Quantcast

In Our Opinion: Township Council, Stop Kicking The Can; End The Flock Contract

September 26, 2026 Speak Out!

At the Sept. 22 Township Council meeting, Mayor Phil Kramer told residents where the Township stands on the more than two dozen Flock Safety license plate readers mounted on poles around Franklin.

“We deeply care about this issue,” he said. “We are looking at all information before there are any decisions. We have received a lot of information, and we are looking at all of it.”

We believe the Mayor is telling the truth. That’s the problem: Six weeks have passed since residents packed the Council chamber on Aug. 11 and the Council has taken no vote, scheduled no vote, and named no date by which it will take one.

“Looking at all of it” is not a position; it is a place to stand while the information keeps arriving.

Perhaps we can help move the needle by recounting what has transpired since the Mayor and Council last discussed the Flock camera issue in public.

On Sept. 23, Semafor reported that Flock Safety is weighing a sale of the company, with preliminary talks involving Axon Enterprise and Motorola Solutions. No decision has been made. Flock declined to comment.

Days before that, Flock offered voluntary buyouts to all of its roughly 1,500 employees, packages the company itself called the most generous it has ever offered and roughly double its previous terms.

The timeline is pretty compressed: Applications close Oct. 2, employees learn by Oct. 9 whether their buyout was approved, and most of those leaving walk out the door around Oct. 29. Flock has said that without enough volunteers, layoffs would almost certainly follow. CEO Garrett Langley has said the “biggest damage” from the backlash has been to internal morale.

This is a company valued at roughly $8 billion that lost more than 90 municipal and county customers in the single month of August, a four times the number in July.

Flock disputes the gloomy reading. A spokeswoman says new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by about 10 to 1 this year, and the company says the buyout program is meant to treat employees with “transparency, respect, and choice.” Both things can be true. A healthy company can restructure. But a healthy company that is also exploring its own sale is still a company whose ownership, leadership and priorities are unsettled, and Franklin’s data does not care which explanation is correct.

We draw no conclusion about Flock’s finances, and we cannot predict what happens next. That’s the point. Neither can the Council, neither can Public Safety Director Lloyd Fredericks, and neither can the residents whose plates are photographed every day on Easton Avenue and Hamilton Street.

Here is what we do know. Franklin’s contract runs four years from October 2025. New Jersey holds the data for three years. Every assurance this township has been given about who can see that data, and what will be done with it, was given by executives at a company that is shopping itself and paying a portion of its workforce to leave by the end of next month.

Here’s a question we have, and the Council should, too: If Flock is sold, who owns Franklin’s record of where its residents drove? The Council was told the Township owns 100% of its data. We would like to know what that sentence is worth in a transaction, and we would like the Council to want to know too, in public, before the poles stay up another quarter.

On Sept. 8, Flock Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley wrote to Sen. Josh Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and counter-terrorism, and made quite the admission. Americans’ constitutional privacy, he wrote, cannot depend on “one vendor’s good judgment, its current leadership, or its commercial incentives.”

In case you missed that: The company’s own chief legal officer says privacy should not rest on a vendor’s current leadership or its commercial incentives, at the same moment the vendor’s leadership and commercial incentives are both in play.

Franklin’s arrangement rests on precisely those things. That is not our characterization, it’s Flock’s.

Sen. Hawley convened a hearing on this industry on Sept. 23 and invited the chief executives of Flock, Axon, Motorola Solutions and Verkada to testify.

Not one of them showed up.

Hawley called the no-shows ridiculous and said plainly, “We have not subpoenaed them, though, and we should.” Sen. Dick Durbin offered the line of the week: “For the Flock CEOs, obviously they’re nervous about being on camera.”

The irony is not lost on us that a company whose entire product is the proposition that being recorded in public is nothing to worry about would not send an executive to be recorded in public.

While Franklin looks at information, other governments have finished looking.

On Sept. 1, Florida ordered license plate readers removed from state highways. On Sept. 8, the Texas Department of Transportation froze new permits for the cameras along state roads, following Gov. Greg Abbott’s order in late August cutting off state funding. Texas has roughly 13,000 Flock cameras.

