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In Dayton, Ohio, the city government discovered it could not figure out whether it was allowed to take down the AI surveillance cameras installed on its public streets.
It could not determine whether the cameras were still recording. It could not find a clear path out of the contract it had signed with the company that installed them.
The solution the city settled on was to send the police department and public works team out with bin liners. Not as a temporary measure. As the measure.
In Evanston, Illinois, the city terminated its contract with the same company. The company reinstalled the cameras without permission. The city sent a cease and desist letter and then, while the legal process worked through the courts, also covered the cameras in bin bags.
Two different cities. Same conclusion.
The company is called Flock Safety. It manufactures AI-powered license plate readers and has installed more than 90,000 cameras across the United States. The cameras scan over twenty billion license plates every month, more than the number of registered vehicles in the country, meaning some vehicles are being scanned multiple times daily. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies are connected to its network.
The network is the critical architectural detail. Flock does not sell cameras to individual cities. It connects those cities into a national system where any participating agency can search any other agency's camera data. A police department in one state can query camera footage from a school in another. No warrant required. No notification to the city that owns the camera. No particular reason needed.
Flock's valuation at the time cities were covering its cameras in bin bags: $8.4 billion. Its annual recurring revenue crossed $300 million in 2025, representing seventy percent year-over-year growth. The market was rewarding the behavior communities were protesting. That is not a contradiction. It is the incentive structure functioning exactly as designed.
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Three specific failures followed from that structure.
Local law enforcement officers used the national Flock network to conduct searches on behalf of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, what investigators described as side door access. Over 4,000 such lookups were documented, including from cameras installed in public school systems. Flock's position was that it does not work with ICE. Flock built a highway. It noted it was not responsible for who drove on it.
In Dunwoody, Georgia, a local resident filed a public records request and obtained Flock's access logs. The logs showed that Flock employees had logged into the city's camera system to run live sales demonstrations for police departments in other cities. The cameras selected for those demonstrations included feeds inside a Jewish community center, specifically cameras pointed at a children's gymnastics room, a pool, and a playground. The CEO apologized. The city renewed the contract.
In February 2026, Flock rewrote its terms and conditions. The new terms granted the company a perpetual, irrevocable license to use and disclose all customer data. The previous version had stated explicitly that Flock does not own and shall not sell customer data. That language was deleted. Flock described the removal as redundant.
More than forty cities have now suspended or terminated Flock contracts. Through all of it, the valuation more than doubled.
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The pattern here is not specific to one company or one technology. It is the gap between deployment speed and the speed at which democratic institutions can respond to what they have deployed.
AI regulation moves at committee speed.
Deployment moves at venture capital speed. By the time the bin bag goes over the camera, the data has already been shared with 4,800 agencies. The contract terms have already been rewritten. The valuation has already doubled.
The technical solutions to the specific problems Flock created are not hypothetical. Differential privacy, federated learning, access control architectures that would make cross-agency searches structurally impossible — these exist in academic and technical literature. They are simply not being required. The regulatory model of waiting for the damage and then legislating cannot keep pace with technology that scales this fast.
The European regulatory approach starts from a different default.
GDPR places the burden of compliance on the data processor before deployment, not after harm is documented. The EU AI Act classifies high-risk AI systems, including biometric identification and law enforcement applications and requires conformity assessment before market entry. Neither framework is perfect, and neither prevents misuse entirely. But both require the question to be answered before the cameras go up, not after the bin bags come out.
For builders developing AI surveillance, identity verification, or data aggregation tools for clients who operate across both markets: the American and European deployment environments are not variations of the same market. They operate on structurally different assumptions about where accountability sits and when it is required.
That difference is not getting smaller.
404 Found covers AI developments from a European Insider, three times a week.
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