cancel-anytime clause.