08/26/2026
A police chief in Oshkosh, Wisconsin caught Flock lying to his city council, and killed the $8 billion surveillance company's contract less than a day after the council had approved it.
Here's how it happened.
The night before, Oshkosh's council was set to renew its deal with Flock Safety, the license plate camera company backed by a16z and Tiger Global.
One council member asked the Flock rep a plain yes-or-no question. Does this system build a heat map of everywhere a specific car travels over time?
Flock's rep said no.
The council believed him and voted 5 to 2 to renew. By the next morning, Chief Dean Smith's own officers had told him that answer was false.
So he pulled up the system himself. He watched it generate the exact heat map Flock had just sworn it couldn't make.
Then he walked into an emergency meeting and said it out loud: "Because of this misrepresentation, I can no longer recommend Flock."
Understand what a heat map is, because it's the whole trick.
Flock sells cities a tidy little story. A car drives by, we snap a photo, we read the plate, that's all it is.
But the same system can quietly average out where your car goes day after day and paint your routine onto a map.
Not one snapshot at one corner. Your pattern. Where you sleep, where you work, where you keep going back and how often.
A Flock employee later admitted on the record that the software does exactly that.
So the pitch and the product are two different things. The company wins the contract selling a plate reader, then sits on a moving map of your life.
The only reason Oshkosh caught it was one skeptical question and a police chief who bothered to check the answer.
The vote to rescind was 7 to 0. Unanimous.
Flock called the whole thing "one small misconception" from a long meeting and said it was disappointed nobody let it explain.
A surveillance company worth eight billion dollars got caught lying about whether it maps where you drive. Its defense was that the lie was small.
Oshkosh got one honest answer by accident. Congress can make it the rule.
Sign The Other 98's petition telling Congress to defund Flock: https://petitions.other98.com/defund-flock
