Since 2023, Cleveland has been home to 100 of Flock’s license plate readers. And on June 17, the Cleveland City Council voted 3-1 against renewing the city’s contract with Flock Safety. Meaning the contract expired as of Monday, and the cameras should no longer be running. But the cameras are still running.
From More Perfect Union via This RSS Feed.
So now City Council will fine the company for illegally operating on Govt property, right? Right?
Some of the towns that wanted to end their contracts but couldn’t have put plastic garbage bags over the cameras.
Couldn’t end a contract???
That’s the whole point of contracts, you can’t just cancel them. Some contracts have ways out if that was how they were negotiated.
Something like this with a lot of expensive hardware was probably set up to pay off that hardware over the life of the contract, so flock isn’t going to let you out of it until they have recouped their hardware+install+removal costs. The only way out might be to pay the full term of the contract which the city wouldn’t have budgeted to do in a single year.
Cock would pay the city to keep letting them collect the data that they sell, but that would set a bad precedent.
In an ideal world, the fine would be multiples of their annual profit, not the cost of doing business.
Why am I even writing this?
