Bought With Your Money

In December 2019, the Greenville Police Department used civil asset forfeiture funds to buy 11 license plate cameras from a company called Flock Safety.

Civil asset forfeiture is the legal process that lets police seize property from people suspected of crimes, often without ever charging them. The money goes into a fund that the department controls. It doesn’t flow through the city budget. It doesn’t go before council. The department decides how to spend it.

GPD used that money to purchase surveillance cameras that now record the license plates of everyone who drives past them. The cameras read your plate, timestamp it, log your location, and upload it to a database. If you’ve driven through Greenville in the past 6 years, your movements are in that system. You can see where these cameras are on the SC camera map.

They used money taken from residents to build a system that tracks residents. And they never asked anyone’s permission.

We know this because we filed a FOIA request. We asked the City of Greenville for every Flock Safety contract, license, MOU, data agreement, letter of intent, and scope of work document active between January 2020 and October 2025. The city sent back 96 pages.

Those 96 pages tell a story about how a $2,000 pilot program turned into a $131,000-per-year surveillance operation, spread across two city departments, without a single recorded vote from any elected official.

Here’s what the documents say.

The chief who signed it

The original Flock contract was signed on December 12, 2019 by Police Chief Kenneth C. Miller and Flock CEO Garrett Langley. The deal: 11 cameras, $2,000 per year total. That’s about $182 per camera. Zero installation fees. Zero pole fees. A 12-month term with no renewal clause.

That pricing was a giveaway. 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. It was a loss-leader: get the hardware in the ground, let the department build a year of operational dependency, then raise the price once the cameras are part of daily operations.

Miller signed this contract alone. No city council resolution authorized it. No public meeting discussed it. The purchase was funded through federal civil asset forfeiture, a spending channel that bypasses the normal appropriations process entirely. The city’s elected officials had no formal role in the decision.

There’s another detail worth knowing about the timing. Miller was under a SLED investigation when he signed the Flock contract. The investigation, which ran for 7 months, found that Miller gave 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 file criminal 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 the city’s surveillance program was signed by a police chief on his way out the door under an ethics cloud.

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, scope of up to 25 units. Proposals were due December 10, 2020.

By the time this RFP hit the street, Flock had already been operating 11 cameras in Greenville for nearly a year. The company was the incumbent vendor with deployed hardware, established relationships inside the department, and a full year of operational data to cite. Any competing vendor would have been pitching against a system the police were already using every day.

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

Hunt’s evaluation score (92.75 out of 100) was among the highest on the committee.

The scoring sheets in the FOIA response appear to show scores for a single respondent across all 5 evaluators. No second set of scores is visible. If Flock was the only company that submitted a proposal, the entire competitive procurement framing collapses. The RFP formalized a relationship that already existed.

The RFP’s evaluation criteria weighted cost at 10% of the total score. Technical knowledge counted for 45%. Experience counted for 40%. The cheapest bid was nearly irrelevant to the outcome.

A few things buried in the RFP language are worth pulling out.

Section 2.1 says cameras “shall be able to interact with similar community or Home Owners Association cameras.” The city wrote that requirement into the solicitation. HOA integration wasn’t something Flock snuck into the contract. 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.” Compare that with what Flock’s actual contract terms say about data rights. Those two things don’t square, and we’ll get to why.

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-specified requirement from the start.

$2,000 became $125,000

The invoices in the FOIA response tell the cost story in hard numbers.

December 2019: 11 cameras, $2,000 per year. The loss-leader.

December 2022: Three invoices land in quick succession. INV-5988: $26,500 (cameras plus sales tax). INV-6068: $15,000 (implementation fee). INV-6576: $13,260 (20 Falcon cameras plus implementation plus tax). Total for the month: roughly $55,000.

April 2024: INV-35242 arrives. 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 roughly a third of the annual bill credited back for missed deadlines. Balance due: $85,250.

Worth remembering when Flock pitches other cities on quick, painless deployment.

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

If the Year 5 renewal follows the $125,000 pricing, the annual run rate is $125,000 for police alone. Actual total spending since 2019 is probably somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000.

A 62x cost 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 second contract nobody noticed

In March 2023, the city’s Public Works Department signed its own, separate Flock contract. Two Falcon cameras at city recycling drop-off sites: 800 East Stone Avenue and 514 Rutherford Road. The contract was signed by Dave Derrick, Public Works Director, and Mark Swift (likely Mark Smith), Flock’s General Counsel.

Year 1 cost: $6,500 ($5,000 usage plus $1,500 implementation). The cameras renewed in 2024 at $6,000 per year and again in 2025 at the same rate. The product was rebranded somewhere along the way: invoices now call it “Flock Safety LPR, fka Falcon.”

Here’s where it gets interesting. 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 bolted onto recycling centers, reading the plates of people using a routine city service, paid for with litter cleanup money.

If you want an example of how Flock spreads into non-policing departments without anyone really noticing, this is it.

Greenville now has two separate Flock contracts across two departments with different funding sources, different renewal timelines, and different contacts. That fragmentation makes it harder for any single person, including council members, to account for the full scope of what the city is doing with Flock.

Combined annual cost across both contracts: roughly $131,000 per year.

What you agreed to (without knowing it)

The FOIA response includes two versions of Flock’s contract terms: the original 2019 SaaS agreement (Exhibit B, pages 42 through 57) and the updated 2023 Government Agency Agreement (pages 58 through 73). The 2023 version is longer. It gives Flock more room to operate.

Data sharing. 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. Flock decides when to share the city’s data and with whom. They don’t need to ask first.

Perpetual data rights. 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. If Greenville cancels tomorrow, Flock keeps every scrap of data it’s already collected.

