Flock Cameras in Spring Hill, TN: How the City Ended Up With Them

Flock Safety's license-plate cameras are one of the most argued-about technologies in American local government right now. Dozens of cities have canceled or deactivated their Flock contracts over the past year. A class-action lawsuit in San Francisco alleges that federal agencies queried one city's cameras more than a million times in seven months. The ACLU runs a national campaign against the technology. At the same time, hundreds of cities keep signing new contracts.

Spring Hill is not on the sidelines of this. The city has been running Flock cameras for years. With the national debate everywhere, it seemed worth establishing the local facts: how the cameras got here, what the city agreed to, whether there was any local debate, and where the cameras are. I pulled the resolutions, the signed contract, the state license, and the meeting recordings. This is what the public record shows.

How Flock cameras work

Flock's core product, the Falcon, is a small fixed camera, usually solar-powered, mounted on a pole at an intersection or neighborhood entrance. It photographs every passing vehicle. Software reads the plate and also builds what Flock calls a "Vehicle Fingerprint" from the car's make, color, body type, and details like bumper stickers and roof racks, which lets police search for a vehicle "even when a license plate isn't visible." Every capture is timestamped, uploaded to Flock's cloud, and searchable by the subscribing agency for a retention window. In Spring Hill's contract, that window is 30 days.

Two features drive both the technology's usefulness and the fight over it. The first is hot lists: plates are checked automatically against databases like NCIC, so a stolen car or an Amber Alert vehicle triggers an immediate alert to officers. The second is sharing networks. Agencies can opt into statewide and national networks, meaning a search run in one town can query cameras in thousands of others. Spring Hill's packet lists both.

Why the cameras are controversial

The case for the cameras is simple. They recover stolen vehicles and help find missing people, and they do it cheaply, with no officer watching a screen. The case against them centers on what happens to everyone else's data. The cameras photograph every car, not just suspects, building a searchable record of ordinary people's movements. The national reporting over the past year has focused on where that data goes. Investigations found federal agencies, including ICE, accessing local camera networks in ways many cities say they never authorized, and that reporting set off the current wave of cancellations. Los Angeles was among them, after an internal audit. Flock's standard vendor agreement, including the one Spring Hill signed, permits the company to disclose footage to law enforcement, government officials, or third parties when legally required, or on Flock's own "good faith belief" that disclosure is reasonably necessary for legal process, security, fraud, or emergencies.

None of that reporting is about Spring Hill specifically. But it's the context every city's Flock contract now sits in, and it's the reason the local paper trail is worth reading.

Spring Hill's trail doesn't have a beginning

The October 2023 resolution that looks like "the Flock vote," Resolution 23-189, is actually an extension. Its own text says the police department "currently has 7 Flock cameras." Police Chief Don Brite's staff memo describes a contract extension with the current provider, with the cameras used for stolen vehicles, Amber Alerts, and criminal investigations. When and how the city bought the original seven isn't in the public record, at least not anywhere I could find it. No earlier Flock-titled resolution appears on the city's list. At $17,500 a year, the original purchase may have been small enough that it never required a board vote. Or the paperwork may exist somewhere I didn't look.

What the city signed

The contract attached to that 2023 resolution, signed by Mayor Jim Hagaman on October 2, 2023:

• 7 Flock Safety "Falcon" cameras at $2,500 per camera per year: $17,500 a year, $87,500 over the 60-month term
• 30-day retention of the images
• Automatic 24-month renewal after the initial five years
• Without the five-year lock-in, per the resolution, the price would have been $3,000 per camera

Chief Brite's memo asked for more than the contract shows. It recommended four or five additional cameras and priced a 12-camera program at $30,000 a year, though the order form the mayor signed is for seven. Then in August 2024 the board approved an annual renewal payment of $27,989.73, which at $2,500 per camera would cover more than eleven cameras. I couldn't find a resolution documenting the additional purchases. It's possible the expansion happened inside a blanket purchase order or some other routine mechanism I missed. Based on what I found: the paper says seven, the payment suggests more, and the record in between is quiet.

Was there any local controversy?

