Pinellas Commissioner Moves to Rip Out Flock Cameras as Sheriff Digs In

A Pinellas County commissioner wants to pull automated license plate reader cameras off county roads entirely, setting up a vote next week that puts the county on a collision course with its own sheriff.

Commissioner Vince Nowicki filed a resolution this week directing the county to terminate its contracts, subscriptions and data-sharing agreements with Flock Safety, Axon and any other license plate reader provider. If it passes, the county would have 30 days to remove existing cameras from county roads and rights-of-way, and it would be barred from signing any new ALPR agreements going forward. The resolution also calls on the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and every municipal police department in the county to do the same.

Nowicki plans to bring the measure to the Board of County Commissioners' Sept. 10 meeting and says he will move for its adoption.

Why now

The timing traces back to a state order. The Florida Department of Transportation told agencies statewide to remove license plate readers from state highway rights-of-way within 30 days. That directive does not touch cameras on county or local roads, but it opened the door for Nowicki to push further.

Of the 73 fixed license plate cameras the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office currently operates, 23 sit on FDOT right-of-way and have to come down or move under the state order. The other 50, plus additional mobile units, sit on county and local roads and are not affected by the state's directive. Nowicki's resolution targets those.

"Public safety and personal liberty are not competing goals, and government should track suspects based on evidence and not collect everyone's movement just in case," Nowicki said. He argues that treating every passing license plate as data worth storing amounts to a different kind of surveillance than officers checking a specific plate for a specific reason.

The sheriff's answer

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri held a news conference of his own on Sept. 2, a day after Nowicki went public, and made clear the Sheriff's Office has no plan to give up the cameras on county roads voluntarily. He said the agency has used some form of license plate reader technology since 2006.

Gualtieri pushed back directly on the idea that the cameras track people continuously. He said they take motion-triggered still photographs of vehicles and plates as they pass, not video, and that they don't identify who is sitting inside the car.

He walked through recent cases to make his point. In an armed robbery near U.S. 19 and Ulmerton Road, two masked men held a gun to a business owner's head and fled in a black Kia. Nearby surveillance video caught the car but not the plate. Investigators tied the same vehicle to two robberies in Tampa, then used license plate camera data to identify the tag. A lookout led an officer in Daytona Beach to stop the car; Gualtieri said the suspects had an AR-15 and other firearms inside.

He also cited a June 5 homicide in Pinellas Park, where a man was shot and the suspect fled on a motorcycle. Investigators searched camera data near the time and location of the shooting, identified a possible tag on the motorcycle, and traced it to an associate of the victim. Gualtieri said that led to probable cause for a first-degree murder arrest.

What the resolution would actually do

Nowicki's proposal doesn't touch red-light cameras, speed cameras or other surveillance systems. It is written specifically around automated license plate readers.

That 60-day reporting requirement matters because right now, even commissioners don't have a full public accounting of how many cameras operate across the county, who owns each one, or what it would cost to unwind existing contracts.

The debate isn't confined to county government. St. Petersburg's city council is separately reviewing its own Flock contract, and a St. Petersburg resident who calls himself the "Flock Blocker" has spent weeks propping a sign against cameras near his neighborhood with a pool skimmer to block them without damaging the equipment. Regional counts from camera-opposition group DeFlock put more than a thousand ALPR cameras operating across the wider Tampa Bay area.

What happens next

The Board of County Commissioners meets Sept. 10 at 2 p.m. at the county courthouse complex in Clearwater, with a public hearing session at 6 p.m. Nowicki's resolution is expected to come up for discussion and a vote at that meeting. Whether it passes will determine whether the Sheriff's Office has to remove cameras it has said it intends to keep, and whether cities across Pinellas face pressure to follow suit.

Residents wanting to weigh in can find the agenda and public comment information through the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners meetings page.

Want to keep up with how this vote plays out and what it means for your neighborhood? Visit Pinellas County Community Website, follow us on Facebook, and join the conversation in our Community Forum. For more coverage of local government decisions, check out our government and politics section.

Header photo: Tony Webster / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)