Bought With Your Money

Since 2019, Greenville has spent at least $200,000 on Flock Safety surveillance cameras. Every plate that passes gets logged, timestamped, and uploaded to Flock’s servers out of state. The data enters a national network searchable by law enforcement agencies across the country, including federal agencies the city never agreed to share data with.

No elected official has ever voted on any of it. No council resolution. No public hearing. Not once in six years.

The first contract was funded with civil asset forfeiture: a process that lets police seize property from people suspected of crimes (often without charging them) and spend the proceeds without going through the city budget. Money taken from residents paid for a system that tracks residents.

We filed a FOIA request. Ninety-six pages came back. Here’s what they say.

The chief who signed it

On December 12, 2019, Police Chief Kenneth C. Miller signed a contract with Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley. Eleven cameras. $2,000 per year total, about $182 per camera. Zero installation fees. A 12-month term with no renewal clause.

That pricing was a loss-leader. Flock’s standard rate by 2023 was $2,500 to $3,000 per camera per year. The 2019 deal priced them at a 93% discount. Plant the hardware, let the department build a year of dependency, then raise the price.

Miller signed alone. The forfeiture funds he used don’t flow through the normal appropriations process, so no council resolution authorized the purchase and no public meeting discussed it. Elected officials had no formal role.

Miller was under a SLED investigation when he signed. The 7-month inquiry found he’d given preferential treatment to Dharmendra “DJ” Rama, a Greenville hotelier and donor to the Greenville Police Foundation, after Rama was arrested for public intoxication. First Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe declined to press charges but called Miller’s conduct “very troubling.”

Miller was placed on administrative leave in December 2019 and resigned shortly after. The foundational contract for Greenville’s surveillance program was signed by a police chief on his way out the door.

$2,000 became $131,000

The invoices tell the cost story.

December 2019: 11 cameras, $2,000 per year.

December 2022: Three invoices land in quick succession. $26,500 for cameras plus sales tax. $15,000 implementation fee. $13,260 for 20 Falcon cameras plus implementation plus tax. Roughly $55,000 in one month.

April 2024: 50 cameras, Year 3: $125,000. But there’s a $39,750 credit annotated “Credit is for delay in getting cameras fully deployed.” Flock couldn’t get all 50 cameras installed on time. That’s a third of the annual bill credited back for missed deadlines. Balance due: $85,250.

Flock pitches other cities on quick, painless deployment. A third of Greenville’s bill came back as a credit for missed deadlines.

Total documented police spend: $142,010. But the FOIA response has gaps. Invoices for Years 2 and 3 (roughly 2020 to 2022) are missing. There’s a hole between the $2,000 Year 1 payment and the December 2022 invoices that probably represents additional payments we don’t have.

Then in March 2023, a second contract appeared. The city’s Public Works Department signed its own Flock deal: two cameras at recycling drop-off sites (800 East Stone Avenue and 514 Rutherford Road). Year 1 cost: $6,500. Renewed in 2024 and 2025 at $6,000 per year.

These cameras weren’t funded from a public safety budget. They were paid for out of the PalmettoPride ENP allocation, a litter prevention program. Surveillance cameras at recycling centers, reading the plates of everyone who drops off their cardboard, paid for with litter cleanup money.

Greenville now runs two separate Flock contracts across two departments with different funding sources, different renewal timelines, and different contacts. That fragmentation makes it harder for anyone (including council members) to see the combined scope.

Combined annual cost: roughly $131,000. A 62x increase over 5 years. The initial price was designed to be too small to trigger scrutiny. The current price is too big to walk away from easily.

The RFP that came 11 months late

In November 2020, the city issued RFP No. 21-3746: a formal solicitation for a License Plate Recognition System, up to 25 units. Proposals were due December 10, 2020.

By then, Flock had been running 11 cameras in Greenville for nearly a year. Deployed hardware, established relationships inside the department, 12 months of operational data. Any competing vendor would’ve been pitching against a system the police already used every day.

The evaluation committee had 5 members. One was Dr. Lee Hunt, GPD’s Strategic Planning and Analysis Administrator. Hunt had overseen the ALPR pilot from the start, evaluated its results, publicly advocated for expansion, and described ALPRs as a tool that “removes personal bias.” Then he sat on the panel scoring proposals to expand the same program he’d championed.

His score? 92.75 out of 100.

The scoring sheets in the FOIA response show scores for what appears to be a single respondent across all 5 evaluators with no second set of scores. If Flock was the only company that submitted a proposal, the competitive procurement framing collapses. The RFP effectively formalized a relationship that already existed.

Cost was weighted at 10% of the total score. Technical knowledge: 45%. Experience: 40%. The cheapest bid was nearly irrelevant.

The RFP language itself tells you what the city was shopping for.

Section 2.1 says cameras “shall be able to interact with similar community or Home Owners Association cameras.” The city wrote that into the solicitation. HOA integration wasn’t something Flock snuck in. Greenville asked for it.

Section 2.3 says “All captured data from the device will be non-proprietary and the sole ownership of the purchasing party.” Remember that line.

Section 2.5 requires “a single interface to footage of cameras. This should include cameras owned by other law enforcement agencies or private entities.” Cross-network surveillance access was a city requirement from the start.

What the city asked for vs. what it signed

The city’s RFP said all captured data would be “non-proprietary and the sole ownership of the purchasing party.” That was the requirement Greenville put on paper.

The contract it signed tells a different story.

Flock decides who gets the data. The 2019 contract (Section 4.1) lets Flock “access, use, preserve and/or disclose the Footage to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties” based on Flock’s own “good faith belief” that disclosure is necessary. They don’t need to ask.

