Eyes That Won't Blink: Guthrie's Persistent Flock Surveillance Defies Deadlines, Echoing National Privacy Battles
Guthrie's Overdue Flock Shutdown Fuels Calls for Privacy Protections Across America
By Marven Goodman, July 25, 2025
In the heart of Oklahoma a quiet storm is brewing over privacy, transparency, and the unchecked reach of modern surveillance. Early on July 24, 2025, as Chief Editor of The Sooner Sentinel, I sent a pointed follow-up Open Records Request to the City of Guthrie, asking for answers about why Flock Safety's automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras continue to operate, three days past their promised uninstall date. I also followed with a request for the official contract period on July 28, 2025. It now gives me great pleasure to report that the Guthrie Flock Cameras have been physically removed, as verified through my personal observations. We celebrate this great win for individual rights and liberties, along with a reaffirmation of the state and federal governments’ limited constitutional powers in this matter.
This isn't just a glitch in the system; it's a glaring example of bureaucratic inertia that threatens the liberties of every citizen, resident, and visitor in Guthrie. As my request underscores, the privacy of Oklahomans is hanging in the balance, with warrantless data capture and sharing persisting in defiance of contractual obligations and common sense.
This saga, which I've been tracking through relentless open records pursuits, mirrors troubling patterns across the nation. From the defiant stance of city officials in Greers Ferry, Arkansas, to ongoing federal lawsuits, Flock Safety's technology, touted as a crime-fighting tool, is increasingly exposed as a double-edged sword, slicing into the Fourth Amendment while enriching private coffers at public expense. In this deep dive, we'll unpack the Guthrie fiasco, draw parallels to the Wolfs' ordeal in Arkansas, and analyze how these cases exemplify a broader erosion of civil liberties in small-town America. At stake? Nothing less than the right to move freely without Big Brother's unblinking eye logging every turn.
The Guthrie Flock Fiasco: A Timeline of Delays and Denials
It started with a seemingly straightforward contract: On February 2, 2023, the City of Guthrie inked a 24-month deal with Flock Safety for 12 ALPR cameras, initially reported as 12 but later confirmed as 10 active via the company's transparency portal after 2 were removed from mobile radar feedback signs placed on State Highway 33. This was first reported by the Sooner Sentinel in “Guthrie’s Growing Surveillance Web: License Plate Scanners Spark Privacy Fears” and by the infamous, or famous, “Guthrie Man” (depending on your point of view).
The cost? A hefty $31,772 upfront, with promises of enhanced public safety through real-time vehicle tracking. These "Flock Safety Falcon" devices snap photos of every passing license plate, analyze features like make and model, and upload data to a cloud server for pattern recognition, essentially building a digital dossier on daily travels.
But as I detailed in my July 18, 2025, Substack article, "When Municipal Employees Overstep: The Flock Safety Fiasco in Guthrie Raises Alarms," the real trouble began when the contract expired. City officials, including the new City Manger Eddie Faulkner, the Clerk/Treasurer Kim Biggs, and Police Chief Don Sweger, notified Flock in February 2025 of their intent to discontinue, citing funding shortages and state legislative hurdles on surveillance tech. Yet, months later, the cameras lingered like unwanted guests, capturing data without council approval. My open records requests revealed inconsistencies: Vague expiration dates oscillating between February and May 2025, and a lack of documented follow-ups despite claims of "three reminders."
Fast-forward to July 23, 2025. Flock's own transparency portal (https://transparency.flocksafety.com/guthrie-ok-pd) paints a damning picture: 10 cameras still operational, 29,940 vehicles detected in the last 30 days, 63 "hotlist" hits (alerts for wanted vehicles), and 26 searches conducted. Data retention? A full 30 days. Worse, this information isn't siloed, it's shared with over 100 external organizations, from local outfits like the Oklahoma City OK PD and Tulsa OK PD to far-flung entities such as the Abilene KS PD, Fort Worth TX PD, and even tribal agencies like the Wyandotte Nation OK PD. Federal ties? Hotlists include NCIC (National Crime Information Center) and NCMEC Amber Alerts, raising flags about unchecked data flows.
