// THE VERGE — HARDWARE & GADGET
The city that fought Flock
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Searching for the ‘silent majority’ of supporters for Flock’s surveillance technology in one West Virginia town.
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It was about to be a long night in Huntington, West Virginia.
Mayor Patrick Farrell stood before 10 members of city council in a white dress shirt and dark blazer studded with an American flag pin. Behind him sat his constituents and residents from neighboring towns. Some had their arms crossed, while others held a steady glare in his direction. Less than a week before the July 13th meeting, a 33-year-old named Jackie Harper had been shot and killed in Huntington. It was the kind of crime Farrell had promised to get under control. But a breakthrough in the case just days after the killing suggested something promising to Farrell. Harper’s suspected killer, said the mayor, had been found in another state — and it was Flock cameras that helped track him down.
The network of automated license plate reader technology, Farrell said, had also helped find a suspect in another tragic double killing earlier in the year of a beloved middle school basketball coach and his brother, a city worker. “Take that in just this year, and then take it back to all of the cold cases that we have,” Farrell said, referencing an unsolved case from more than 20 years ago where four teens were killed in Huntington on their prom night. Shortly after the gruesome shooting, police said they suspected it was linked to crack cocaine dealers from Detroit. To this day, officials still point to a stubborn flow of drugs from Michigan as the central scourge of the community. The prom night murders remain unsolved. “Think about what might have happened had we had this technology,” Farrell pleaded.
For the next seven hours, that’s what dozens of residents of Huntington and surrounding areas imagined as they stepped up to the microphone to address the city council. Their vision of a Flock-filled future sounded far more bleak. Individuals’ rights to privacy would be trampled. They would be stalked and surveilled. Perfectly legal day-to-day activities could be subject to abuse by Flock itself or rogue police officers with access to its recordings. Sometime after 2AM, a few speakers simply read from George Orwell’s 1984, passing a copy of the book back to the next person in line who wanted it, committed to keeping councilmembers up and looking into their own crystal ball as long as they could.