Flock refused to remove cameras after Illinois college asked to cancel its contract

A college that could not end its camera contract

In April 2025, Elgin Community College in Illinois installed six cameras from Flock Safety on campus, an arrangement the school framed as a way to improve safety for students, The Verge reports. By September 2025, administrators had accumulated three serious concerns: that Flock was sharing camera data with US Customs and Border Protection, that the video feeds were not properly secured, and that both law enforcement personnel and Flock's own employees had misused their access to the data.

The next month, the college asked the company to take the cameras down. College President Peggy Heinrich said Flock rejected the request on the basis that it had not violated its contract.

An offer to pay, then no response

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, school officials tried a second time in December 2025, offering to pay for the five months still remaining on the contract if the equipment would just be removed. The Verge reports that this request received no answer from the company.

What followed is the part of the episode that has drawn wider attention. Heinrich said campus staff resorted to covering the cameras with black trash bags fastened with zip ties so the devices could not capture footage. Workers arriving in an unmarked vehicle, which Heinrich believed belonged to Flock, repeatedly removed the coverings during service visits.

"We were kind of in a back and forth for a bit where we'd cover, and then when they'd come to service, they'd remove," Heinrich told the Sun-Times. "Then we'd cover and then they'd remove."

The cycle continued until April 2026, when the contract ran out and Flock finally took the cameras down. The college got the outcome it wanted only by waiting out the agreement it had signed.

What the account leaves open

The reporting rests primarily on the college's version of events. Flock's stated position was that it had not breached the contract, and Heinrich only assumed the unmarked vehicle was the company's — neither The Verge nor the Sun-Times confirmed who was actually stripping the coverings. Those caveats matter, but they do not change the central fact both outlets agree on: the college asked for removal, offered to pay the remainder of the contract, and went roughly six months without the cameras being taken down.

Why it matters

The story is a sharp illustration of how little leverage a customer can have once surveillance-as-a-service hardware is in the ground. Elgin Community College says it raised concerns about federal data sharing, insecure feeds and access abuse, then offered to pay out the full remainder of its deal, and still could not get the equipment off its own property until the contract expired on its own terms.

For the schools, cities and agencies that buy Flock-style camera networks, the lesson is that termination rights, data ownership and hardware removal matter as much as the product's features. If a vendor can simply decline to uninstall — and keep servicing devices the customer has actively tried to disable — the real exit cost of these contracts is measured in months of unwanted surveillance, not dollars. Procurement processes that treat exit clauses as boilerplate are effectively signing up for whatever the vendor's practices turn out to be, for the full length of the term.