404 Media45%
Flock ‘Objects to Our Removing Their Equipment’: Emails Reveal Why a Town Put Bags Over Its Flock Cameras 64%
By Jason Koebler44%
7/22/2026, 2:03:02 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Representativeness Heuristic, and False Dilemma, with Overconfidence Bias as the most egregious example at 18.8% saturation with 73 hits. Analysis detected 604 faulty-reasoning hits from 388 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 59.2% and a BS Rank of 64% (7,383 of 20,517 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 64.00% of the article peer group.
For weeks, Verona, Wisconsin tried to get Flock to remove the three automated license plate cameras that its city council had voted to stop using.
Flock told city employees not to remove the cameras, and a Flock employee told city officials that they were unsure whether the cameras could be remotely disabled, which led the town to decide to put black plastic trash bags over them until Flock eventually removed the cameras itself, according to emails obtained using a public records request by 404 Media.
The emails give insight into the process cities face while deFlocking themselves after voting not to renew a contract with the AI surveillance company.
As we’ve previously reported, multiple cities around the country have decided to put black trash bags over their Flock cameras while they wait for them to be removed; this is in part because, until the cameras are physically removed by Flock, cities are unsure whether they have the legal right to remove the cameras themselves and are not sure whether they can disable their recording operations.
The emails show Verona city officials telling each other that they had made multiple requests to Flock to have the cameras removed, and show a work order from Flock in which the cameras were set to have maintenance performed on them rather than being removed.
In February, Verona mayor Luke Diaz told the Wisconsin Examiner that Flock didn’t remove the cameras even after several requests: “They weren’t removing them,” he said.
“We kind of looked at the contract, talked it over amongst staff, and the thing we felt most comfortable with was just covering them so they could stop spying on people … I’m 100% certain that they were still working,” even after the contract ended, he said.
The emails obtained by 404 Media give more insight into what was happening behind the scenes, and why it took so long to get Flock to remove the cameras.
A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that the discrepancy occurred because Verona voted to not renew its contract rather than outright canceling it mid-term.
It is clear from emails obtained by 404 Media, however, that Verona city officials wanted the cameras to come down as quickly as possible.
Speakers
2speakers25%attributed speech291writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageLuke Diaz
73 attributed words75% of attributed speech81% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.