ORD — It was standing room only at the Aug. 11 meeting of the Valley County Board of Supervisors in the small town of Ord. Members of the public packed the tight quarters of the county meeting room.
Just one week earlier, the Ord City Council met and voted unanimously to remove two automatic license plate reader cameras within the city limits – the first such move from a municipality in Nebraska in an emerging fight over privacy. Just one problem: The license plate readers, operated by Flock Safety, are owned by Valley County.
The people came to make it clear that they want Flock cameras out of Valley County.
The tense meeting was the culmination of a dispute that had been building for weeks in Valley County. After Ord officials initially voted to allow the cameras into town last year, city officials and residents now say the technology amounts to an unacceptable violation of their privacy. The Valley County sheriff maintains the Flock cameras are a responsible crime-fighting tool, and some county supervisors have signaled they aren’t ready to see them removed from the rest of the county.
At issue are residents’ concerns that the license plate data collected is being shared with law enforcement agencies across the United States. Records provided to the Flatwater Free Press show over 3,000 agencies, up to the FBI and CIA, accessed the small county’s data more than 450,000 times across the previous month.
The county has agreed to remove the two Flock cameras in city limits, but say they want to keep the other seven scattered throughout Valley County. Now, some residents say the intrusion into their lives has gone far enough.
“We didn’t get a say in these cameras coming here,” said one member of the public.
“We don’t want them in our county,” said another.
How did we get here?
Although the automatic license plate readers were installed by Flock Safety in Ord back in February, many locals didn’t take notice until months later. Frustrated by the unannounced nature of the installation, they began complaining to their city council.
Morgan Sherwood was one of the first to object to the new technology. She says she doesn’t recall members of the public getting a say in the matter when the city voted to bring in the cameras.
“I was waiting for us to have some kind of county or city meeting, and I just never caught any word of it,” Sherwood said. “They thought they were doing the right thing, but really, at the end of the day, at what cost?”
Automatic license plate readers – or ALPRs – are static cameras that take a photo of a passing car. That picture is then analyzed by proprietary artificial intelligence software that automatically identifies the plate number, make, model, color and other details about the vehicle. That information gets compiled into a database that can be searched by law enforcement at the stroke of a few keys.
Flock Safety is one of the most popular private vendors of license plate cameras in the United States, with a vast network of 120,000 cameras in more than 5,000 jurisdictions. The company allows law enforcement agencies to opt in to network sharing, which allows them to search other agencies’ data in exchange for access to their own. Its system allows law enforcement to search for any vehicle without using a license plate number, such as “blue SUV” or “black pickup truck.”
The technology has quickly become popular among law enforcement – including federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On Flock Safety’s website, agencies say they used their cameras to catch drug dealers, find missing persons and track violent criminals across state lines.
As the cameras have spread rapidly across Nebraska, so too has skepticism of the powerful policing tool. The ACLU of Nebraska accuses companies like Flock Safety of “quietly creating a nationwide mass surveillance system,” and estimates more than 500 cameras are photographing license plates in over a dozen Nebraska counties.
Nationally, the technology has been challenged in court dozens of times as being an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. But federal judges have consistently ruled the technology stops short of violating the Fourth Amendment by photographing license plates only in public spaces.
This hasn’t stopped citizens from pushing their local governments to ban the use of the technology. Ord was the first city in Nebraska to vote to get rid of the cameras, joining dozens of other cities across the United States that have made similar decisions after public backlash.
But the cameras remain popular with police and politicians who are proponents of their crime-stopping capabilities. And in Valley County, the sheriff and Board of Supervisors have maintained their support.
Ord’s vote
Last year, the Region 26 Emergency Management Agency approached the Valley County Sheriff’s Office asking if it would be interested in getting two Flock cameras through a federal grant. For Sheriff David Scheideler, it was easy to say yes.
He said the Sheriff’s Office was stretched thin following months of responding to calls in both the city and county after Ord lost its police department to turnover in late 2024.
“We were reaching a point where I needed more officers,” Scheideler said. “Our resources couldn’t provide the coverage we needed.”
Region 26 pitched the Flock cameras as a staffing supplement and a massive time saver, Scheideler said. Plus, the first two cameras were free. The sheriff would post them in Ord and use them to fight crime.
