Between the City of Florence and Lauderdale County, they have spent ninety thousand dollars watching you.

On April 8, 2024, the Lauderdale County Commission voted unanimously to sign an agreement with Flock Group, Inc. (Flock Safety) for its automated license plate reader system. The county agreed to pay ten thousand dollars a year, for three years, which comes to thirty thousand dollars total, out of the General Fund.

The resolution was signed by all five commissioners: Chairman Danny Pettus, Roger Garner, Brad Black, Fay Parker, and Joe Hackworth. The contract covers four Flock "Falcon" cameras and the Flock software platform. The motion to approve was made by Commissioner Brad Black and seconded by Commissioner Fay Parker.

Read a copy of the contract (PDF) Original source: lauderdalecountyal.gov, April 8, 2024 Commission minutes

On December 5, 2023, the Florence City Council approved a contract with Flock Group, Inc. for the Florence Police Department. The city agreed to pay twenty thousand dollars a year, for three years, which comes to sixty thousand dollars total, from budgeted funds out of Account #256-42100.

The resolution was sponsored by Ron Tyler, who was the Florence Police Chief at the time and is now the Mayor of Florence.

Read a copy of the council minutes (PDF) Original source: florenceal.org, December 5, 2023 Council minutes

This is public money, your money, spent on a system that records where residents drive, without a warrant and without anyone ever being asked. Ninety thousand dollars is the figure for just two of our local governments. It does not yet include Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, or Tuscumbia.

The part most people don't realize is where the data goes. These cameras aren't a closed local system. Per the county's own contract, they're tied into a statewide and nationwide license plate lookup network. That means a plate captured by a camera here in the Shoals can be searched by law enforcement agencies in other counties and other states, agencies with no connection to our community and no accountability to the people who paid for the cameras. Your daily movements, logged here, become searchable far from here.

That's the trade our local government officals signed us up for: our tax dollars, our movements, fed into a national surveillance network, on contracts most residents never heard about.

Here's the thing worth sitting with. The Fourth Amendment exists to keep the government from tracking and searching people without a warrant. That's its whole spirit, the reason it's in the Constitution at all. Warrantless license plate tracking runs straight against that spirit, and the Supreme Court has spent the last decade saying so about technology exactly like this. You can read that whole story on our main page.

So when officials put their name on one of these contracts, whatever they intended, this is what they actually did: they signed our community up for a system that logs where we go and feeds it into a national network, without a warrant, without a vote, and against the spirit of the very rights they swore to protect. Good intentions don't change what's on the paper. A signature on one of these deals is a signature that puts surveillance ahead of your constitutional rights, and the people who signed should have to answer for that to the residents who pay their salaries.

They made a choice that doesn't have your rights as an American at heart, and they made it with your money, and you deserve to know their names and hold them to it.