Closer to home, Cherry Hill announced on Sept. 14 that it will not renew its Flock contract. Its 10 cameras go dark when the agreement expires Dec. 31 and the hardware comes down.

In Burlington County, Shamong Township introduced a one-year moratorium on license plate readers on Sept. 3, with a public hearing and vote set for Oct. 6. Mayor Michael Di Croce put it this way: “Flock cameras basically create a surveillance system for people who have done nothing wrong.”

Nationally, Newsweek counted 153 communities that have canceled, rejected or deactivated these systems as of Sept. 5. In July the count was 95. That’s what pollsters call a trend.

In July, a Flock camera in Plymouth, Minnesota, misread the New Jersey manufacturer plate on a car driven by automotive journalist Joel Feder and matched it to a missing-plate record out of Los Angeles. Officers ordered Feder and his wife out of the vehicle at gunpoint in a Kohl’s parking lot. The car was legitimate. The plate was legitimate.

This week, Plymouth’s council voted to discontinue all 16 of its readers.

So a New Jersey plate, misread by a camera 1,200 miles away, produced drawn weapons in a retail parking lot. Franklin does not control that camera. Franklin’s police department does not control that camera. The Township Council cannot audit that camera. And Franklin’s plate data is shared with 54 outside law enforcement agencies, every one of which operates under someone else’s supervision.

Once again, we are not accusing the Franklin Township Police Department of anything. We said that in August and we say it again now, without qualification. Fredericks has described an audit trail, mandatory case numbers, quarterly self-audits and random monthly checks. We have no evidence that Franklin’s officers have misused this system, and we do not expect to find any.

That has never been the question. The question is what happens to Franklin’s data when it leaves Franklin, and who answers for it when the company holding it is being shopped to competitors while its staff collects severance.

Consider one detail from the American Civil Liberties Union’s August analysis of Flock’s latest safeguards. Officers elsewhere satisfied the requirement to state a reason for a search by typing “investigation.” One typed “hehehe.” That is the safeguard, working as designed, in a system Franklin feeds.

The Township Council should cancel the contract with Flock Safety at the earliest date the agreement and the law allow, and it should direct township attorney Lou Rainone to report publicly, at the Oct. 13 Council meeting, exactly what that date is and what it costs.

In the meantime, cover the cameras and unplug them. Not as a gesture, but as the only step available that stops the collection while the lawyers work. It’s been done before; Lufkin, Texas, suspended its entire system in August while an investigation proceeded. Franklin can do the same thing on a Tuesday night with a motion and a second.

Mayor Kramer says the Council is looking at all the information. Then look at this: On Oct. 13, the Franklin Township Council will hold its next regular meeting. On Oct. 29, a portion of the company that holds this township’s data walks out for the last time.

And who knows when the company may be sold.

Franklin’s residents have been patient. Frank Sciara’s petition has more than 900 signatures. Opponents to the cameras packed the Council Chamber in August and were told the Council would look into it. They were told again on Sept. 22 that the Council is looking into it.

At some point, “looking into it” becomes a decision not to decide. The Council is nearly there.

Stop kicking the can. Cancel the contract. Cover the cameras tonight. End this.

The Franklin Reporter & Advocate does not ordinarily footnote its editorials. We are doing so here because the Council has said it is still reviewing information, and we would rather hand over ours than be told it does not exist.

Your Thoughts

comments

Check Also

In Your Opinion: Township Council Needs To Scold Bad Cricket Behavior

By Bill Connell. The Township just approved, rounding up, $9 million for Catalpa Park.ย ย Roughly half …

Copyright ยฉ 2026 The Franklin Reporter & Advocate, LLC. The FR&A in 2025 reached 73,000 unique visitors, who recorded 378,000 page views. Monthly, there were 6,083 unique visits, with 3,096 coming from Franklin, or within a 10-mile radius. Source: Quantcast.
Created with recycled electrons.