After Scheideler signed on, Region 26 received the Ord City Council’s approval in September 2025. Mayor Jeramy Sedlacek said the city was told the cameras would help stop crime and wouldn’t store any information.
But after discourse about the dangers of the technology erupted online, the mayor said he felt they had made a mistake.
“I probably should have done my research a lot more,” Sedlacek said. “Information can be sold. It’s a third-party company that has the information.”
After the initial installation in Ord, the sheriff ordered seven more cameras to be placed outside the city, for a total of nine countywide. He asked if Ord would be willing to pay the annual $1,000 fee for the two cameras in city limits.
By then, Sedlacek was asking questions and researching the technology. He discovered that many constituents weren’t on board.
On top of that, Ord’s new police chief told Sedlacek he believed the cameras might be powerful crime-fighting tools, but that they also were dangerous.
Mayor Sedlacek told Sheriff Scheideler no.
“I’m like, ‘No way,’” Sedlacek said. “We don’t want this.”
At its Aug. 3 meeting, the Ord City Council voted 5-0 to have the two Flock cameras removed from the city.
County pushback
In response, the Valley County supervisors agreed they would comply with Ord’s resolution to have the two cameras in town removed. But the seven cameras outside the city would remain in place, to the frustration of members of the public.
At the Aug. 11 meeting of the Board of Supervisors, county officials invited Sheriff Scheideler to defend the technology.
“It has helped us immensely,” he said. “It doesn’t do the job for you, but it really helps us solve crimes.”
In an effort to ease people’s fears, a public relations officer for Flock, Phillip Arnold, appeared virtually at the meeting. He fielded pointed questions from concerned county residents who accused the company of harvesting their data and spying on them.
“It would not behoove us to do something we say we do not do,” Arnold said. “Over 40 courts in the United States have heard this case already, including federal courts, and they have determined that there is no violation of the Fourth Amendment.
“There is no right to privacy on a public roadway.”
But residents weren’t convinced. Many said they trusted their county government and their local sheriff’s office, but felt uncomfortable with a private company collecting so many data points from their day-to-day lives.
Local resident Joseph Garcia compared the passive nature of Flock’s surveillance to checkpoints used by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ’40s to keep track of people.
“It takes a private citizen’s movements and catalogs them in a way that over a matter of days or weeks, you have a very intimate picture of that person’s life,” he said. “There’s no place for that in a free society. That is not liberty.”
Flock Safety has repeatedly asserted that its technology can’t cause any harm because customer data isn’t sold and is deleted after a retention period that varies from state to state. However, a federal court found the company’s own retention period does not prevent the long-term storage of data that is downloaded from the Flock system, such as in response to a public records request.
According to Valley County records reviewed by the Flatwater Free Press, in the period between July 19 and Aug. 18, the Valley County Sheriff’s Office searched its Flock data 61 times. The most common searches related to missing persons, burglary and alcohol offenses.
In that same 30-day period, Valley County’s data showed up in 450,646 searches from nearly 3,000 different law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and CIA. Over 200 searches were for immigration offenses, with some directly tied to ICE investigations.
That doesn’t necessarily mean these agencies are targeting Valley County specifically. Still, Sherwood said it reinforces her fear of the police technology.
“That just reiterates why we don’t want these here,” she said. “What is a town of 2,400 people doing getting checked in over 400,000 times, and what are you doing with that information? Why do you get access to that? Why do you get to know what we’re doing in small-town Nebraska?”
Unresolved tension
In response to the backlash, the county held a public hearing at the courthouse in Ord on Monday, Aug. 24.
Sheriff Scheiedler opened the hearing by reiterating that the Flock cameras provide safety and security.
“It’s very important that our Fourth Amendment stays in place,” he said.
Chairman Jack VanSlyke leaned on backing from State Sen. Fred Meyer, who represents Ord and Valley County, and the Nebraska Association of County Officials in support of the cameras.
“They are fully behind law enforcement for the state of Nebraska, and they stand behind the idea that they’re doing more good than they are harm,” VanSlyke said.
After the meeting, VanSlyke told the Flatwater Free Press he supports the technology and wants to come up with a policy to put “safeguards” in place so it’s not misused.
Several dozen people attended – and many made clear they weren’t swayed.
“In my mind, there’s no version of this technology that adequately protects our resident privacy,” said Aaron Ventura.