Flock keeps the data forever. The 2023 contract (Section 4.5) grants Flock a “non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right (during and after the Term)” to use anonymized customer data for “training of machine learning algorithms” and “other Flock offerings.” This right survives contract termination. Greenville can cancel tomorrow. Flock keeps everything it’s already collected.

Other agencies can search Greenville’s footage. The 2023 contract (Section 4.2) lets Flock disclose customer data, including footage, “to enable law enforcement monitoring for elected law enforcement Hotlists as well as provide Footage search access to law enforcement for investigative purposes only.” In practice, agencies across the country search Greenville’s camera data through Flock’s national network. The city doesn’t control who’s looking.

Private cameras feed into police access. Section 1.20 defines “Non-Customer End Users” as schools, HOAs, businesses, and individual Flock customers who can share footage and notifications with the city through the Flock platform. The RFP asked for this feature. The contract built the plumbing.

The contract does include a “permitted purpose” limitation: usage restricted to “gathering evidence that could be used in a lawful criminal investigation.” However, no audit mechanism is attached, and there is no penalty for violation, making this toothless provision wishful thinking at best.

Flock can also push upgrades without asking (Section 2.12), as long as changes don’t “materially change any terms or conditions.” The 2023 contract bolted on real-time video streaming, third-party camera integration, and video replay. The system sold as simple plate readers has grown FAR past that description.

And to really sink their hooks in, the city can’t even leave without incurring massive charges. The termination fee jumped from $200 per camera in 2019 to $500 in 2023. At 52 cameras across both contracts, walking away would cost the city at least $26,000 in removal fees, on top of losing any prepaid subscription time.

That said, there is one avenue for accountability. The 2023 contract says Flock “understands and agrees that Customer is subject to the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act.” Flock can’t hide behind trade secret claims for contract terms. That clause is why these 96 pages exist.

Where the data goes after it leaves Greenville

Flock’s out-of-state servers aren’t the last stop. The data also flows to SLED, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which runs a statewide ALPR database.

SLED keeps plate reads for 3 years. The database is accessible to more than 2,000 users across at least 99 agencies. Between 2019 and 2022, it logged 422 million license plate reads. Over 100 million per year.

Flock tells cities their data is deleted after 30 days. That’s true for Flock’s own servers. Once the data hits SLED, it lives for 36 months. The 30-day claim is a technicality that obscures the actual retention window.

No South Carolina statute authorizes the SLED database. SLED’s ALPR guidelines are internal policy, not law. No penalties for violations. A lawsuit is trying to shut the database down.

The guidelines don’t work. In 2013, a SLED officer used the database to search for a vehicle he personally owned, found his own plate, and falsified the record to show someone else’s instead. His access was revoked, but no charges were filed. In 2024, a North Charleston lieutenant used city surveillance cameras to track his wife over multiple days, eventually confronting her in a Target parking lot. He was demoted. Not fired. When the Post and Courier filed a FOIA request asking SLED for more misconduct cases, SLED refused, citing ongoing litigation.

Those are just the cases that surfaced. And no South Carolina law makes any of it illegal.

Beyond SLED, there’s Flock’s national network. Over the past two years, investigations in Colorado, Virginia, Washington, and Illinois have documented how federal agencies have accessed local camera data through the Flock platform. In some cases, local departments didn’t even know their data was being searched. Flock’s own CEO admitted that the company “cannot monitor how CBP uses the system or ensure searches comply with state restrictions.”

What’s already gone wrong

In Greenville, a Flock camera misread a rental car’s license plate and flagged it as stolen. Two sisters were pulled over at gunpoint. Police handcuffed them both and put them in the back of a squad car. The car wasn’t stolen. It had been improperly reported. The sisters are suing Greenville PD.

The sisters’ case is the most visible harm, but the system’s risks go beyond misreads.

In Spartanburg County, former Sheriff Chuck Wright pled guilty to federal charges including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and obtaining controlled substances through fraud. He oversaw Flock camera deployments during his tenure. Both counties run on the same platform, feed data into the same SLED database, and operate under the same absence of law.

Six years, no vote

We searched for evidence that Greenville City Council ever voted on, debated, or discussed the Flock camera program. Post and Courier archives, the Greenville Journal, GovTech, local TV news, council meeting coverage going back to 2019.

We found nothing. No resolution, no recorded vote, no news story mentioning council deliberation.

The most substantive local coverage, a December 2020 Post and Courier story about GPD expanding its camera network, raises oversight concerns but doesn’t reference any council approval.

The entire program was built at the departmental level. The police chief signed the first contract with seized money. The Purchasing Division ran an RFP that formalized what already existed. The Public Works Director signed a second contract with litter prevention funds.

Over six years, the cost grew from $2,000 to $131,000 across two contracts and 52 cameras, and not a single elected official cast a vote on any of it.

What we’re looking for next

We’ve drafted a follow-up FOIA request asking for search and query logs, authorized user counts, federal data-sharing agreements, and council minutes that reference Flock or ALPR technology. If council discussed this behind closed doors, those records should exist. If you want to file your own, the FOIA toolkit has templates.

At the state level, four bills are sitting in committee. H.4675 is the strongest: it would ban Flock’s cloud storage model, prohibit AI-based vehicle tracking, and block immigration enforcement access. If passed, every existing Flock contract in South Carolina would be void. None of the four bills have moved.

If your state rep sits on Judiciary or Education and Public Works, they control whether those bills get a hearing.

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