Huntington residents rally to ban Flock cameras after West Virginia city council approves contract

According to The Verge, the city council of Huntington, West Virginia, voted 6-4 in July to let Mayor Patrick Farrell sign a contract with Flock Safety, the company behind widely used automated license plate readers. The decision came after a seven-hour public meeting that ran past 2AM, and it has since triggered a citizen-led ballot campaign that could void the deal entirely.

A seven-hour meeting ended 6-4

At the July 13th meeting, Farrell made an emotional case for the technology. Less than a week earlier, 33-year-old Jackie Harper had been shot and killed in Huntington, and the mayor said Flock cameras helped authorities track the suspected killer down in another state within days. He also credited the camera network with helping find a suspect in a double killing earlier in the year, which claimed a middle school basketball coach and his brother, a city worker. Farrell then reached further back, invoking the unsolved killings of four teenagers on their prom night more than 20 years ago and suggesting the cases might have turned out differently with such tools available.

Councilmembers pushed back on practical grounds, arguing the contract language was loose enough to expose the city to lawsuits and questioning whether a vote was necessary given the intensity of constituent opposition. After a motion to shelve the deal indefinitely failed, the council approved it 6-4. As The Verge reports, opponents took turns reading passages from George Orwell's 1984 into the early morning, and at one point the council chair mistook stomping from constituents watching in an upstairs auditorium for thunder — only to be reminded the noise came from local taxpayers.

Distrust on both sides

Farrell said the idea came from conversations with other mayors at a conference who credited Flock with cutting crime. When one councilmember asked whether he had spoken with mayors in cities that canceled their Flock contracts, he said he had not.

Residents laid out a darker vision: routine movements tracked, privacy eroded, and lawful daily activity exposed to misuse by the company or by officers with access to the footage. After the vote, Farrell framed opponents as a vocal minority and pointed to a silent majority of supporters, saying he had heard from hundreds of them. The Verge's reporting found opponents far more visible in the city, and Rob Archer, a councilmember who voted for the contract, told the outlet he regularly encounters constituents who disapprove of it.

A city shaped by crisis

Huntington, a city of roughly 45,000 anchored by Marshall University, has absorbed more than its share of tragedy: destructive floods, a 1970s plane crash that killed 37 members of the Marshall football team along with coaches and staff, and a drug epidemic that drew national attention. The Cabell-Huntington Health Department found in 2015 that drug overdose was the third-leading cause of death in the county, and Johns Hopkins University researchers concluded from a 2018 study that the county had the highest opioid overdose rate in the state. That history of resilience runs through the opposition, too. Noah Jasper Gibson, a young musician protesting Flock, described neighbors who work long shifts and still show up to demonstrate.

The petition to undo the deal

The Huntington Community Action Group is now gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would void the Flock contract and prohibit the city from replacing it with a competing surveillance service. The group needs signatures from at least 10 percent of registered voters — roughly 2,700 — to force the council to consider the ordinance. As of mid-September, after a little over a month of canvassing, it had collected 1,600 signatures and set a target of 4,000 for cushion. If the council rejects or alters the proposal, as expected, it would go to a citywide vote within a year, or land on its own ballot if no election falls that year. Holly Smith Mount, a councilmember who voted against the contract, told The Verge she found the democratic process energizing, even if it means sitting through another marathon meeting.

Why it matters

The Huntington fight is a live test of whether residents can claw back surveillance infrastructure after elected officials adopt it. Automated license plate readers sit squarely at the intersection of AI and policing: they continuously log where vehicles travel, and the debate turns on whether investigative wins justify that kind of blanket location tracking. The fact that some cities have canceled Flock contracts — the very question raised at the council meeting — shows the technology's record is contested. Huntington's ballot initiative offers a third route beyond adoption and quiet cancellation: letting voters decide directly. For other small cities weighing similar deals, the outcome could become a reference point either way.