A Florida county that found a cluster of unpermitted Flock cameras during a countywide removal effort says it will not investigate who owned them. The cameras have since disappeared.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that residents of St. Lucie County remain upset because they do not know who installed the devices or how the collected data was used. Hannah Galindo, a 31-year-old resident who petitioned for the removal of Flock cameras, told the Post she worried that "data could be anywhere."
Officials found 12 cameras in total. Five were eventually claimed by city law enforcement, according to the Post. A Flock spokesperson told the newspaper that a police department had mistakenly issued guidance saying officers could mount multiple cameras under a single permit. The county, however, required an individual permit for each camera.
Neither Flock nor the police departments in Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce, which claimed the cameras, would confirm which agency issued that guidance.
Money is also part of the picture. The Port St. Lucie Police Department's contract with Flock grew from $22,000 to $470,000 over three years, reaching that level in 2025. That was the year before the county required the removal of cameras on county roads.
Erick Gill, a spokesperson for St. Lucie County, told the Post that the county has ended that contract, which was worth nearly half a million dollars. Even so, he said, the county does not have the resources to look into who owned the other seven unpermitted cameras.
According to Gill, the aim was always to get the cameras taken down rather than to identify who put them up. For that reason, the county gave owners 30 days to remove their cameras without being asked any questions.
Galindo was critical of that approach. "It sounds like when you do something wrong, and you don't want to get caught, and you kind of just want to sweep it under the rug," she told the Post.
