Fond du Lac County law enforcement agencies pulled the plug on their entire network of Flock Safety license plate cameras effective immediately, with crews physically covering every lens on Friday after discovering that search data tied to active criminal investigations had leaked out to the public. The county's sheriff's office and local police departments said they could no longer guarantee how their data was being handled once it left their control, prompting a countywide shutdown that also ended their ability to run searches on the system entirely.
The abrupt decision, first reported by TMJ4 News, was outlined in a joint release signed by law enforcement leaders including Ryan Waldschmidt, Pete Vergos, Aaron Goldstein, Jeremy Rasch, and Bill Wallner. The agencies said maintaining public trust remains a critical part of their mission, and officials acknowledged that Flock technology had previously helped them apprehend dangerous criminals even as they concluded that continuing the program was no longer appropriate at this time. Crews installed covers over every camera lens across the county to prevent any further image capture while the shutdown takes effect.
A Wisconsin Records Law Collision
The trouble traces back to a legal conflict baked into how Flock's nationwide network operates. Under Wisconsin's open records statutes, records tied to active criminal investigations are exempt from public disclosure — but that protection evaporated once out-of-state agencies fulfilled open records requests under their own states' laws, releasing shared Flock search data to the public, according to the Washington County Insider. Because Flock's system pools license plate search logs across municipal and state lines, a records request filed anywhere in the country could theoretically expose Wisconsin investigative data never meant to see daylight.
The disclosures could compromise ongoing criminal investigations and affect public trust, per WTMJ. Officials there noted they would consider adopting similar automated license plate reader technology again in the future, but only if stronger security safeguards and local data protections are established first — a distinction that matters, since the rejection targets Flock's centralized, multi-jurisdictional sharing structure rather than plate-reading technology itself.
Neighboring Counties Move in Lockstep
Fond du Lac County wasn't alone. Winnebago County agencies — including the sheriff's office and police departments in Neenah, Menasha, Fox Crossing, Winneconne, and UW-Oshkosh — simultaneously suspended or terminated their own Flock camera use on the same day, citing the identical unauthorized out-of-state disclosures, according to WHBY. The Winnebago County Sheriff's Office also launched an internal review the same day to evaluate whether any active criminal investigations in the county had been compromised by the leaked records, per WTAQ.
Before the shutdown, the Fond du Lac County Sheriff's Office had operated 25 Flock Safety cameras across its jurisdiction as of last September, according to the Atlas of Surveillance database. That network is now dark, joining a growing list of Wisconsin exits that includes Dane County, Appleton, and Verona, all of which canceled, defunded, or suspended their Flock programs at some point in 2026 amid privacy and data governance concerns, as documented by FOX6 News Milwaukee.
A Pattern Hoodline Has Tracked All Summer
The Fond du Lac and Winnebago shutdowns land just a week after nearby Sheboygan bagged all 15 of its Flock cameras and moved to cancel its contract after learning Flock had attempted to sell the city five years of its own traffic and speed data without ever disclosing that such tracking was happening. Kenosha's police chief said Thursday that his city was also terminating its Flock contract, opting instead to replace the system with Axon's Outpost license plate readers.
Misuse scandals have compounded the distrust. Reports have documented numerous alleged Flock camera misuse cases by police officers nationwide, including cases in Wisconsin. One of those involved a Milwaukee police officer who resigned and was criminally charged earlier this year after an investigation found he ran nearly 180 unauthorized searches on a dating partner and her ex-partner using the department's Flock database.
Vendor Promised Fixes, Counties Weren't Convinced
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley announced policy changes on August 13, including shortening the default image retention period from 30 days to 7 days and requiring case codes for database searches, according to Business Insider. Those changes came just weeks before Fond du Lac County terminated its contract entirely, suggesting the vendor-level reforms did little to reassure local agencies already grappling with leaked investigative data. Flock technology has also expanded well beyond traditional plate-reading systems in recent years, adding another layer of complexity to the data-sharing concerns driving counties away from the platform.
What remains unclear is which specific active criminal cases in Wisconsin may have been exposed by the out-of-state records releases, whether Fond du Lac and Winnebago counties will pursue alternative standalone ALPR vendors, and whether Flock Safety will ultimately alter its nationwide database architecture to respect state-specific record exemption laws. For now, the cameras across Fond du Lac County sit covered, and county officials say instituting stronger, county-wide protocols will be a prerequisite before any new system goes back up.
