News

Anti-Flock fervor erupts in city and county

Police Chief Blair Myhand describes how the city uses Flock data to solve crime and locate missing people.

By Bill Moss, Published: September 8, 2026

The growing anti-Flock campaign is now fighting City Hall while still urging the county to shut down the license-plate readers.

But so far, the surveillance camera opponents have mostly heard a defense of the system and gotten no commitment to remove them.

Flock opponents appeared at a Hendersonville City Council meeting last Thursday night, one month after an Edneyville berry grower urged the county Board of Commissioners to unplug the roadside cameras.

At Tuesday's meeting of the county commission, the wave of anti-Flock sentiment grew even larger.  More than a dozen residents spoke passionately against what they called warrantless mass surveillance, urging the county's elected leaders to cancel the Flock contract.

“We do not want you in office if you are going to approve these of any kind," Mattie Drake told commissioners. "This is not China. This is America. This is not Europe. This is America. We are supposed to be the land of the free. We have had enough. We are not animals in a zoo for all of you and our law enforcement to keep an eye on. We are citizens of this county and of this country.”

After more than an hour of public comments, nearly all opposing license plate readers, County Commission Chair Bill Lapsley responded that commissioners would think about what action the county may take if any.

“We'll certainly be public with our discussions on the matter," he said.

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

If birds of a feather flock together, these birds come in every color — red to blue to purple to pink.

Two weeks ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a conservative firebrand, ordered Flock cameras removed on state roads throughout the Sunshine State. 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 data collecting by the company, which operates more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states that snap more than 20 billion vehicle scans every 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.”

‘Tide is turning’ against Flock

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

“I’m very optimistic,” Rhodes said last week. “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 who have joined 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 new “Flock No!” group urged people to attend the city council meeting and the Tuesday night meeting of the Board of Commissioners.

“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,” he said. “So we joined with Austin and his people, which is a huge mix across the whole political spectrum.”

‘It is about protecting our rights’

Shantz was among the speakers who urged the city council to shutter the cameras.

“I want to be perfectly clear about something at the outset because it’s making the rounds out there,” he said. “The anti-flock technology movement here is not anti-police. It is about government accountability. It is about government transparency. It is about protecting our rights and liberties as ordinary citizens in a free America — as long as, that is, we have a country of constitutional rights and liberties.”

A combat veteran told the council that he was outraged when he read that Flock’s CEO had “quite infamously referred to people who were concerned about his products being used as part of the surveillance state and encroaching on our constitutional rights … as terrorists. But that’s everybody in this room.

“I took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States,” he said. “I fought in wars against actual real terrorists, shot at them, shot at me. I had friends blown to bits for this country, and I will say that I take extreme exception to being referred to as a terrorist for caring about the Constitution that I swore an oath to protect.”

Holly Newton, who described herself as a native of the city, small business owner, wife and a mother of a 4-year-old, was also, like Shantz, active in the “No Kings” protests.

“Most of us read the headlines regarding well-documented cases of misuse by officers, wrongful arrest, hacking, and the infringements on our Fourth Amendment rights,” she said. “My concern here today is the lack of transparency from our city, the use of taxpayer dollars for funding, the lack of public consent for mass surveillance, and the disregard for the public’s attempts to request contracts and financials via public record.”

Chief Blair Myhand has responded to Flock requests seeking the cost and how the data is used, city communications director Allison Justus.

Myhand provided to the Lightning and others the locations of all 15 Flock cameras the city leases and the cost, which is $6,000 a year. He also provided a copy of the city contract with Flock Group Inc. and a 28-page description of the product and services.

Flock cams solve crimes, chief says

At the council meeting, Myhand strongly defended the license plate readers, saying they had provided crucial vehicle location information that led to arrests for a bank robbery, murder, domestic violence, armed robbery and assault and helped locate missing persons.

Myhand said assertions in the anti-Flock movement about broad surveillance of cell-phones and facial recognition is inaccurate.

“The license plate recognition system does not have the capability of doing that,” he said. “License plate recognition systems take a point-in-time picture, a closeup picture of the license plate of a vehicle and a full picture of the vehicle as seen from the rear. There is no biometric data, no facial recognition.”

Myhand called on Amber Kleppe, the police department’s communications and technology manager, to explain the precautions the city takes to prevent abuse of Flock data.

“We’ve actually had no cases of misuse,” she said. “Basically, the one thing that Flock does that some of the competitors don’t do is provide us kind of like an algorithm to determine if there’s like outliers. So the system actually will flag anomalies for us” that could identify potential improper use, such as tracking an ex-spouse. “We pick 20 every single month that we also just randomly decide. We pull them at random, just to confirm that they are indeed true searches.”

Connet agreed with the chief that the cameras have merit.

“From the city manager seat, I will tell you this: that over 34 years, there’s been a number of times that I’ve gotten complaints and calls from citizens because law enforcement could not solve certain specific crimes, (like) theft, larceny,” he said. “The public did not think that law enforcement cared or would investigate these. I will tell you, this tool is helping our police department solve these crimes like I’ve never seen before, and actually protecting our citizens.

“This tool needs to be controlled, it needs to have guardrails, it needs to be used properly — I fully admit that,” he added. “But I just want to support the chief in the fact that it is a powerful tool that is solving crimes in your community.”