A crowd of about 50 people rallied outside Norfolk City Hall Tuesday to urge city leaders to end the city's contract with Flock Safety, the company behind the automated license plate readers that have stoked worries about privacy over the last year in Norfolk and across the country.
"I don't think any of us were asked what we wanted," said Derryck Sargent, a member of DeFlock Norfolk Coalition, which has petitioned the city council repeatedly to remove the cameras.
Nationally, Flock cameras have ignited debates about dragnet security systems popping up in cities and counties and the potential for misuse by members of law enforcement.
In recent weeks, several Virginia localities have dropped Flock amid mounting outrage and privacy concerns, including Henrico and Arlington counties and the city of Richmond. Cities like Charlottesville and Staunton removed their Flock cameras late in 2025.
"They're here in working-class communities to track us," said Henry Reed, another DeFlock Norfolk organizer, at Tuesday’s protest.
A study by Christopher Newport University professor Johnny Finn found that Flock cameras across the region surveil Black communities more intensely than white ones. In Norfolk, the highest concentration of Flock cameras is in majority Black neighborhoods around Norfolk State University, one of the region’s two HBCUs.
The DeFlock coalition wants Norfolk to cancel it’s contract with the security company as other cities have and remove every Flock camera in the city. The group says it wants the cameras gone, not regulated.
Reed said they would escalate if the council keeps ignoring it. This summer, the council moved to limit repetitive public comments, a move anti-Flock citizens said was designed to quiet their objections to the city’s use of the cameras.
"We're really trying to show city council that there are people in the city that care about this, and maybe they're not involved with the civic leagues," Reed said, citing the neighborhood-level community groups that often serve as the hub of politics in the city and often have the ear of members of the council.
"We've gone to city council. We've talked in smaller groups," he said. "It seems that our voices still are falling on deaf ears."
Tuesday’s protest, and the months of petitioning city council that have led up to it, don’t seem to have moved Norfolk leaders.
City Manager Patrick Roberts addressed the cameras at the start of Tuesday’s meeting, which was once again packed with anti-Flock residents.
"In any scenario where someone would access the data and misuse the data, it will be detected," Roberts said. He said an employee who misuses the data could face consequences up to termination and possible criminal charges.
Cases of police officers using Flock camera data for personal reasons have gotten widespread attention, including dozens of cases analyzed by the Washington Post in which officers used the system to stalk former lovers.
Norfolk Commonwealth's Attorney Ramin Fatehi, who describes himself as a progressive prosecutor, told council Tuesday the cameras are "a net good" for residents.
"It is a civil rights tool," Fatehi said, noting that in his nearly 20 years as a prosecutor, he’s never seen any technology do more to solve violent crimes.
Fatehi said Flock photographs license plates and stores them until a search is needed. He said state law requires search logs, limits searches to criminal justice purposes and bans sharing data out of state.
Those limits, however, don’t always stop such sharing. The Virginian-Pilot recently revealed that Smithfield Police illegally shared Flock data with the FBI after the mass shooting at Old Dominion University in March.
The Smithfield officer who shared the data will not face charges. Isle of Wight’s prosecutor declined to charge the officer, saying they didn’t intend to violate the law, according to the Pilot report. Smithfield police said in a statement its department misunderstood the law's sharing limits.
Norfolk has had Flock cameras since 2023; currently there are 175 of them around the city.
At an Aug. 25 work session, Police Chief Mark Talbot told Norfolk's council that Flock helped detectives in three recent cases, including an April shooting and a hit and run that injured a 9-year-old.
Councilman Carlos Clanton said at the same meeting that civic leagues in his communities are not asking him to get rid of Flock. Reed said DeFlock members met with Clanton following Clanton's questions about Flock during that August work session.
Residents told the council again at Tuesday's meeting they wanted the cameras gone. None of the council members addressed any of the public comments.
After the meeting was adjourned, attendees were ushered into the hallway, while council exited to their bullpen meeting room.
