County workers in Henrico, Virginia spent Saturday taking down more than 120 plate cameras by hand because the company that sold them never sent anyone. County Manager John Vithoulkas said Flock Safety failed its contractual obligation to remove the hardware, so the county climbed the poles itself.
The break was announced October 6. Police said they would cut ties within seven days, and the county expected the cameras to be off public property within two weeks of the contract ending. Weeks passed with the network intact. County Attorney Andrew Newby confirmed in late October that all 128 units were still mounted.
What comes down and what stays is the interesting part. Crews removed the camera heads. The poles remain, because county officials say Flock still owns and must collect that mounting hardware on its own schedule.
The reason given in October was resident concern about plate data, plus the risk that other agencies could query a network Henrico no longer supervised. Every week the hardware stayed up was a week the county could not fully vouch for what the lens was doing.
Henrico held the sixth-largest Flock deployment in Virginia. At least half a dozen New York municipalities have also cancelled or let contracts lapse, and Plymouth, Minnesota cut power cords from its units in September after a similar silence.
The pattern points at a gap in how surveillance hardware is sold. A cancelled subscription revokes an account. It does not disconnect a device, and nobody in the procurement paperwork appears obligated to arrive with a ladder.
