The full August 18 meeting. The Flock segment begins at 1:06:10. Open on YouTube → Timestamps below refer to this video.
The council was split. The room was not.
The council renewed the contract 5 to 3. Ward 8 Councilman Mark Stonecipher was absent. Voting no were the three members who had engaged residents all along: James Cooper (Ward 2), JoBeth Hamon (Ward 6), and Camal Pennington (Ward 7). Voting yes were Mayor David Holt and Council members Bradley Carter (Ward 1), Katrina Avers (Ward 3), Todd Stone (Ward 4), and Matthew Hinkle (Ward 5).
In the room it was not close. More than two dozen residents signed up to speak, and not one spoke in favor of the contract. When the chief invoked the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to make his case, the chamber booed.
The public that showed up was unanimous. The council that voted was not.
The chief read the vendor's script.
Two weeks before the vote, 404 Media published Flock's leaked coaching guide for police, "How to Speak to City Councils." It tells officers not to deny mass surveillance, to pivot the conversation from "surveillance" to "governance," to "show the guardrails," and to lean on emotional cases. Chief Ron Bacy's hour-long presentation followed it line by line.
Pivot from "surveillance" to "governance." "Show the guardrails."
"The real question is, are the right guard rails and protections in place?" He then walked the community's own "recommended guardrails" list, claiming to "meet or exceed" every one. He used the word guard rails at least three times.
Lean on emotional cases: missing kids, murder victims. Own the narrative before the public speaks.
He stacked the OKC bombing memorial, a 2024 election-day terror plot, his own missing relative, a carjacking, and a mass shooting, in sequence, as the climax of the pitch. He also told the council, "as everyone who comes behind me speaks today," signaling supporters to follow.
He cued the council to listen to everyone who came behind him. They came, and they buried him. More than two dozen residents signed up to speak after the chief, and not one rose in support of the contract. The backers he had signaled never came, and the only prepared case in that room was his own.
What he told the council the cameras do, and what they actually do.
Repeatedly, the chief described the limits of OKC's current configuration as if they were the limits of the technology. They are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole argument.
"No video or audio... Flock does sell cameras capable of recording video, but we do not contract for those." "There's no personal or biometric information, meaning no facial recognition or anything else that identifies anybody."
"Not contracted for" is not "not capable" and not "not captured." Flock holds patents on facial recognition and on person tracking; its Raven audio-detection module is microphone hardware that, once mounted on a camera, can have its listening features switched on remotely by a software update; and Section 2.4 of the contract lets Flock change the platform without the city's consent. What OCPD is billed for today does not bind what the platform can do, or what Flock can turn on next.
"It cannot reveal personal activities or sensitive destinations."
Minutes later: we "block any searches for immigration-related or reproductive-rights searches."
These cannot both be true. You can only block searches for trips the system is capable of revealing. In the same breath as "cannot reveal," he also said "investigations can use aggregated data to generate leads," which is exactly the pattern-of-life tracking he just denied.
"Our data is locally controlled... Flock cannot sell or share our data without our permission. We decide if, when, and with whom data is shared."
The signed contract says otherwise. Section 4.1 grants Flock an irrevocable, worldwide license to the data; Section 4.3 grants a perpetual, worldwide right to train its machine-learning models on it. Neither requires the city's per-use permission. "Locally controlled" cannot be squared with a license Flock already holds and the city cannot revoke.
"We only have 90 cameras."
Under questioning from Councilwoman Hamon, he conceded that "90" is a floor, not a ceiling. Through the real-time crime center, OCPD can pull in and search private cameras, business and neighborhood-association cameras, that it does not own. Asked if it can access a Lowe's or an HOA's feed, he answered: "Yes, we have access, we can have access to those." He also conceded OCPD cannot say who else those private owners share with, and that the city's 7-day retention does not apply to any of it.
The platform he named for this is Fusus, a real-time crime center system acquired by Axon in 2024, the same Axon we say must never replace Flock. So the department already runs an Axon camera-fusion pipe, and ending the 90-camera Flock contract would not close it.
"Our department is voluntarily transitioning from 30-day to 7-day data retention."
The 7-day retention depends on Flock's new "evidence mode," which by his own account is not deployed yet: "they are still rolling that out and we are waiting on the system upgrade." Flock built it and "announced it last week." The privacy improvement he presented as done is a vendor feature the city does not control and does not yet have, and flagged records are kept past seven days anyway.
An "election day plot in November of 2024... where people were going to shoot up polling sites" was stopped "because of the efforts of law enforcement," offered inside the case for Flock.
That plot was foiled by an FBI undercover counterterrorism operation (the ISIS-inspired Tawhedi case), with no documented role for Flock or any license plate reader. Placing it in a Flock presentation implies a connection that does not exist.
He told the council the courts had settled this. A councilmember had read the cases.
Two Oklahoma federal cases, United States v. Costa and United States v. Brown, found "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in a plate on a public street, and "other courts across the country have consistently upheld" ALPR use.
