Mystery Flock cameras in St. Lucie County, Florida

St. Lucie County, Florida, went looking for its license plate readers so it could take them down, and found more than it had approved. The county thought 52 cameras stood on its roads; it counted 66.¹ The 14 extras, reported as Flock Safety cameras, had no county permit, and for most of them nobody has said whose they are.²

The number grew as staff looked. A county report signed September 10 listed three cameras at unpermitted locations; by the commission meeting on September 15 the count had reached at least 14. Staff said they had not yet been through the county’s entire right-of-way, and that more could turn up.²

“Not knowing who they belong to, I think, is another issue,” said County Commissioner James Clasby, who had pushed for the removal.² “There’s the potential for non-law enforcement to have cameras out there, and I’m not OK with that.”⁶

After the county shared its list, the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office said three of the 14 cameras were its own, without explaining why they had no permits. The county’s two other law enforcement agencies said the rest were not theirs. That leaves 11 mystery Flock cameras with no publicly identified owner.¹⁵

With no owner, the basic questions have no answer either. County officials do not know who put the 11 cameras up, whether they are recording, or who might be able to search what they capture.¹ A Flock camera sends what it reads to the account of the customer that runs it, and that customer decides how long the data is kept and which other agencies can search it, as what a Flock camera is explains. Here, the customer is the unknown.

Flock told The Washington Post that it had contacted the county and was willing to review the disputed equipment, and noted that permitting requirements vary from one jurisdiction to the next.¹

The county is treating every reader on its right-of-way the same way, permitted or not. The owners of the 52 approved devices had all been sent revocation notices by September 14, each giving 30 days to remove them.² The unpermitted cameras get the notice on the pole itself. “It’s like a bright red notice that says you have 30 days to remove this. And we will also bag the cameras so they’re not operable,” said Mayte Santamaria, the interim county administrator.²

A county spokesman, Erick Gill, told the Post that the bags would go on while the deadlines, which fall between October 16 and October 20, run out. If no owner removes a camera by then, the county plans to ask Flock for help finding out whose it is.¹

The state went first. On August 31 the Florida Department of Transportation began revoking every approval it had issued for license plate readers on state rights-of-way and gave local agencies 30 days to take them down.⁷⁸ That order covers state roads only, as our account of the Texas and Florida actions describes.

The county went further. The next evening, September 1, St. Lucie County commissioners voted 3–2 to stop issuing permits for Flock cameras and other automated vehicle-tracking systems on county roads and property, to review and potentially revoke the permits already issued, to send 30-day removal notices, and to inventory every device.³ The order leaves out readers mounted in police vehicles and cameras on private property.³ “I’m not in any way saying that our law enforcement officers are doing anything wrong at all,” Clasby said. Sheriff Richard Del Toro said his office would comply with the state’s directive and announced tighter limits of his own, restricting reader use to specific investigations approved in advance.⁴

A local misuse case. In Fort Pierce, the county seat, a former police officer, Josepher Crutchfield, was arrested on four felony counts after investigators found he had used the department’s Flock system 382 times between October 2025 and July 2026 to search the plate of a vehicle registered to his ex-girlfriend. He resigned in August before the internal investigation finished. “The cameras are here for our community’s safety, not to be abused by those entrusted to safeguard them,” Police Chief David Smith said.¹¹

The county’s largest city paused too. Port St. Lucie’s police department paused all use of its plate readers on September 1, allowing access only in “exigent circumstances” such as an immediate threat to someone’s life.⁹ The city’s 18 Flock cameras, nine on county right-of-way and nine on state right-of-way, were scheduled to be removed by the vendor by September 30.¹⁰ Decisions like these are collected in our tracker of cities that have dropped Flock.

As of October 1, 2026, volunteers had documented 105 license plate readers inside Port St. Lucie’s city limits, far more than the 18 the city said were its own. Another 38 are documented in Fort Pierce. A camera’s location and maker are usually on the record; its owner usually is not. Most documented cameras carry no operator tag at all, which is why our list of named camera operators is a sample rather than a census.

Statewide, this site documents 9,740 readers in Florida, about 76% of them made by Flock Safety. The Flock and ALPR camera map shows where each one was documented. It cannot show who owns a camera, whether it held a permit, or whether it is switched on today.

St. Lucie County’s experience shows how hard this can be even for the government that owns the road. For anyone else, these are the places to look.

• Ask whoever owns the road. A camera on a public right-of-way needs the road owner’s permission: the city, the county, or the state transportation department. Comparing cameras in the field with its own permits is how St. Lucie County found the 14.²
• Check the local agencies’ transparency portals. Many police departments and sheriff’s offices publish one, showing their policy, retention period and sharing partners. Where to find them is in how long Flock cameras keep data.
• Consider private owners. Businesses and homeowners associations run Flock cameras on their own land, outside any road permit and outside orders like St. Lucie County’s. The largest retail examples are covered in Flock cameras at Lowe’s and Home Depot.
• Know what the camera looks like. Telling a Flock unit from another vendor’s narrows the question; what a Flock camera looks like is a field guide.

The October deadlines. Whether an owner comes forward for any of the 11 cameras before the notices expire, between October 16 and October 20, and what Flock’s review finds if none does.¹

More cameras. The county had not finished checking its right-of-way when the count reached 14.²

Cameras that come back. Removal is not always the end of it. In Dayton, Minnesota, Flock cameras were reinstalled after the city had taken them down and told the company to do no further work.