Questions you’ll hear, and short answers

Probably, but it’s worth checking. In Excelsior Springs, Missouri, police said on November 5 that their bagged Flock cameras were still capturing data. Most images were obscured, but a few showed license plates and vehicles. They found it while answering a public records request, and crews put a second bag on each camera. Wausau’s cameras presumably still have power. It’s fair to ask the city whether anyone has checked that they’ve stopped capturing images since November 9, and what happens to anything captured since.

Some posts also claim Flock cameras log nearby phones over wifi or Bluetooth. We haven’t found credible evidence of that. Researchers have detected the cameras’ own wireless signals, which are used to set up the units and report battery health. That’s the camera announcing itself, not reading your phone.

Sources: KCTV5, KMBC, and DeFlockILM, November 2026.

Section 11.16 makes every payment conditional on appropriated funds and allows termination on 30 days’ written notice “without penalty or other cost.” If the council doesn’t appropriate the money, the city can leave.

Chief Barnes told the Finance Committee this on October 6, and the committee chair warned that cutting the money could invite litigation. Section 11.16 says the city’s obligations are “conditioned on the availability of funds appropriated for that purpose” and lets the city terminate for non-appropriation “without penalty or other cost.” It doesn’t limit the council’s reasons for not appropriating the money. Chief Barnes has said he reads the clause as covering whether the city is able to pay, not a choice to stop paying, which is exactly the question the city attorney should answer in writing. Flock’s newer standard contracts are narrower, and Wausau’s 2023 contract doesn’t have that language. The city attorney was at the same meeting and wasn’t asked, so the council should get her reading in writing before it votes.

It should. Finance Director Maryanne Groat told the Finance Committee on October 20 that the last invoice, dated December 15, 2025, was charged to the 2026 budget and paid February 6, and that the two remaining payments would normally be paid in January 2027 and January 2028. As we read that, the invoice dated this December would be paid from the 2027 budget, and the committee has now voted to leave the money out of it. Earlier, the committee chair had said the December payment came out of the 2026 budget, which would have taken a two-thirds council vote to change. The city attorney should confirm in writing which budget the next invoice is charged to, and the city should send notice under Section 11.16 by November 15 so the 30 days run out before that invoice is dated.

Chief Barnes told the Finance Committee this on October 6, and said the cameras are on entrances and exits to the city and on its bridges. Volunteers have mapped 20 Flock cameras in and beside Wausau, the same number the department reports. All 20 are on main roads, and 10 are within 1,000 feet of the city limit or a freeway ramp, or within 600 feet of a river bridge. But 15 of the 20 have at least one house within 300 feet, which is about a block, and 10 have five or more. One is 48 feet from the nearest house. In all, 122 homes sit within 300 feet of a camera, and the cameras stand in 8 of the 11 alder districts. See the map and the count for each camera and district.

The camera positions come from volunteer mapping on OpenStreetMap, not from the police department. The house counts come from the state parcel map and Microsoft building footprints, measured from the camera to the house itself. Apartment buildings with four or more units aren’t counted, so the totals run low.

Thirty closed cases in three years is about ten a year, set against 20,020 searches since 2023 and roughly 2.8 million images a year, and the department has never reported how many of those cases produced a charge or a conviction. Federally funded randomized studies find that plate readers recover more stolen cars but don’t add arrests or reduce crime.

Chief Barnes told the Police and Fire Commission this on September 28. The footage is deleted after 30 days, but Section 4.3 of the contract lets Flock keep “anonymized” data from Wausau’s cameras with no time limit, train its software on it, and “use and distribute” it in “other Flock offerings.” The contract names no standard for anonymizing and gives the city no right to check. Flock hasn’t published any method for doing it, and its marketing advertises counts of unique vehicles and repeat visits, which require telling one car from another. In Sheboygan, a Flock sales representative offered the city’s public works department up to five years of traffic data from its police cameras. Whether Wausau’s data is in that product isn’t public. The report on Flock’s anonymization

Flock’s current terms are worse for the city on four of five points: Flock may use all camera data, it owns what it builds from it, the city can leave through the budget only at the end of a fiscal year, and disputes go to private arbitration under Georgia law. Flock rewrote its terms twice this year. Any change to Wausau’s contract takes Flock’s signature, and in 2028 Flock can raise the price or offer only its terms of the day. The 2023 contract lets the city leave now at no cost. Compare the two contracts

That setting was the other way for three years, and a captain can reverse it. It also doesn’t bind the roughly 200 agencies that can search Wausau’s cameras, or the county sheriff, whose cameras ring the city and share with agencies in 40 states. Separately, Section 5.3 of the contract lets Flock itself disclose footage to police or other third parties for 30 days, without a warrant and without telling the city, when it believes in good faith that it’s reasonably necessary.

The audit samples 10 searches every six months out of more than 10,000 a year, so it would be unlikely to. In Milwaukee it was a victim who found the misuse, and the detective put on the case was then charged with the same thing.

Stevens Point had the strictest settings in the region and switched its cameras off anyway. Every safeguard lives inside software that Flock runs and can change. The only setting Wausau fully controls is whether the cameras are on.

Wausau still keeps data for 30 days. The reforms are Flock’s own policies and aren’t written into Wausau’s contract, and the 7-day default applies to new customers.

A single photo of a plate is public. A searchable record of every trip past those cameras, open to about 200 agencies, raises a legal question that one photo doesn’t. A Virginia judge held in 2024 that querying a 172-camera Flock network is a search, and a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled this month that an officer’s Flock lookup without a warrant or probable cause was one too. Other courts have gone the other way, and neither ruling binds Wisconsin. The lawsuit against Waukesha County and 11 municipalities is now in federal court, where the defense attorney expects a ruling in 2027. In October, the ACLU of Wisconsin and the Electronic Frontier Foundation also asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to require warrants for plate reader searches. FOX 11

Missing-person searches were 4 of 781 Marathon County searches this year, which is about half of one percent. Amber Alert hotlists run on every other agency’s cameras in the region whether or not Wausau owns any, and Wausau can ask a partner agency to search.

That money’s spent whether the program continues or not. What’s left to decide is the remaining $100,000.

Many of the departures were led by law enforcement. Racine County’s sheriff removed his own cameras, Sheboygan’s police chief asked his council to terminate, and 42 Wisconsin agencies have ended or decided to end Flock, with 16 more switching their cameras off.