In July, the Knox County Commission voted unanimously for further review of Knox County Sheriff's Office (KCSO) use of Flock Safety mass surveillance cameras before more are installed. Currently, there are 84 such cameras active in Knox County with a total of nearly 300 surveillance cameras requested by KCSO from a $1.5 million state grant.

Now, KCSO and Flock’s CEO & representatives are expected to defend their 10-year long contract at the County Commission Workshop on Monday, Aug. 24 at 1:00pm. Then, the commission is expected to vote whether to ban these surveillance cameras at their meeting on Monday, Aug. 31 at 5:00pm. The workshop and meeting will be in the Main Assembly Room of the City-County Building (400 Main St., Knoxville).

It is critical that we speak up NOW to stop Knox from being sold out to the multi-billion dollar mass surveillance industry.

There are many reasons to be concerned with and skeptical of the KCSO-Flock agreement, among them:

• Flock's AI-powered license plate readers are alarmingly inaccurate. Just last month, for example, the Los Angeles PD dropped its Flock contract after an internal audit found a 32.3% false-positive rate, with its Flock alerts offering about a 1-in-3 chance of pulling over an innocent person.
• Flock has a long track record of misrepresenting itself and its products to communities and law enforcement agencies across the country. The company has lied about creating heat maps of travelers' movements and federal agencies' access to local camera data. Flock has also made dubious claims about their cameras reducing crime and their role in solving crime nationwide. Just this week, Wired reported that after years of saying its products “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals,” Flock is now deploying an AI tool that "can identify drivers and tracks vehicles by their patterns of movement alone." Flock's CEO Garrett Langley has also made contradictory statements about the surveillance cameras' ability to capture video.
• Flock and other mass surveillance systems have a well-documented history of enabling abuse of power. The safeguards it claims to implement are simply ineffective, as accountability loopholes remain around audits, data retention, and unreasonable searches
  
• KCSO has not been transparent about its implementation of this contract. For example, it used a  "piggyback" law to avoid approval from the County Mayor and County Commission. KCSO has not published any guardrail policies for its use of Flock cameras or the new surveillance hub they'll power. They have not followed their own promises of Flock camera locations.
• Mounted ALPRs like Flock's have been shown to have hazardous installations and lack third-party crash-safe testing.
• We must ask if KCSO has sufficient public trust and is culturally equipped to manage such a consequential surveillance apparatuss: 11 current and former KCSO employees have been indicted on corruption charges this year, including Aaron Yarnell, the former KCSO technology director who oversaw this no-bid contract.
• Despite Flock's misleading claims of reducing and solving crime, mass surveillance does not make us safer. We also note that rates of crime locally and nationally continue to fall.
• KCSO does not have to use the $1.5 million state grant for mass surveillance; the grant could also be used towards things like pedestrian infrastructure and traffic-calming measures.
• Other municipalities nationwide are choosing privacy, safety, and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars over mass surveillance. At least 23 municipalities voted to cancel their Flock contracts so far in 2026. Why shouldn't we?