Those are criminal suppression rulings on the settled, narrow point that a single plate visible on a public street is not private. No one disputes that. They do not resolve the question this fight actually turns on: whether logging a whole city's movements over time is a search. The decision Flock cites most, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, went for the city but is on appeal to the Fourth Circuit.
Councilwoman Hamon had read them. She noted that the no-expectation-of-privacy rule the chief was leaning on comes from the Supreme Court's 1983 decision United States v. Knotts, and then pointed to what that same opinion reserved a page or two later: the question of mass surveillance. Justice Rehnquist wrote that "if such dragnet-type law enforcement practices ... should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable."
That reserved question, around-the-clock tracking of ordinary people, is exactly what a citywide camera network is. The Supreme Court returned to it in Carpenter v. United States (2018) and held that persistent, aggregated location tracking is a Fourth Amendment search. The chief cited the easy half of the law. A member of his own council quoted him the half he skipped.
Twice, the answer was "sensitive."
Councilwoman Hamon asked the two questions any oversight begins with. She was refused both times.
Hamon: "Can you make that list available to us to review?"
Bacy: "No, ma'am."
Hamon: "how do you choose locations of where to mount cameras?"
Bacy: "I would consider that to be law enforcement sensitive data."
Read the two refusals together. The council that governs this program was not allowed to see who receives its data (109 local agencies, still unnamed), or to learn how the police decide where to put its cameras. The elected body being asked to approve the program was refused a look at the program itself. On August 27 that list was requested under the Open Records Act through both the City and the Department, on the simple ground that a count of 109 cannot exist without a list of 109. On the accountability the amendment promises, the chief also confirmed that officers are not required to enter a case number to run a search (96:47), and that the "continuous" audit is run by Flock's own AI, which his own analyst admitted will not flag misuse that is not repeated or does not share a last name. That is the department auditing Flock's system with Flock's own AI, on an audit log it has denied the public. It will not show its work to the council, and it will not show it to you.
Eight members were present. Three took part.
For an hour-plus presentation and Q&A on a $270,000 surveillance contract, only three of the eight council members present engaged the material at all: Hamon and Cooper, who pressed the hard questions and voted no, and Avers, who asked a single question and voted yes. The rest sat the discussion out, then voted.
- Voted no (3): James Cooper (Ward 2), JoBeth Hamon (Ward 6), Camal Pennington (Ward 7).
- Voted yes (5): Mayor David Holt, Bradley Carter (Ward 1), Katrina Avers (Ward 3), Todd Stone (Ward 4), Matthew Hinkle (Ward 5).
- Absent: Mark Stonecipher (Ward 8).
Of the five who voted yes, only Councilman Stone defended the program out loud. His argument, that residents already accept tracking because they carry cell phones and drive connected cars, is one we answer in full on our Common Questions page. Interrupting to tell the chief he had worked in the cell phone industry, Stone said your location data is "always there, always available, unless you break your phone in half" (137:57). The point cuts the other way: a phone is a device you can put down, and a license plate is one the state requires you to display. The other four yes votes were cast without a word of public explanation.
He posted his defense. Then the whole page vanished. The day after the vote, Ward 1 Councilman Bradley Carter put out a written statement defending his yes, leaning on the same "stronger safeguards, accountability, and oversight" the chief had been selling (OKCFox). Then the official Ward 1 Facebook page, his constituents' one public channel to reach him, disappeared. Not the post. The entire page. Gone. His statement survives at all only because OKCFox had already saved a copy. We will not tell you why a public official's public page evaporates the same week his vote packed City Hall with boos. We will only note that it did, and that a ward just lost its public line to the man elected to answer to it.
The emotional case, answered from the dais.
The chief's presentation leaned hardest on grief. The room recognized it, and booed when the bombing was invoked. Not long after, Councilman James Cooper answered the "it solves crimes" pitch with Oklahoma's own history:
"Does everyone remember how we caught McVeigh? ... It was good old-fashioned police work when they pulled him over on the interstate ... Because he did not have a license plate. The very thing this technology supposedly helps us capture people with."
Councilman James Cooper, Ward 2
Timothy McVeigh carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in the country's history. He was stopped about ninety minutes later on Interstate 35, not by any camera, but for driving with no license plate at all. The chief invoked that bombing to sell a plate reader. The man who committed it was caught because he had no plate to read.
The chief presented a stat block, 60 murders, 210 missing people, 1,280 recovered vehicles, and said the technology "solved" them. But the department told a records requester in July that it keeps no records linking Flock searches to case outcomes (OCPD-10088). It cannot substantiate the number it built its case on.
The vote is in. The case isn't closed.
The contract renews for one year, retroactive to July 1 and expiring June 30, 2027. It comes back around. The demand has not changed:
- 01 Do not renew the Flock contract.
- 02 Remove the Flock cameras, and end the private-camera integration that outlives them.
- 03 Do not contract with another ALPR vendor.
Read the full argument, or add your name to the more than 2,200 who have signed to end it.
Read The Case Sign the Petition