WHITEHALL — For the first time since license-plate-reading cameras went up along county roads, the county board will have to say, on the record, whether it wants them. Supervisor Parrish filed a motion this month to terminate the sheriff’s office contract with Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company whose cameras photograph and log every plate that passes them. The board takes it up at its August meeting.
The cameras arrived without a board vote. As in many Wisconsin counties, the original service agreement was signed administratively through the sheriff’s office, and it renews automatically each fall unless one side gives written notice. That renewal clause is exactly what Parrish’s motion targets: end the agreement inside its notice window, and the cameras come down before the county owes another year.
The devices themselves are unremarkable to look at — a small camera and a solar panel on a roadside pole. What they do is less ordinary. Each one photographs the plate of every passing vehicle and records the time and place, building a searchable log of who drove where. Flock’s system retains reads for thirty days by default, and participating agencies can extend searches across the company’s network far beyond the county line.
Parrish has argued that this amounts to a running record of the movements of people suspected of nothing, assembled without a warrant and without the elected board ever having voted to build it. The supervisor has also pressed a narrower question that has proven hard to answer: who, exactly, has been searching Trempealeau County’s cameras, and why. Elsewhere in the country, audits of Flock search logs have turned up queries from agencies hundreds of miles from the cameras they searched, for reasons the contracting community never anticipated.
“This agreement shall automatically renew … unless terminated by written notice.”
From the county’s service agreement — the clause the motion targets
The Pioneer has filed a public-records request for the county’s Flock search logs. It is pending, and it is the subject of this month’s Watchdog column.
The sheriff’s office has defended the cameras as an investigative tool rather than an enforcement one. Investigators have credited plate reads with contributing to more than a dozen cases, and the office has said that every search of the system is logged and attributable to a named user. Supporters on the board have echoed that position, arguing the county should not give up a tool its neighbors will keep.
Skeptics answer that a log only matters if someone reads it, and that the board has never required anyone to. Nothing in county policy today says who may search the cameras, for what purpose, or what happens when a search goes beyond it. Parrish’s motion would moot those questions by ending the contract outright; a competing proposal expected from the public-safety committee would keep the cameras but write the missing rules.
The money is real but modest — Flock’s published pricing runs about $3,000 per camera per year — and both sides agree the fight is not really about the invoice. It is about whether a surveillance network is an administrative purchase or a policy choice.
That question has been working its way through communities far larger than this one. Several Wisconsin municipalities have debated dropping the cameras in the past two years; some renewed with new restrictions, a few declined to renew at all. Court challenges elsewhere have argued that networked plate readers amount to warrantless tracking; the case law is young and unsettled.
Locally, the argument has filled meeting rooms. Public comment at the last two board sessions ran long, and a petition supporting removal has been circulating at village halls and farm-supply counters alike. Whichever way the vote goes, supervisors will no longer be able to say the question was never put to them.
The board meets in August at the courthouse in Whitehall. Public comment opens the session; arrive early to sign in, and bring your three minutes rehearsed.