Remember Section 2.3 of the city’s own RFP, the one that said all captured data would be the “sole ownership of the purchasing party”? The contract the city actually signed says something very different.

Cross-network access. The 2023 contract (Section 4.2) allows Flock to 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, this means other agencies can search Greenville’s camera footage through Flock’s national network. The city doesn’t control who’s looking.

Private cameras feeding 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. This is the contractual plumbing that links private cameras to police. The RFP asked for this feature specifically.

The “permitted purpose” limitation. Section 2.5.1 says usage is limited to “gathering evidence that could be used in a lawful criminal investigation.” No audit mechanism is attached. No penalty for violation. It’s a sentence in a contract, nothing more.

Unilateral upgrades. Section 2.12 lets Flock make “any upgrades to the system or platform that it deems necessary or useful” without asking, as long as upgrades don’t “materially change any terms or conditions.” That’s a wide lane.

Exit costs. The 2019 contract set the early termination fee at $200 per camera. The 2023 contract raised it to $500. At 52 cameras across both contracts, walking away would cost the city at least $26,000 in removal fees alone, on top of losing any prepaid subscription time.

The 2023 contract also bolts on Flock’s broader platform: real-time video streaming (Wing Livestream), third-party camera integration (Wing LPR), and video replay (Wing Replay). The system sold as simple plate readers has expanded well past that description.

One provision works in the public’s favor. Section 4.1 of the 2023 contract explicitly says Flock “understands and agrees that Customer is subject to the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act.” The city can respond to FOIA requests “as it deems necessary and prudent in its sole discretion.” Flock can’t hide behind trade secret claims for contract terms. That provision is the reason these 96 pages exist.

Where your data goes

Every plate scan from Greenville’s cameras doesn’t just sit in Flock’s system for 30 days. The data flows to SLED, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which maintains a statewide ALPR database.

SLED’s database retains plate reads for 3 years. It’s accessible to more than 2,000 authorized users across at least 99 agencies. Between 2019 and 2022, the database logged 422 million license plate reads. Over 100 million per year.

Flock tells cities their data is deleted after 30 days. That’s technically true for Flock’s own servers. But 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 guidelines for ALPR data are internal policy, not law. They carry no penalties for violations.

We know this because there’s already been a documented violation. In 2013, a SLED officer used the ALPR database to search for a vehicle he personally owned. He found his own plate in the system and falsified the record to show someone else’s plate instead. His access was removed. That’s it. No charges, no prosecution, no public accountability beyond the incident being noted.

When the Post and Courier filed a FOIA request asking for more recent misconduct cases, SLED refused to provide any documents, citing ongoing litigation. One documented abuse case. No way to know how many have happened since. And no law that would make any of it illegal.

Beyond SLED, there’s Flock’s own national network. Over the past two years, investigations in Colorado, Virginia, Washington, and Illinois have documented how federal agencies, including ICE and CBP, 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 the company “cannot monitor how CBP uses the system or ensure searches comply with state restrictions.”

Flock’s national data-sharing architecture means that once Greenville’s plate reads enter the network, the city has limited control over who accesses them. The contract says “investigative purposes only.” There’s no mechanism to enforce that.

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.

That’s the most visible harm. It’s not the only one.

Just up I-85 in Spartanburg County, former Sheriff Chuck Wright oversaw Flock camera deployments during his tenure. Wright was a prominent local figure with decades in law enforcement. He pled guilty to federal charges: conspiracy to commit theft of federal funds, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and obtaining controlled substances through fraud. He faces up to 30 years in prison. His name was removed from the Sheriff’s Office sign in May 2025.

A convicted criminal had unsupervised access to surveillance tools that track where residents drive. That’s what no oversight looks like in practice. And both counties run on the same Flock platform, feeding data into the same SLED database, governed by the same absence of law.

Six years, no vote

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

We found nothing. Not a resolution. Not a recorded vote. Not a single news story mentioning council deliberation on the program.

The most substantive local coverage, a December 2020 Post and Courier story about GPD expanding its camera network, raises oversight and privacy concerns but doesn’t reference any council approval. The article’s own framing highlights the gap.

The entire Flock program, from $2,000 pilot to $131,000-per-year operation with 57 cameras across two departments, appears to have been built and expanded entirely 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. At no point did an elected official formally weigh in.

Six years. A 62x cost increase. Two contracts. 52 cameras (at minimum). Zero public votes.

What we’re still looking for

The 96 pages we received answer a lot of questions. They also open new ones.

We’ve drafted a follow-up FOIA request asking for search and query logs (how often are the cameras being searched, and by whom), authorized user counts, any federal data-sharing agreements, and council minutes that reference Flock or ALPR technology. If council did discuss this behind closed doors, those records should exist. If you want to file your own requests, the FOIA toolkit has templates ready to go.

We also want the full RFP response documents. The FOIA gave us the city’s solicitation and Flock’s signed contract, but not Flock’s actual proposal. And we’d like to know whether the Public Works cameras at those two recycling centers are actively capturing license plates or serving some other function. The addresses are known. On-site verification is next.

At the state level, four bills are sitting in committee right now: H. 4675, S. 447, H. 3155, and H. 4013. H. 4675 is the strongest: it would ban Flock’s cloud storage, prohibit AI-based vehicle tracking, and block immigration enforcement access. The other three would set retention limits, require access controls, and create penalties for misuse. All four have bipartisan support. None have moved.

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

Take Action

Find your city council, county council, and state legislators.

Read the documents yourself

The full 96-page FOIA response is embedded below. Every contract, invoice, purchase order, and RFP scoring sheet referenced in this article is in here.

96-page PDF — best viewed on a larger screen, or download to read in your PDF app.

Download FOIA Response (PDF)

City of Greenville FOIA Response, received March 10, 2026 (96 pages) Download PDF