Politics

'Flock No!' activists set to fight city hall

By Bill Moss, Published: September 2, 2026

The fast-growing anti-Flock campaign is set to alight at City Hall.

Henderson County residents opposed to the AI-based automatic license plate readers plan to appear at a Hendersonville City Council meeting Thursday night, one month after an Edneyville berry grower stood before the county Board of Commissioners to urge the board to unplug Flock cameras.

The citizen uprising in Henderson County comes amid movement across the political spectrum nationally to abolish the surveillance system, which critics say is rife with abuses.

If birds of a feather flock together, the anti-AI birds are adorned in every color — from red to blue to purple to pink.

On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a conservative firebrand, ordered Flock cameras removed on state roads throughout the Sunshine State. And last week, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, who like DeSantis is mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2028, formally launched an investigation into the practices of Flock Safety, which operates more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states that snap more than 20 billion vehicle images a month.

“The overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong,” Hawley wrote to Flock’s president/CEO. “Instead of serving discrete local investigations, as contemplated by our constitutional processes and safeguards, these camera networks harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search.”

After Austin Rhodes, the Edneyville farmer, appeared before county commissioners on Aug. 3, an online anti-Flock petition caught fire, drawing more than 1,700 signatures within days.

“I’m very optimistic,” Rhodes said Tuesday. “I think the tide is turning, and it’s interesting to see how this is happening nationwide. I’m hoping that some indirect political pressure is occurring here in the county. I think it probably is.”

Tom Shantz, whose recent political activism has focused on organizing “No Kings” and “Hands Off” anti-Trump rallies, is among those joining the anti-Flock movement.

“This is the fascinating thing about this whole thing,” Shantz said. “This whole the Flock effort is the only genuinely not political, nonpartisan thing that I’m aware of that we talk about that among ourselves. It’s amazing.”

Shantz’s Persist Henderson County is promoting “Flock No!” participation at Thursday night’s city council meeting, which is at 5:45 p.m. at the City Operations Center on Williams Street, and at the next county commission meeting, at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 8, at the Historic Courthouse.

“We’re a progressive grassroots group. We organized or were co-organizers of all the No Kings rallies, and about 13 other what we call visibility events,” Shantz said. "So we joined with Austin and his people, which is a huge mix across the whole political spectrum.”

Shantz and another anti-Flocker, Tiernan Turner, sent public records requests to the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office and city Police Chief Blair Myhand seeking information on the agencies’ Flock contracts and their audit logs of Flock use.

“We both filed information requests with Myhand at the city level, and of course with the sheriff at the county level,” Shantz said. “And that’s going nowhere so far. But we know this is going to be a long slog to get any kind of attention.”

The Lightning made the same request of the sheriff’s office on Tuesday.

Ron Justice, who until last Friday when he retired as the sheriff’s counsel, said Wednesday that the office’s communications director, Stephanie Barbosa, was compiling “a packet” of information in response to the citizen and media requests that would include the agency’s Flock policy and contract information.

The SBI and state attorney general, Justice said, had determined that Flock audit logs were exempt from the state public records law because they could pertain to ongoing criminal investigations.

Declaring that he understood "the public’s concern and fear of government surveillance surrounding the use of the Flock system," Sheriff Lowell Griffin last month issued a strong defense of the license-plate readers and their role in solving crime.

"Our agency has maintained an ALPR policy for years, and the use of Flock is specifically addressed within that policy," he said. "We are committed to ensuring technology is used responsibly, lawfully, and in a manner that protects both public safety and individual privacy."