In my latest Open Records Request, sent under the Oklahoma Open Records Act (51 O.S. § 24A.1 et seq.), I called out these discrepancies head-on. "The continued operation and data dissemination directly contradict the uninstall confirmation," I wrote, referencing Flock's July 3, 2025, email promising removal by July 21. I ask once again for the exact contract expiration date, still shrouded in ambiguity, and details on formal actions to halt this "unauthorized surveillance." Suggestions included cease-and-desist orders, legal remedies, internal audits of post-expiration data sharing, and notifications to affected individuals about potential exposures.
This isn't mere nitpicking; it's about accountability in a council-manager system where elected officials set policy, not staff. As my Substack piece argued, this overreach smacks of "local tyranny," where unelected bureaucrats blur lines, potentially violating the Open Records Act through evasive responses and exposing taxpayers to hidden liabilities. The portal's policies claim data is used "for law enforcement purposes only" and isn't sold, with prohibitions on immigration enforcement or harassment. But without a contract, who's enforcing that? And what about the "prohibited uses" like personal gain or bias based on protected classes? The stakes are high: Unauthorized data hoarding could lead to misuse, errors (like false positives triggering wrongful stops), and breaches that disproportionately hit everyday folks, truckers, commuters, families, just going about their lives.
Guthrie Finnaly Shuts Down Flock Surveillance System
In a resounding triumph for individual liberty and privacy rights in the heartland, the Guthrie Oklahoma Police Department has ceased operations of its Flock Safety license plate recognition (LPR) system, effectively ending the warrantless tracking of residents' movements throughout the city, at least for the time being. As documented in the department's Transparency Portal, last updated on July 27, 2025, the number of active LPR and other cameras now stands at zero, a stark contrast to the system's previous role in capturing objective evidence of vehicle locations without compromising on individual privacy, as the portal's overview once touted. This shutdown liberates Guthrie's citizens from the pervasive gaze of automated surveillance, allowing them to traverse their community without the shadow of constant monitoring by government tools that logged tens of thousands of vehicle detections monthly.
The portal's usage statistics paint a clear picture of the program's final days: over the last 30 days leading up to July 27, it recorded 28,718 vehicles detected, 53 hotlist hits, and just 24 searches, underscoring a rapid wind-down. Complementing this is the Public Search Audit CSV file, which details those 24 searches and culminates in a telling entry on July 23, 2025, at 02:13:23.948. This last record, involving 10 cameras and coded simply as "TS" under the reason column, appears to signify "Termination of Service," aligning perfectly with the subsequent drop to zero cameras and the absence of any further activity. Such transparency, while ironic in a system designed for oversight, highlights the deliberate closure of a program that, despite policies prohibiting uses like immigration enforcement or personal harassment, raised ongoing concerns about mass data collection without warrants.
This achievement restores a core tenet of American freedom, the right to privacy in one's daily travels, free from retroactive searches that could reconstruct personal itineraries after the fact. Privacy advocates have long critiqued LPR systems like Flock's for their potential to erode civil liberties, even as the Guthrie PD's policies emphasized data ownership by the department and human verification for hotlist actions. With external access once granted to dozens of organizations, from neighboring Oklahoma agencies to out-of-state partners like the Wichita KS PD, the termination severs a vast network of shared surveillance. Guthrie's decision, driven by expired funding as reported locally earlier this year, sets an inspiring precedent, proving that communities can reclaim their autonomy from tech-driven tracking and prioritize liberty over unchecked security measures. As the windswept plains of Oklahoma reclaim their unmonitored openness, local residents celebrate a future where movement is truly free. We just received an email, dated July 29, 2025, in response to our latest open records request to the Guthrie records manager confirming that the contract between the City and Flock offically began on February 2, 2023, and was cancelled effective February 18, 2025, cancled two weeks late, and yet Flock continued to collect and report ALPR data until July 23, 2025, a full 5 months after contract exparation.
