A Town Voted Flock Out — and Still Couldn’t Get the Cameras Down

The reporting outlet 404 Media obtained Verona’s internal emails through a public-records request and published them on July 22, 2026. They document something residents here should see before their own commissioners act: getting a Flock system removed is not as simple as voting it out.

The vote was the easy part

On November 10, 2025, the Verona Common Council voted to end its Flock contract. The reason council members gave was trust. They said they trusted their own police department; they did not trust the company. One alderman put the data question directly — Flock had assured the town its data belonged to the town, and he did not believe the assurance could be relied on. That is the same contract-language concern we have raised about New Hanover’s agreement.

The day after the vote, a council member sent a warning that every board considering this should read. The contract, she noted, auto-renews for two years unless the town gives notice at least 30 days before the renewal date. Miss the window, and the vote does not matter for another two years.

Then the cameras kept running

By mid-January — more than two months after the vote — the cameras were still up and, as far as anyone could tell, still scanning. A resident wrote to the council asking why. The police chief hoped a Flock work-order notice meant removal; it did not. The mayor, according to the emails, reached the point of asking whether the town could simply take the cameras down itself and hold them at City Hall until Flock came to collect them.

The town’s public works crew said it could pull the cameras and store them within a day.

Flock objected to the town touching its own equipment

Before that happened, a police officer held off to speak with Flock first. His account of that call, in the emails, is the part that matters most: Flock objected to the town removing the cameras. The company’s representative had never processed an expedited removal and was not sure how. Asked whether the network could at least be switched off remotely, the representative did not know whether that was possible either.

So the town did the only thing left within its control. Public works put black plastic bags over the cameras on January 23 and photographed them for the council. Flock removed the hardware on February 4 — nearly three months after the vote.

Flock’s position, stated to 404 Media, is that its cameras remain company property and are taken down through a “defined offboarding process,” that they can be deactivated remotely, and that Verona’s delay stemmed from the council voting not to renew rather than cancelling mid-term — two paths the company says it handles differently.

This is a pattern, not one town

The Verona account does not rest on a single outlet. The Wisconsin Examiner reported in February that the town had waited months for the cameras to come down after cancelling, and Bolts covered the vote itself and the residents who pushed for it. Independent reporting, more than one newsroom, same facts.

And Verona is not the only town that reached for trash bags. Over the first half of 2026, the same scene played out in city after city — officials who wanted the cameras off, unsure whether they could lawfully remove Flock’s hardware themselves, covering the lenses while they waited. Techdirt and Jalopnik documented it as a national trend.

The largest example is Dayton, Ohio. As Fortune reported, Dayton workers bagged roughly 72 Flock cameras in June 2026 after a paid audit found the city’s own camera data had been searched thousands of times for immigration enforcement — searches the city’s policy expressly prohibited. Reporting also describes Evanston, Illinois re-covering cameras after Flock reinstalled them without the city’s permission.

The through-line is the one that matters for a New Hanover vote: the concern that ends these contracts is not the local police department. It is what happens to the data once it leaves the county — the same question our own redacted audit raises here.

What this means for New Hanover County

In our reading, three lessons carry over, and they cut in the county’s favor if it acts deliberately.

First, the decision belongs to elected officials, and it is reversible — but only they can make it. New Hanover’s contract, unlike Verona’s, appears cancelable by the county at any time. That is a stronger position than Verona held. It also means the Board of Commissioners, not the vendor, holds the timing.

Second, how you end it matters as much as whether you end it. Verona chose non-renewal and, by the company’s own account, landed in the slower process. A clean cancellation, decided in the open, avoids the auto-renewal clock a board can otherwise miss by simply not noticing a date.

Third, the ownership terms are real. The hardware is Flock’s, the removal runs on Flock’s schedule, and a town that changed its mind found that out the hard way. That is an argument for a public vote before a deployment grows — not a cleanup afterward.

We are not litigating Verona’s contract, and Wisconsin law is not ours. But the pattern is instructive, and it is not isolated — Macon County here in North Carolina reached the same destination by a cleaner route, declining to fund the program 5–0 rather than fighting over a contract.

Your county commissioners or town council hold the lever that ends Flock where you live. They meet regularly — find the next date.

Sources. The Verona emails were obtained and reported by 404 Media (Jason Koebler, July 22, 2026). The Verona timeline is corroborated by the Wisconsin Examiner and Bolts. The broader trash-bag pattern is drawn from Techdirt, Jalopnik, and Fortune. This post is commentary on public reporting and general information about the removal process; it is not legal advice, and describes other jurisdictions’ contracts, not New Hanover County’s.