All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

Almost nobody bought that framing. The comments treated the theft as a symptom of how toxic Flock has become, not as an isolated property crime. The core point was that a networked automatic license plate reader is not just “a camera in public.” At scale it becomes a searchable movement database, often shared across jurisdictions, and that changes both the constitutional and practical stakes. Several commenters pointed to reported cases where Flock access spread beyond local limits, including sharing with outside law enforcement, federal agencies, or searches that were later framed as missing-person work but looked like reproductive surveillance. The other big theme was that Flock’s public language around data is slippery on purpose. People zeroed in on “owned by the police department” and “deleted after 30 days” as phrases that may describe only one copy, one class of data, or one retention path. The repeated suspicion was that raw footage, derived plate reads, vehicle fingerprints, search logs, and model inputs are governed very differently, and that cities often do not understand the gap. That fed a wider view that this is a private-company workaround for surveillance the public would reject if described plainly. The mood was openly hostile to Flock and broadly approving of the cameras being removed. A smaller but credible slice objected to celebrating vandalism, warned that whoever did this could face serious charges, and argued that political change should come through contracts, audits, public records requests, and city politics instead of sabotage.