Echoes Across State Lines: The Wolfs' Fight in Greers Ferry, Arkansas
Guthrie's woes aren't isolated; they're part of a national patchwork of Flock-fueled controversies. Take Greers Ferry, Arkansas, where the Institute for Justice (IJ) fired off a scathing letter today demanding the removal of a Flock camera parked right across from the home of retirees Charlie and Angie Wolf. As detailed in IJ's press release, the city installed five ALPRs last year, but one zeroes in on the Wolfs' driveway and front yard, capturing every entry, exit, and potentially yard playtime with grandkids.
Charlie, a 20-year veteran cop, and Angie, a former teacher, sought peace in Greers Ferry, only to find themselves under "constant surveillance." Their pleas fell on deaf ears: The police chief said, "It's not moving," and city attorney Blake Spears quipped, "Get a court order." IJ Senior Attorney Joshua Windham nailed it: "The city has put the Wolfs under a state of constant surveillance, where they’re effectively being treated as criminal suspects, even though they’ve done nothing wrong."
IJ's arguments cut deep into constitutional territory. First, the targeted placement echoes long-term pole-camera surveillance deemed unconstitutional by state supreme courts in Colorado and Massachusetts, revealing intimate life details without warrants. Second, the citywide network enables mass tracking, violating the U.S. Supreme Court's 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling, which mandated warrants for cell-site location data. "Using cameras to capture the movements of every person who drives through the city is also a search that requires a warrant," IJ asserts.
This ties into IJ's broader Project on the Fourth Amendment, including a groundbreaking lawsuit against Norfolk, Virginia. In February 2025, a judge greenlit the case, noting that "a reasonable person could believe that society’s [privacy] expectations... are being violated by the Norfolk Flock system." Greers Ferry's defiance, refusing renewal and removal, highlights how small towns, lured by tech promises, often overlook public input, leading to dystopian outcomes.
A Tale of Two Cities: Analyzing Overreach in Guthrie and Greers Ferry
Both Guthrie and Greers Ferry spotlight Flock Safety's ALPRs as flashpoints for government overreach, privacy invasions, and accountability gaps in rural America. They share core DNA: Tech enabling warrantless vehicle tracking, creating databases that map personal routines. Privacy risks loom large, Guthrie's unauthorized post-expiration capture implicitly echoes Greers Ferry's explicit Carpenter invocation, treating innocents as suspects and chilling free movement.
Government intransigence unites them: Greers Ferry's officials dare residents to sue, while Guthrie's provide patchy records, illustrating how bureaucrats prioritize tools over transparency. Human impacts resonate, retirees like the Wolfs parallel Guthrie's taxpayers, burdened by fiscal waste and democratic erosion. Nationally, these feed into trends: ALPRs in over 2,000 cities, often grant-funded but opaque, with critiques from the ACLU and EFF on data misuse and biases.
Yet differences sharpen the narrative. Greers Ferry's spatial intrusion, indefinite home targeting, feels personal and proactive, a civil rights showdown. Guthrie's temporal slip, lingering cameras via administrative neglect, is reactive, a transparency scandal exposing council-manager flaws. IJ's legalistic tone contrasts The Sooner Sentinel's investigative grit, but both demand reforms: Warrants, audits, non-renewals.
Strengths? Human stories humanize tech's toll; evidence from records builds cases. Implications? Unchecked partnerships like Flock's entrench surveillance, risking normalization. In a post-Carpenter world, these could spark state bans or federal oversight, urging vigilance through journalism and lawsuits.
