Someone cut down two Flock surveillance cameras near a Lowe’s in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania on the Fourth of July. They taped an American flag to the pole.

Pennsylvania State Police are investigating. No arrests have been made.

It was not an isolated incident.

Across the country, Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader cameras are being cut down with reciprocating saws, rammed with trucks, and smashed with baseball bats. Confirmed incidents have been reported in Texas, Virginia, South Carolina, Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, California, Oregon, Idaho, Iowa, New York, North Carolina, and now Pennsylvania.

Law enforcement sources have put the running count at more than two dozen destroyed cameras across five states dating back to April 2025. That number is almost certainly low. The actual tally is difficult to track because many incidents go unreported or are logged only in local police blotters that never reach the press.

Flock Safety operates roughly 120,000 cameras across 49 states. The cameras photograph license plates on public roads and upload the data to a shared national database searchable by any subscribing law enforcement agency. The company says its technology helps solve 10 percent of reported crimes in the United States.

The people cutting them down say something different.

The Wave Accelerated in 2026

The destruction wave picked up speed in early 2026. In Houston, four cameras were found on the ground in two different parts of the city. In Pleasant Hill, Iowa, someone cut a camera pole in half and scattered the parts across the road. In Troy, New York, three cameras were vandalized in a single week. Days later, a 25-year-old man was arrested after sawing down another one at 1:30 in the morning. In Monterey County, California, a man drove from Pismo Beach to destroy cameras in two separate communities. He was charged with felony vandalism. Bail was set at $30,000.

In Ashland, Ohio, investigators found shattered solar panels and camera poles that had been struck by vehicles, bats, and clubs. In North Carolina, police asked the public to help identify two men who took down a brand-new camera. Callers trolled the tip line, suggesting the suspects were Batman and Robin.

In Bluffton, South Carolina, six cameras along a two-mile stretch of Buckwalter Parkway were damaged or unplugged. In Alexandria, Virginia, a man used a baseball bat to destroy cameras at multiple locations across the city, including one outside a middle school. He was identified after police found the bat on his front seat.

The hardware makes it easy. Flock cameras are solar-powered, mounted on thin aluminum poles, and connected by cellular signal. No wires. No hardline power. A battery-operated saw cuts through the pole in seconds.

Pennsylvania

Franklin County Sheriff Benjamin Sites told reporters he is aware of local social media pages where people organize against the cameras and, in some cases, cut them down. His office has about three cameras of its own plus data-sharing agreements with roughly 15 local businesses.

U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, who represents south-central Pennsylvania, has been the loudest voice in Congress against Flock. He has posted “Stop the Flock” graphics on social media and called the company’s vehicle scans “mass collection and surveillance, not safety.” Perry co-sponsored a bipartisan amendment to a federal highway bill that would have banned the use of ALPRs on federally funded roads for anything other than tolling. The amendment was killed in committee.

Pennsylvania has no state law governing how long ALPR data can be retained, who can access it, or how it can be shared. PennDOT bars the installation of new ALPR structures in state rights-of-way, which pushes the cameras onto private property where public records requests do not apply.

According to DeFlock, the open-source mapping project, there are roughly 3,250 ALPRs in Pennsylvania and the surrounding area. Fifty-nine percent of them are Flock cameras.

The closest heavy deployment to the Poconos is in Hazleton, where 60 Flock cameras and 164 gunshot detectors blanket the city. Chief Brian Schoonmaker has called the system a game changer. Hazleton was the first community in the tri-state area to deploy Flock community-wide, and the system has since spread to West Hazleton, Hazle Township, and Weatherly.

No Flock contracts or camera deployments have been publicly disclosed for any agency in Monroe, Pike, or Wayne counties. That does not mean none exist. Business-owned cameras that share data with police do not appear in municipal records.

The Bill Is Coming

Municipalities that signed Flock contracts may be about to inherit a bill they did not anticipate.

Independent journalists covering the destruction wave have reported that Flock has updated its replacement terms, shifting more of the cost onto local governments unless they purchase separate premium insurance. Flock has not publicly confirmed the change, and the company did not respond to a request for comment. But the reporting is consistent enough, and the incentives clear enough, that municipal officials in areas with active vandalism should be reading the fine print of their own contracts now, not later.

The financial exposure is not small. In Pleasant Hill, Iowa, Captain Amy Kramer told a local reporter that replacing a single Flock camera can cost as much as $7,000.

That money comes from the same municipal budgets that pay for road repairs, staffing, and services. Every destroyed camera is a line item that did not exist when the contract was signed.

The financial exposure scales with the destruction. And the destruction is scaling.

Flock Safety is a private company valued at $8.4 billion. It has raised roughly $1 billion in venture capital from firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund. It reported more than $300 million in annual recurring revenue with 70 percent year-over-year growth. The company does not sell cameras. It leases them on subscription, typically $2,500 to $3,650 per camera per year. Flock owns the hardware. The municipality pays the tab.

When a camera is destroyed, the municipality pays for the replacement too.

Eighty-two Flock contracts have been terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026. Thirty-nine of those cancellations happened in the first five months of 2026 alone. The reasons cluster around unauthorized data sharing with federal agencies, officer misuse, and the growing realization that the contract terms favor the company, not the city.

The Bluetooth Question

The cameras are getting smarter.

A developer recently documented what he described as a signal-trace integration already live on Flock hardware. The addition is a small device attached to existing cameras that pulls Bluetooth identifiers from nearby phones while scanning license plates. The system matches that Bluetooth signature to a profile.

If accurate, the capability means Flock would no longer need a camera to track a person. A phone in a pocket would be enough.

Flock has not publicly confirmed the feature. The claim has circulated through independent security researchers and social media but has not been verified by mainstream reporting.

The claim deserves scrutiny. A company that built a 120,000-camera surveillance network with no federal regulation and no public vote does not need permission to add a Bluetooth scanner to the pole.

Pocono Review is filing Right-to-Know requests with Monroe County, Pike County, Wayne County, and regional police departments to determine the scope of ALPR deployment in the Poconos. We will publish what comes back.

Tips on ALPR (Flock) cameras in Northeast Pennsylvania can be sent to tips@poconoreview.com.