Eight Million Dollars in Cameras Can’t See What’s Missing

Freedom Hall Pool opened in 1974. For more than fifty years, it was where Johnson City kids learned to swim and working families spent summer afternoons without paying resort prices. It closes permanently on April 3, 2026. The city received an engineering estimate last August: repairs would cost $750,000. Deputy City Manager Steve Willis called it “an incredible amount of money.” The city did not pay it.

One month before that report landed on Willis’s desk, the Johnson City Board of Commissioners approved an $8,063,000 contract to lease hundreds of cameras from the surveillance company Flock Safety. The vote was 4-0, supported by Commissioners Brock, Cox, Hunter, and Wise. It happened on the consent agenda—the section reserved for routine items that require no discussion. Nobody debated it. The whole thing passed in under a minute.

Two hundred and ninety cameras. Ten years. Eight million dollars. No public comment. Two months after cameras were already going up, the commission held a community roundtable to hear what residents thought.

The pool cost $750,000 to save. The cameras cost $8 million to lease. The city found one of those affordable.

What the Cameras Actually Do

Flock Safety photographs every vehicle that passes one of its cameras and builds a searchable record of where that vehicle was, when, and in what direction it was traveling. The cameras capture license plates, vehicle make, model, color, and what the company calls a “vehicle fingerprint”—distinguishing features like bumper stickers, body damage, and roof racks that allow tracking even when a plate is obscured.

Johnson City’s cameras join a national network of roughly 90,000 Flock cameras performing more than 20 billion vehicle scans per month across 5,000 law enforcement agencies in 49 states. By default, local data is shared with any agency within a 500-mile radius. Seventy-five percent of Flock’s law enforcement customers have enrolled in the National Lookup Tool, which allows any participating agency anywhere in the country to search the full network.

Think about what that data reveals. Your car outside a methadone clinic twice a week. Your car at a domestic violence shelter the night you left. Your car in the lot of an abortion provider, an HIV testing center, or an immigration legal aid office. Your car at a union meeting. Your car in front of a house at 3am. None of those trips were anyone else’s business. Flock logged them anyway. And because license plates, property records, and social media are public, anyone who cross-references Flock data with those records gets your home address—and from there, your name, your relationships, your photograph.

Flock Cameras Don’t Prevent Crime

JCPD’s own figures show 11 pilot cameras contributed to 15 arrests over nine months. Crime in Johnson City was already falling—down 12 percent in 2024—before a single new camera went up. The National Institute of Justice rates license plate reader technology as a crime deterrent “Ineffective.” Every randomized controlled trial conducted over 15 years has returned null results on crime reduction.

Flock markets claims of “up to 70% crime reduction,” but an investigation by 404 Media found those numbers rest on a company-produced study whose own named academic co-author said he would have done things “much differently” and that the underlying data was too “incomplete” for meaningful analysis.

A System Other Cities Are Abandoning

Since early 2025, at least 30 cities have canceled Flock contracts or rejected new ones. Denver’s city council unanimously refused a contract renewal after hundreds of residents showed up to oppose it. Ithaca’s mayor ended the city’s contract: “I don’t know that I could live with myself if I allowed something to exist in our community that directly or indirectly led to someone’s civil liberties being violated.” Oak Park, Illinois canceled after data showed 84 percent of drivers stopped in Flock-related traffic stops were Black, in a city where Black residents make up 19 percent of the population.

What were these cities responding to? In Texas, a police officer ran a nationwide Flock search logged as “had an abortion, search for female.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained documents showing the department consulted prosecutors about charging the woman. In Virginia, agencies ran nearly 3,000 immigration-related searches on the state’s Flock network. The EFF analyzed 12 million Flock searches from more than 3,900 agencies and found hundreds related to political demonstrations, including anti-Trump protests in 2025.

JCPD policy prohibits using the system for immigration enforcement or targeting based on protected characteristics. However, so did policies in the departments that used the data improperly. We’re repeatedly told the honor system doesn’t work, unless it’s the people who want power over us. Johnson City’s commissioners voted yes on the consent agenda without mentioning any of this.

The Budget Tells the Real Story

JCPD received a 16 percent budget increase in FY2025, bringing its total to $19.4 million—the city’s largest operating budget share by a significant margin. Johnson City Transit stops service at 6:15 p.m. on weekdays and 5:15 on Saturdays. No Sunday service. No night service. In a city where more than one in ten households has no car and more than one in five residents lives in poverty, the transit system closes before second shift ends. The FY2023 transit capital budget was approximately $410,000. The Flock contract’s steady-state annual cost is $970,375.

Two months before approving the cameras, the Commission unanimously paid $28 million to settle a lawsuit documenting that JCPD had maintained an “unconstitutional pattern and practice” in sexual assault investigations. More than 60 women were victimized by serial rapist Sean Williams while the department looked the other way. Total payouts reached $30.6 million. The city’s general fund balance fell from $54.9 million to $24.6 million. Residents absorbed a 14 percent property tax increase. The Blue Plum Festival did not return. The pool closed.

Five months after the settlement, the same commission approved a ten-year, eight-million-dollar contract to expand the capabilities of the department whose failures produced it. That is the transaction this city made. That is what the consent agenda hid.

What Residents Deserve to Know

JCPD has declined to tell residents where the cameras are located, saying it would reduce their effectiveness. Residents built jcmappingproject.org themselves—a community-maintained map of reported camera locations—because the city responsible for this infrastructure will not account for where it sits. There is also deflock.me, a nationwide website where people report camera locations.

Johnson City could not find $750,000 for a pool that served low-income families for fifty years. It found $8,000,000 for a surveillance system that other cities are canceling, built by a company with documented security failures and a CEO who calls civil liberties concerns criminal sympathy, to expand the reach of a department whose misconduct cost taxpayers more than $30 million.

These are priorities. They belong to the Commission that voted yes without discussion. We have a right to demand they cancel this contract before nearly $1 million of our money is spent invading our privacy. We have a right to ask why this city found money for cameras it would not spend on buses, pools, or the survivors of its own police department’s failures. And we have a right to demand that the next decision this city makes about our lives gets more than a minute on the consent agenda.