Dayton, Minnesota says Flock put two cameras back up after contract ended

Flock put two of its AI license plate cameras back up in Dayton, Minnesota, weeks after the city council suspended the program and canceled the contract, according to the city’s own account of events.¹

What happened

The city council voted on August 25 to suspend the automatic license plate reader program and the Flock cameras, citing community concerns about privacy and data misuse.¹ Some of the cameras had already been taken down earlier. Local media reports say they were broken and vandalized, and police disabled and removed them on August 20 to prevent more damage.¹

On September 17, Flock submitted a maintenance work order. The city says its Police Department learned of the order that day, and that Dayton replied the next day to say the program was on hold and no work orders should be completed.¹ The city says Flock went ahead anyway and reinstalled the cameras without authorization.¹

What residents and the city say

Residents spotted two cameras and complained. The city then posted an explanation on Facebook on September 29 and said the Police Department had been informed and told to remove the cameras.¹

It is not known when the cameras went back up.¹ It is also not clear how the stop-work message was handled on Flock’s side: either the company ignored the city’s instruction, or the instruction never reached the people doing the installs.¹ The city’s account is the main source for the timeline. Flock’s side was not part of the material available for this story.

A wider pattern of complaints

Dayton is not the first place where Flock has drawn scrutiny. One earlier case involved a car reviewer who was reportedly pulled over after a camera misread his plate.¹ In another, Flock’s chief information security officer reportedly told the Oshkosh City Council that Flock did not create a heat map of individual license plates, though the system does have a heat map feature.¹ Those are separate matters from Dayton’s dispute, and they are reported here as background, not as findings about this case.

Our read: The facts that matter are simple and, so far, come from one side: the city says it told Flock to stop, and cameras went up anyway. If that holds, this is less a debate about license plate readers and more a plain contract question: does a vendor’s work order override a council vote? The likeliest explanation may be a dull one, an instruction lost between offices, but the city’s removal order and any explanation from Flock are the things to watch. Until the company speaks, the “why” is open.

[Tom’s Hardware, which first published this account, relied on The Drive and local reports in turn.]¹

Footnotes

1. Tom’s Hardware, “Flock ignores Minnesota city’s orders not to reinstall AI surveillance cameras — citizens complain after spotting two cameras despite the city canceling its contract”. Retrieved October 29, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