The Road Ahead: Demanding Accountability in the Sooner State
As an Oklahoman, I see this as a betrayal of our values: limited government, personal freedom, fiscal prudence. Flock's portal, which buzzed with activity well into July, mocked the uninstall promise, sharing data far and wide without consent. My request was not just for records; it was a call to action: What should Guthrie have done, cease-and-desist, audit, notify victims, or none of the above? On July 29, 2025, I received a response from City Clerk/Treasurer Kim Biggs, attaching the original agreement signed on February 2, 2023, by Mayor Steve Gentling (and countersigned by Flock on February 14, 2023), along with cancellation emails from February 18, 2025, and a July 3, 2025, thread confirming unsuccessful renewal attempts. Notably, a March 13, 2025, message from Flock's Gena Hatch processed the cancellation and waived outstanding bills, yet the contract's 24-month term had already expired on February 2, 2025, making the formal cancellation two weeks late. Even more alarmingly, the City allowed Flock to continue gathering ALPR data and making it available to outside agencies through the end of July 2025, a full five months post-expiration, raising serious questions about oversight and continued unauthorized surveillance.
Broader, these cases warn of surveillance creep eroding the Fourth Amendment nationwide. If unaddressed, we will normalize a panopticon where every drive is documented, every visitor logged. But Oklahomans are resilient; through open records, lawsuits, and voices like The Sooner Sentinel, we can reclaim our privacy.
To our city officials, including the new Guthrie City Manager Eddie Faulkner, all eyes are on you now. The Sooner Sentinel will continue to stand watch, because liberty demands no less.
References:
From: Kim Biggs <kbiggs@cityofguthrie.com>
Subject: RE: Open Records Request – Post-Expiration Use of Flock Cameras and Software
Date: July 29, 2025 at 12:14:39 PM CDT
To: Marven Goodman <marven.goodman@gmail.com>, Eddie Faulkner <efaulkner@cityofguthrie.com>
Mr. Goodman,
In response to your request regarding the Flock Safety contract, I’ve attached the following documentation:
1. A copy of the agreement signed by Mayor Steve Gentling on February 2, 2023, and by Mr. Mark Smith, General Counsel for Flock Group, on February 14, 2023.
2. An email from Chief Sweger formally cancelling the contract on February 18, 2025.
3. An email thread dated July 3, 2025, showing multiple unsuccessful attempts by Flock representatives to renew the agreement.
4. Within that same thread, please note a message from Gena Hatch dated March 13, 2025, at 1:05 p.m., confirming the cancellation and stating: “Hey there, Just wanted to let you know that I have processed your cancellation. Our billing team is aware of this, so please feel free to ignore your outstanding bill. If you are willing to reconsider adding Flock to your community down the line, please let myself or @Ashley Fernandez know, and we would be happy to get you back up and running!”
This confirms that the contract began on February 2, 2023, and was cancelled effective February 18, 2025. The City has no records indicating a contract renewal after that date.
Please let me know if you need anything further.
Sincerely,
Kim Biggs | City of Guthrie
City Clerk / Treasurer
Office: 405.282.0495 | Fax: 405.282.6898
PO Box 908, Guthrie, OK 73044 | cityofguthrie.com
July 28, 2025
Dear Mrs. Biggs, Mr. Faulkner, and the City of Guthrie,
Thank you for your email dated July 28, 2025, in which you confirmed that you have provided all available documents regarding the Flock Safety contract and related matters. I appreciate your willingness to review again if specific outstanding documents are identified.
However, I must express my deep disappointment that the City of Guthrie appears to have failed to adequately track and maintain records of the start and end dates for contracts with outside commercial vendors, such as Flock Safety. This lack of precise documentation, including the exact expiration date of the contract, which has been variably referenced in prior communications as occurring on or around May 2023 or tied to February notifications, undermines public transparency and accountability. Such oversight is particularly concerning given the implications for privacy, fiscal responsibility, and compliance with the Oklahoma Open Records Act (51 O.S. § 24A.1 et seq.), as citizens rely on accurate records to understand how public funds and surveillance tools are managed.
