Swansenreport

Those Cameras on Highway 2? Here’s What Dane County Just Did With Theirs.

If you’ve driven westbound on Highway 2 near the Great Lakes Visitor Center, you’ve passed one of them — a Flock Safety automated license plate reader, mounted roadside, quietly photographing the back of your vehicle and logging where you were and when.

Bayfield County has had these cameras since 2022. Since that year, county officials have installed five Flock Safety surveillance cameras — the Atlanta-based company that markets automated license plate reader systems to law enforcement agencies nationwide. apg-wi.com

Last week, officials in Dane County showed what happens when a local government decides enough is enough — and what happens when the company doesn’t cooperate.

The Dane County Board voted to end its contract with Flock Safety, with the contract expiring May 31. When the company failed to remove its 26 cameras by that deadline, Dane County Sheriff’s deputies put bags over all of them on the morning of June 5. The goal was to stop any continued data collection and pressure the company to finally retrieve its own hardware. WMTV 15 NEWS

The reason the county couldn’t just take the cameras down? Flock owns the cameras — they’re the company’s property, not the county’s — which meant the Sheriff’s Office couldn’t remove them unilaterally. WMTV 15 NEWS

This isn’t a one-county story. Verona went through the same thing. After that city’s contract ended, the cameras weren’t promptly removed either, and the city had to resort to covering them with bags. Mayor Luke Diaz said the company was not keeping data secure and was sharing it broadly — and that terminating a contract doesn’t mean Flock stops collecting data on its own. WKOW

The privacy concerns go deeper than whether individual agencies are misusing the technology. The ACLU of Wisconsin has documented that data collected by Flock cameras doesn’t just stay local — it can be shared across jurisdictions and accessed by outside agencies, including federal law enforcement like ICE and DHS. In Verona, searches were still being tagged as federal even after Flock claimed to have restricted that access. ACLU of Wisconsin

In addition to reading license plates, the cameras register vehicle color, make, model, stickers, damage, and other identifying characteristics. That information goes into a database accessible by police departments and federal agencies nationwide. WPR

More than 200 law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin use Flock cameras. Bayfield County Sheriff’s Office is one of them — and as of this writing, the county has not publicly addressed whether it intends to review that relationship. Spectrum News

The questions Dane County’s board raised are the same ones that apply here: Who controls the data after it’s collected? What happens to it when it’s shared with outside agencies? And if the county ever decides to end the contract, what assurance is there that Flock will actually remove the hardware?

Those are worth asking. The cameras on Highway 2 are still running.

Sources: WMTV15 (NBC15 Madison), June 5, 2026 (https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flock-cameras-after-company-fails-remove-them-following-contract-expiration/); Fox47 Madison, June 5, 2026 (https://fox47.com/news/local/dane-county-sheriffs-office-covers-flock-cameras); WKOW 27 News, April 30, 2026 (https://www.wkow.com/news/sheriff-says-losing-flock-cameras-will-significantly-impact-dane-county-crime-investigations/); WPR, December 2025 (https://www.wpr.org/news/wisconsin-police-forces-use-cameras-track-vehicles-communities-worry-overreach); ACLU of Wisconsin, April 24, 2026 (https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/wisconsinites-are-fighting-back-against-flock/); Wisconsin Watch/Bolts, May 15, 2026 (https://wisconsinwatch.org/2026/05/wisconsin-flock-camera-ai-surveillance-backlash-police-privacy-dane-county-milwaukee/); Ashland Daily Press, December 4, 2025 (https://www.apg-wi.com/ashland_daily_press/paywall/bayfield-countys-flock-cameras-spark-privacy-debate-as-national-concerns-grow/article_e57cec14-cf27-4e55-b2de-2093a8cf6709.html) [subscriber-only]; Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin, May 8, 2026 (https://spectrumnews1.com/wi/milwaukee/news/2026/05/08/where-wisconsin-cities-stand-on-flock-camera-programs)