Every vehicle in Monongalia County is being logged.

The Monongalia County Sheriff's Office runs 20 Flock Safety automated license plate readers. In the last 30 days they tracked 437,978 unique vehicles without suspicion of a crime.[2] The program was paid for with $180,000 of opioid settlement money, approved outside the county's own grant process.[1]

20cameras on county roads
437,978unique vehicles tracked in 30 days (as of Sept 2026)
$180,000of opioid settlement funds, over 3 years
3,049,590searches of Mon County's camera data by 3,918 agencies this year (FOIA audit logs)
What Flock says vs. what's true What you can do

What is Flock?

Flock Safety is a private company that sells what it calls "surveillance as a service." Its automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are cameras mounted along public roads. Each time a vehicle passes, the camera photographs it and uploads the image to Flock's servers, where software reads the license plate and records the vehicle's make, model, color, and other details, along with the time, date, and location of the sighting.

Each sighting becomes a record in a national database that Flock's customers (police departments, sheriff's offices, and other agencies across the country) can search. A single query can return everywhere a vehicle has been seen on the network, not just in Monongalia County.

The Sheriff's Office credits the system with real investigative results, including recovering a child in an abduction case in August 2026.[2] Nobody disputes that the system can produce investigative leads. The dispute is whether mass location surveillance of every driver, people suspected of nothing, is a price a free community should pay for them, and whether the public was told the truth about what it agreed to.

Where the cameras are

The Sheriff's Office runs 20 cameras.[2] The crowdsourced map below shows 33.[13]

Dark street map of Monongalia County with blue dots marking Flock camera locations in and around Morgantown, Star City, and Granville, and along routes 705, 19, and 857.
Crowdsourced camera locations from deflock.org, as of September 2026. Locations change; the live map has current data.[13]

How it got here

In November 2025, the Sheriff's Office asked the County Commission to buy 20 Flock cameras. The commission said yes, with opioid settlement money, outside the county's own grant process.[1]

  1. The pitch

    Sheriff's Office leadership and task force commanders present at a County Commission work session: 20 cameras, $193,000 for a three-year contract, discounted to about $180,000 if signed before November 14, when Flock would waive the installation fee. They cited examples of cases where the cameras "would have come in handy" and presented no evidence or statistics that they prevent opioid deaths or drug use.[1]

  2. The vote

    Seven days after the pitch, the Commission unanimously approves the three-year, $180,000 agreement, paid from the county's share of West Virginia's $980 million opioid settlement. The Sheriff's Office did not go through the county's formal opioid grant application process, the process other organizations must follow, with project summaries, justification documents, financial records, and six-month and year-end reporting. The Commission President confirmed: "Did they apply through the grant process? No."[1][15]

  3. Live, unannounced

    The cameras go live. The first evidence is the "success stories" dated April 2026 on the Sheriff's transparency portal. By mid-July the system had captured 525,370 images. The department had searched 101 of them. The other 525,269 were the movements of people suspected of nothing.[2][16]

  4. The FOIA lands

    A records request filed September 30 for the Flock network audit logs and sharing settings comes back October 7 with the Sheriff's own numbers: 3,049,590 searches of Mon County's camera data by 3,918 agencies in nine months.[FOIA]

Read the full timeline

Claims vs. reality

Flock's transparency portal for Monongalia County makes specific promises. The fine print is where they fall apart.

The claim
"Data is owned by Monongalia WV County SO and is never sold to 3rd parties."
The reality

Flock's Terms and Conditions split the data in two. "Customer Data" (the raw images) belongs to the county. But the analysis of those images is "Flock Property": Flock's terms define that to include "any derivative works, intermediate or final outputs, analyses, reports, models, or other results generated by or through the Flock Services," and grant the county "no rights... to download, extract, export, or otherwise create or retain copies" of it. The never-sold promise covers only Customer Data. And the county hands Flock an "irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license" to use the raw data to "support and improve Flock's products and services."[2][3]

The claim
"Customers are in control of their data and can choose not to share"
The reality

The Sheriff's Office can choose which agencies get an explicit share of Mon County's camera data, and it chose 14: twelve in West Virginia, two in Pennsylvania. The audit logs show that data queried 3,049,590 times by 3,918 agencies in nine months, 3,181 of which have no entry in the sharing settings at all. The setting controls the share list, not who searches the data.[FOIA]

The claim
"Contract Between FLOCK and Monongalia Sheriff's Office."
The reality

The "contract" published on the transparency portal is a purchase order, and it doesn't contain the terms. It binds the county to "the terms and conditions contained in the Terms of Service located at" a URL on Flock's website. No version, no date. That URL now serves terms last updated August 21, 2026, nine months after the county signed.[3][4][17]

The claim
"What's Detected: License Plates, Vehicles."
The reality

The cameras photograph everything in frame and upload it to Flock's cloud, where the analysis extracts far more than plates. Flock's search capabilities include Vehicle Fingerprint Search, which covers "bumper stickers, decals, and roof racks," and FreeForm, which enables searches like "man wearing a red hat and blue shirt," and other identifiers like tattoos and race.[2][7][8][9][17]

The claim
"All system access requires a valid reason and is stored indefinitely."
The reality

Nationally, officers' "valid reasons" include "LOL," "LMAO," and "idk."[5] The Sheriff's own audit logs now put numbers on the problem: 81.38% of 3,049,590 searches carry no case-specific content at all. "Investigation" is the stated reason 158,518 times. "Criminal Justice Purpose" (the search is its own justification) 95,435 times. A case number appears on only about a third of rows. And we have no way of knowing whether any of these reasons are true, or what they even mean.[FOIA]

