Plymouth City Council voted unanimously in September 2026 to terminate its contract with Flock Safety, the license-plate-reader company whose cameras had been installed around the city. What happened next is more revealing than the vote itself: Flock simply didn't respond. According to The Drive, the city notified Flock immediately after the council vote. A week passed with no acknowledgment, no removal plan, no contact. The cameras — networked surveillance hardware collecting vehicle data on public roads — kept running on city infrastructure as if the contract still existed. Plymouth Police Chief Eric Fadden resolved the impasse the old-fashioned way: he physically disconnected the cameras' power cords. It's a striking image — a police chief unplugging surveillance equipment because the surveillance vendor wouldn't take its own hardware home. The city had to treat Flock's cameras like squatters. The episode illuminates a structural problem in how municipalities contract with surveillance-tech vendors. The hardware sits on public infrastructure, but the vendor controls the software, the data pipeline, and apparently the removal timeline. When a city votes to end the relationship, the vendor holds asymmetric leverage simply by doing nothing. Every day the cameras stay powered is another day of data collection the city explicitly voted to stop. Flock Safety has faced mounting privacy controversies nationally, with civil liberties groups raising alarms about the scope of license-plate data collection and the opacity of how that data is shared with law enforcement agencies beyond the contracting municipality. Plymouth's unanimous vote suggests these concerns have reached the council level in smaller cities, not just activist circles. The deeper question is contractual: what enforcement mechanisms did Plymouth's agreement include for non-compliant removal? If the contract lacked teeth on exit — as many municipal SaaS agreements do — then the unanimity of the vote was performative until the chief grabbed a power cord. Cities nationwide are learning that voting to end surveillance is the easy part. Actually ending it requires leverage the contracts rarely provide. Plymouth's solution worked because the hardware was physically accessible. The next generation of this problem — cloud-hosted analytics, data already exfiltrated, algorithmic access that persists after hardware removal — won't be solved with a pair of hands and a wall outlet.
