Petition to Remove Flock Safety Cameras from Arkansas City, Kansas

We, the undersigned residents and concerned citizens, call upon the Arkansas City Commission and the Arkansas City Police Department to discontinue the use of Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader cameras and remove them from our community.

These cameras continuously photograph vehicles, record license plates, document locations and travel patterns, and store information about people who have not been accused of any crime. This warrantless collection raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns and undermines the principle that citizens should be free from unreasonable government surveillance.

Flock camera alerts can also place innocent people under suspicion because of outdated records, incorrect plate readings, stolen plates, or mistaken associations with a vehicle. In practice, this can force citizens to explain their movements and prove their innocence—even though our justice system requires the government to establish probable cause and prove wrongdoing.

Public safety matters, but it should not come at the cost of treating every driver as a potential suspect. Once collected, this information may be retained, searched, or shared with agencies outside our community without the vehicle owner’s knowledge or consent. Such a powerful surveillance system also creates opportunities for misuse, unauthorized access, and tracking unrelated to a specific criminal investigation.

We therefore ask Arkansas City officials to:

1. End the city’s agreement with Flock Safety.
2. Remove all Flock cameras operating on behalf of the city.
3. Delete locally controlled historical license-plate data to the fullest extent permitted by law.
4. Disclose how the system has been used, what it has cost taxpayers, which agencies have accessed the data, and whether any incorrect alerts have resulted in stops or investigations.
5. Require meaningful public notice, debate, and approval before adopting any similar surveillance technology in the future.

Arkansas City can support effective law enforcement without creating a permanent record of innocent citizens’ movements. We urge our city leaders to protect constitutional rights, government transparency, and the presumption of innocence by removing Flock cameras from our community.