Thieves saw down and steal every Flock camera in a Minnesota city

In a single coordinated operation on August 1, someone cut down and hauled off all eight of the Winona, Minnesota Police Department’s Flock automated license plate readers, along with two more owned by Buffalo County on the Mississippi River Bridge. The cameras were sawed from their poles at highway entry and exit points around the city, with the poles left behind. Officers only noticed after a patrol officer flagged that the devices had gone silent for 24 hours. At roughly $3,000 each, the loss lands directly on the department’s budget at about $24,000, and no suspects have been identified.

The cameras log license plates plus vehicle make, model, and color, feeding a surveillance network police use for cases like hit-and-runs and missing-persons searches. The department says it owns the data and purges it after 30 days. But Flock’s rapid spread across US municipalities has made the hardware a lightning rod, and this theft fits a growing national pattern of the cameras being vandalized or physically removed.

The backlash is driven less by ordinary crime than by civil-liberties objections: critics argue the readers amount to mass warrantless tracking and worry that captured data can be shared with third-party firms or federal agencies. Whatever the motive here, sawing down an entire city’s network in one night signals that opposition to persistent ALPR surveillance is escalating from public comment into direct action.