After months of discussion and outrage from residents, the city council of the tiny town of Bandera, Texas voted 3-2 to immediately end its contract with the surveillance company Flock. In the aftermath of the vote, one of the dissenting council members crashed out and said he would be introducing measures to ban cell phones, the internet, cameras, and nearly all technology in the town of roughly 900 people.
Bandera had a state grant to install eight Flock Safety AI license plate reader cameras in the tiny town. The technology proved to be incredibly controversial, with residents repeatedly turning out to city council meetings to say that they did not want government surveillance in the town; the poles that the cameras were installed on were repeatedly destroyed by vandals in protest, leading the town to have to replace them at their own expense. Last week, the town formally decided to abandon its contract with Flock entirely.
After the vote, Councilmember Jeff Flowers, a staunch Flock supporter, said that if people in the town wanted privacy then the city council should basically ban all technology, essentially calling people who did not want government surveillance hypocrites. Flowers said he would propose a series of new regulations at an upcoming city council meeting, which he is calling the “Bandera Declaration of Digital Independence.” In a letter posted by the local newspaper, the Bandera Bulletin, Flowers said that in the name of preserving privacy he would suggest the city go back to the days of 1880 .
“For months, I have listened to the outcry regarding License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology. I have seen the eyerolls, and I’ve even been met with ‘Nazi rhetoric,’ the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism,” Flowers wrote. “Comparing a neighbor’s desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges; it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.”
Flowers said that at the next city council meeting he will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we are to be truly ‘private,’ we must leave our smartphones at the city line.” He will also propose “a total ban on outward facing cameras,” and “a total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping. We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only.”
Like in many other communities around the country, the use of Flock’s AI cameras has become a major topic of discussion in Bandera. In February, Bandera held a town hall meeting exclusively about Flock that Flowers moderated. Kerry McCormack, a former Cleveland city council member who is now on the public affairs team for Flock, came to that meeting to discuss the technology, demonstrating that the company is sending representatives even to tiny towns in order to promote its use. Bandera paid for its Flock cameras using a public safety grant from the state of Texas; in his letter, Flowers said that the city “didn’t just throw away a state grant (free money), they spent $15,000 of your local tax dollars out of pocket to back out of the deal.”
In an earlier February city council meeting, Flowers said, “I believe personally that guilty people act defensively. If you don’t have anything to hide, then it shouldn’t be a problem. I also believe when you are in a public space, your privacy kind of goes out the window because you are in essence in a public place.”
Bandera had eight Flock cameras installed. At the meeting last week where the town voted to end the Flock contract, residents noted that Bandera has one of the lowest crime rates in the state. Other residents noted that people in the town kept cutting down the poles the Flock cameras are installed on, leading the town to continually spend money and time to replace them. Residents said they felt like they made it clear that they do not want the cameras in the town, but that the town had dragged its feet on actually ending the contract.
“This is the fifth meeting [about Flock]. How many more meetings are we going to have to have before we get to the idea that we don’t need the Flock system?” one resident said in the meeting last week. “How many more meetings is it going to take before we understand the community didn’t vote for this? They don’t want it. How many more times are the cameras going to have to get cut down before somebody realizes it’s not worth the money? It’s coming to a point where we’re going to have to have meetings until we’re all dead […] By putting the cameras back up [after they’ve been cut down], you’re basically baiting someone else to come cut them down or shoot them down, you’re basically causing an issue because we didn’t vote for it.”
Another resident said Flock “doesn’t pass the vibe check. Bandera is the cowboy capital of the world. We don’t need to implement mass government surveillance in our town.”
At the meeting last week, city council members discussed how it was clear residents didn’t want Flock cameras, and that the town had stopped installing new ones, but that it never formally ended the contract. “Call for a vote please,” one council member eventually said. “It’s a waste of time,” to keep discussing a technology that residents didn’t want, they added. At that point, the council proposed to “deactivate and remove any Flock cameras that are city owned,” and voted to end the contract.
The discussion that happened in Bandera is essentially the same one that has played out throughout the country in small towns and large cities across the political spectrum. Time and time again, local politicians advocate for more surveillance even when it is clear their constituents don’t want it. In Troy, New York, the city council voted to end its Flock contract, for example, but the mayor declared a state of emergency to continue using the cameras, The Washington Post reported. In Dunwoody, Georgia, residents have been fighting against Flock after they learned the company was using cameras in the city in sales demos. The city council there elected to slightly tweak its contract with Flock but not end it entirely. Later this week, Flock is throwing a training for police officers about “how to speak with city councils: meeting the moment with confidence.”
In his letter to residents, Flowers said that they should stop being hypocrites by using technology.
“Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy,” Flowers wrote. “If LPRs are ‘unconstitutional’ and invade our right to ‘public’ privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the ‘Privacy First’ crowd showing up to support these bans […] just remember to leave your phones at home.”
Earlier this year, after the February town hall meeting, Flowers told the Bandera Bulletin that he believed town residents’ privacy concerns “deserve to be addressed directly and respectfully.” Flowers did not respond to multiple requests for comment from 404 Media.