To resolve this, I formally request the exact start date (day, month, and year) and expiration date (day, month, and year) of the Flock Safety contract with the City of Guthrie. If these documents are not available for public inspection within the City's records, I urge you to contact Flock Safety directly to obtain and verify this information, and to provide it in writing as part of your response. This step would ensure compliance with open records requirements and help restore confidence in the City's record-keeping practices.
Please provide this information at your earliest convenience, ideally within the statutory timeframe. If any additional records or explanations are necessary to fulfill this request, kindly include them as well.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter. I look forward to your prompt response.
Sincerely,
Marven Goodman
Chief Editor and Journalist
The Sooner Sentinel
On Jul 28, 2025, at 11:03 AM, Kim Biggs <kbiggs@cityofguthrie.com> wrote:
Mr. Goodman,
Thank you for your email. I have provided all documents available on this matter. If additional records existed, they would have been included. Please let me know if there are specific outstanding documents you believe have not yet been provided, and I’ll be happy to review again.
Sincerely
Kim Biggs | City of Guthrie
City Clerk / Treasurer
Office: 405.282.0495 | Fax: 405.282.6898
PO Box 908, Guthrie, OK 73044 | cityofguthrie.com
July 24, 2025
Dear Mrs. Biggs, Mr. Faulkner, and the City of Guthrie,
Thank you for your response dated July 22, 2025, and for providing the attached correspondence regarding the City's notifications to Flock Safety about discontinuing the service. I appreciate the promptness in sharing these documents, which include the February 18, 2025, initial cancellation notice; the February 26, 2025, follow-up; the February 28, 2025, reaffirmation; and the July 3, 2025, confirmation from Flock of an uninstall date of July 21, 2025.
However, I must point out that my original Open Records Request on July 20, 2025, pursuant to the Oklahoma Open Records Act (51 O.S. § 24A.1 et seq.), had already requested access to all such documents, including contracts, amendments, extensions, financial records, emails, memos, meeting notes, and communications between City officials and Flock Safety concerning post-expiration use. The additional materials you provided align with my previous request, but the ongoing situation raises additional concerns that necessitate further clarification and action.
As of today, July 24, 2025, three days after the uninstall date confirmed by Flock Safety, the Guthrie OK PD Transparency Portal indicates that the Flock cameras continue to operate actively. The portal reports 29,940 vehicles detected in the last 30 days, 63 hotlist hits, and 26 searches conducted during the same period, with data retention set at 30 days and 10 LPR cameras listed as operational. Moreover, the system is sharing data with an extensive list of external organizations, numbering well over 100, including entities such as the Abilene KS PD, Oklahoma City OK PD, Tulsa OK PD, and various county sheriff's offices across multiple states, as well as federal and tribal agencies. This continued operation and data dissemination directly contradict the uninstall confirmation and suggest that surveillance activities have not ceased.
The privacy of the citizens, residents, and visitors of the City of Guthrie is at stake here. The unwarranted and ongoing intrusion into their daily travels, through the capture and sharing of license plate data without a valid contract, poses significant risks to individual liberties and could violate expectations of privacy under state and federal law. To address this, I am requesting detailed information on what formal actions the City is prepared to take to preserve the privacy of those affected and to halt this unauthorized surveillance immediately. This may include, but is not limited to, steps such as issuing cease-and-desist directives to Flock Safety, pursuing legal remedies for non-compliance, conducting an internal audit of data shared post-expiration, or notifying affected individuals of potential data exposure.
Additionally, I formally request the exact date (day, month, and year) on which the Flock contract with the City of Guthrie actually expired, as previous communications have referenced varying timelines (e.g., "on or around May 2025" or tied to the February notifications), and precise documentation is essential for public accountability.
Please provide this information in writing at your earliest convenience, ideally within the statutory timeframe outlined in 51 O.S. § 24A.5. If any further records or explanations are required to fulfill this request, kindly include them as well.
Thank you once again for your attention to this matter. Upholding transparency and protecting privacy are critical to maintaining public trust in local government, and I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Marven Goodman
Chief Editor and Journalist
The Sooner Sentinel