Given the national fight, this is the natural question. Based on what I found, the answer is no, none that made it into the record. All four Flock-related votes passed on the consent agenda, the stack of routine items a board approves in one motion. No resident spoke about the cameras at any of the four meetings. No alderman asked a question. Every vote was unanimous. Consent agendas are a normal way for cities to handle routine business, and any member can pull an item out for separate discussion. At the December 2023 meeting the board did exactly that with a different item, while the camera item stayed in the stack. The program has simply never been the subject of a public conversation in Spring Hill.

The four votes, for anyone who wants to verify (each clip is under three minutes):

• October 2, 2023: the five-year contract, read into consent between HVAC, roofing, and plumbing contracts. Unanimous. Video, ~12:17.
• December 18, 2023: Resolution 23-253, authorizing police use of license-plate readers under the state statute. Read between a traffic-consultant item and a concrete contract. 8-0. Video, ~19:44.
• August 5, 2024: the $27,989.73 renewal payment, between street striping and HR purchase orders. 8-0. Video, ~51:06.
• February 3, 2025: Resolution 25-26, the state-road license, alongside police-headquarters landscaping, ice machines, and televisions. 8-0. Video, ~07:42.

One archival footnote: the written minutes for the October 2023 meeting were never posted to the city's site.

Why the state got involved

The cameras belong to Spring Hill. The police department operates them and the city pays for them. But Highway 31 and Duplex Road are state routes, and the roadside is TDOT's land, so putting city cameras there required the state's permission. That's what Resolution 25-26 is: a ten-year license from TDOT, at no cost to the city, for three documented locations.

1. Duplex Road at Ferguson Road, facing westbound traffic
2. Highway 31 at Buckner Road, facing southbound
3. Highway 31 at Buckner Road, facing northbound

The license limits use to criminal investigations and searches for missing or endangered persons, requires the data to stay in the U.S., and bars commercial sale. Those three spots are the only camera locations documented anywhere in the city's public record. They are not the whole network.

The map: documented sites and reported sightings

The map shows two kinds of dots. The red pins are the three locations documented in the city's TDOT license exhibit. The green dots are camera sightings from DeFlock, a community mapping project where volunteers log license-plate readers they've spotted. It currently shows around eighteen Flock-brand sightings within Spring Hill, including ones matching both documented intersections, plus more just north in Thompson's Station.

The green dots are crowdsourced reports, not official records. A sighting can't tell you whether a camera belongs to Spring Hill police, a neighboring agency, or a private operator, and the community map may be incomplete or imperfect. But the gap between three documented locations and roughly eighteen reported sightings gives a sense of how much of the network sits outside the public paper trail.

What the record doesn't say

Four open questions the public record can't answer. How the original seven cameras were purchased, and where they are. How seven cameras became a payment that covers more than eleven. What the cameras have actually produced in Spring Hill (hits, recoveries, arrests), none of which appears in any packet or meeting reviewed for this post. And whether the city has enabled Flock's "Transparency Portal," a public page some cities publish showing what their cameras do and how the data is used. The feature is listed in Spring Hill's packet, but there's no evidence it was ever turned on.

For precision about what's deployed: the order form buys Falcon license-plate readers. Flock also sells audio and video products, and its brochure in the city's packet mentions them, but nothing in the record shows Spring Hill bought those.

The five-year contract runs through October 2028 and renews automatically for two years unless the city acts. As far as I can tell, the meeting clips linked above are the entire public discussion of this program to date. All of it fits in about ten minutes. That said, I'm one person reading public records, and I may be missing something: a purchase that happened under a different name, a discussion at a meeting I didn't review, a document that never made it online. If you know something that fills in these gaps, or corrects anything here, I'd genuinely like to hear it.

This article draws on Resolutions 23-189, 23-253, 24-176, and 25-26 with their attachments (including the signed Flock order form, master services agreement, and TDOT license with location exhibit), the four BOMA meeting recordings, the DeFlock community camera map, and national reporting on Flock Safety linked in the text. Figures and quotes are as written in those documents and spoken in those recordings.