The claim
"Prohibited Uses: Immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment or intimidation..."
The reality

The prohibition is a policy promise, not a technical control, and it has no contractual force. Nationally, a DEA agent used a local officer's password, without the officer's knowledge, to search Flock for someone suspected of an "immigration violation." The cameras automatically alert on NCIC hotlists, such as the "Immigration Violator" hotlist published by ICE. In Mon County, "Traffic Infraction" is the stated purpose on 362,452 searches in the Sheriff's own audit logs, 11.9% of everything in the files; our local safeguards do nothing to limit outside agencies.[FOIA][3][10][18]

The claim
"Data retention: 21 days."
The reality

The 21-day retention period governs how long Flock stores Customer Data. Retention doesn't govern Flock Property, the analyses and outputs like plate numbers, vehicle and people descriptions, etc. Flock has already been caught retaining one city's traffic data for 5 years.[2][3][19]

The claim
"No federal agencies have access."
The reality

Flock makes this claim, but they don't put it in the contract,[3] and it's obvious why: the audit logs show federally funded HIDTA drug task forces (two entries literally tagged "[Federal]"), the West Virginia Fusion Center, and regional intelligence networks all searching Mon County's data. No FBI or ICE appears under its own name, but no audit log can see an agent using a partner agency's account.[FOIA]

The national pattern

The guardrails Monongalia County relies on are the same ones that failed everywhere else.

  • The Institute for Justice has cataloged 241 documented incidents of ALPR abuse: officers stalking romantic partners, wrongful stops at gunpoint, and searches of people who committed no crime.[6]
  • A Texas deputy used 83,000 Flock cameras to find a woman who allegedly had a medication abortion, at the request of her abusive partner. A Georgia police chief used the system to track his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times. A Lufkin, Texas officer was indicted on 100 felony counts after searching for his ex-girlfriend more than 10,000 times.[6]
  • EFF's analysis of millions of audit records found officers searching the database for school residency checks, noise complaints, and background checks, with "LMAO" entered as the reason.[5]
  • Flock itself created a fake police department ("Flock City PD") and used it to search live cameras in U.S. cities for "crowds," people holding signs, and people wearing masks, during product demonstrations.[11]
  • Scores of towns have canceled or suspended their Flock contracts under public pressure. Flock's 2026 "reforms" (shorter default retention, offense filtering) are company policy. As EFF put it: "what is stopping Flock from reversing course on them...? Nothing."[12]

Take action

Other communities have gotten Flock contracts canceled. Ours can too.

Sign the petitions

Sign all 3! If you're the owner of one of these, please reach out to coordinate.

Contact the County Commission

The commission approved this program and can end it. Monongalia County Commission, 243 High St, Morgantown, WV 26505. (304) 291-7257.[14][17]

Contact the Sheriff's Office

Let the sheriff know Flock isn't worth our civil liberties. Monongalia County Sheriff's Office, 116 Walnut Street, Morgantown, WV 26505. (304) 291-7260. info@monongaliasheriff.gov.[4]

Speak at a commission meeting

Public comment is how other communities moved their councils to act. Meetings are every Wednesday at 10am at the county courthouse.[14]

Sources

  1. WBOY 12 News (Hannah Heiskell), "Sheriff's office did not use Mon County's formal opioid grant process for Flock, commission says," Sept 18, 2026. wboy.com
  2. Flock Safety Transparency Portal, Monongalia WV County SO (accessed Sept 20, 2026). transparency.flocksafety.com
  3. Flock Safety, Terms and Conditions (last updated Aug 21, 2026). flocksafety.com/legal/terms-and-conditions
  4. Monongalia County Sheriff's Office, Flock Safety Transparency. monongaliasheriff.gov
  5. Electronic Frontier Foundation (Rindala Alajaji and Dave Maass), "The High Crime of 'LMAO': How Cops Are Treating Flock's Mass Surveillance As a Joke," Sept 14, 2026. eff.org
  6. Institute for Justice, The IJ Database of ALPR Abuse. ij.org
  7. Flock Safety, FreeForm product page. flocksafety.com/products/freeform-search
  8. Have I Been Flocked, FreeForm Report. haveibeenflocked.com
  9. 404 Media, "How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars," July 16, 2026. 404media.co
  10. 404 Media, "Feds Used Local Cop's Password to Do Immigration Surveillance With Flock Cameras," Aug 12, 2025. 404media.co
  11. 404 Media, "'Flock City PD': The Fake Flock-Owned 'Police Department' That Searched Real Cameras for Real People," Sept 17, 2026. 404media.co
  12. Electronic Frontier Foundation (Matthew Guariglia), "Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms," Aug 13, 2026. eff.org
  13. Deflock. deflock.org
  14. Monongalia County Commission. monongaliacounty.gov
  15. The Dominion Post, "Commission approves funding for 20 license plate recognition cameras," Nov 12, 2025. dominionpost.com
  16. WV News (Chase Hughart), "Flock Safety cameras spark debate over privacy, policing in Monongalia County," July 17, 2026. wvnews.com
  17. Flock Safety Order Form, WV-Monongalia County SO, executed Nov 13, 2025 (published as "Contract Between Flock and Monongalia Sheriff's Office"). monongaliasheriff.gov
  18. Electronic Frontier Foundation (Dave Maass), "Are Your Local Police Using Flock Safety ALPRs to Scan for Immigrants?" June 25, 2026. eff.org
  19. FOX6 Milwaukee (Bryan Polcyn), "Sheboygan canceling Flock contract over undisclosed data tracking," Sept 3, 2026. fox6now.com