The cameras’ opponents are just gearing up for a fight against Flock.
“I think that the county has their mind made up, and they just don’t want to tell us,” Sherwood said. “But I’m not gonna stop. We are gonna work on getting petitions. … I hope that they hear that their community really doesn’t want these.”
10 Comments
What a nice change of pace. A decent article from Flatwater, making less use than usual of anecdotal stories, discussing a concern from a rural part of the state, and doing so (mostly) without hijacking the discussion toward urban-centric thinking. Pretty good job! Please do more articles like this one, and not so many of those others.
In regards to Flock, this is one topic on which we should not defer to the “experts” like police departments, because while they may view this as a useful tool, they are blatantly ignoring the real issues. Who else has access to this data, and what are they doing with it? Does that federal grant they used to pay for the cameras come with any dangerous strings attached? Who manages that grant? Did the county get it direct from the feds, or is there a state pass-through entity involved? Is the use of the funds monitored and can the monitor get access to records of how the cameras were used? And what recourse, if any, do local citizens have if they discover some future case where the cameras have been misused? There are probably dozens more dangerous questions to ask about this scenario.
And really, at the end of the day, what need is there for these cameras in a backwater farming community? Are there truly so many serial killers going shopping in downtown Ord, Nebraska as to justify turning the place into a dystopian surveillance state? If so, the sheriff must not be doing a very good job to begin with.
Thank you for bringing attention to this important issue!
And thank you for reminding the Flatwater editor that his comments section has no login function, no verified user names and that any user can identify themselves by anything they choose to type into the name field, even if their identity appears to be a “false” one.
They’re against it because they want to keep making left turns on red light and speed 15+. Nebraskans love doing that.
Flock cameras read and take STILL photos of license plate numbers; they do not record video of moving violations.
We can have a discussion of flock cameras- let’s keep it on track.
All Flock cameras manufactured and installed after 2025 are fully video enabled. It’s not just still images anymore.
And even at that the video isn’t the issue. If all these cameras had to be monitored by human operators, there would be far too much data for even an army of analysts to process. But the cameras are run by computer AI now, and every tiny scrap of data they capture is categorized, analyzed and added to searchable databases.
If someone wants to know “how often does Bob Smith drive to church on Sunday” they no longer need to figure this out on their own. Flock already has the answer. And there is no ethical way to use that knowledge.
Well, I don’t explicitly disagree with you, but…
Honestly, speed limit laws are kind of nonsense. The majority of accidents where speed was a factor are caused by differences in speed, not excessive speed. As such, speed limit laws may actually make this problem worse. (Source: National Motorists Association)
I have never seen anyone turn left on a red light, but I’m not going to get into anecdotal arguments over who has seen what.
The reason people oppose Flock cameras is because giving any government that kind of surveillance power is dangerous. At best the government will use it to hand out a lot of frivolous traffic tickets, which is probably why some backwater sheriff in a rural area wants them, as they will prove useful to the revenue his department can rake in. But at worst the cameras will be used to target people for reasons that have nothing to do with traffic enforcement. The Trump administration has already been documented using these cameras for immigration enforcement. And even if you are in approval of that, ask yourself what happens in 2028 when Trump leaves office and someone else is elected? Will the next administration use these cameras to enforce COVID lockdowns or trace the movements of people with political views the government doesn’t like?
So yeah, I would totally prefer if Nebraskans continue to plow through red lights at 15 miles over the speed limit rather than have government authoritarians tracking my every move.
The issue for me isn’t the use of the data for legal law enforcement, or even immigration enforcement, purposes. The issue for me is that there are too many idiot cops out there doing too many unethical and illegal things with the data, and most are not being held accountable for their actions.
When a cop uses the data to spy on their ex-girlfriend they are often given a simple reprimand or at the worst forced to resign. The idiot cop then simply gets a job 2 cities to the north/south/east/west and resumes being an idiot cop in a different town. No loss of law enforcement license, no prosecution for crimes committed. If law enforcement administration and prosecutors would put the hammer down on these idiot cops, then the public trust in law enforcement would rise.
Sure, I can understand your perspective, and I even agree to a degree.
But here’s the thing… Every government agency has corrupt people, lazy do-nothings, self-serving ladder climbers and good ol’ fashioned jerks. The police, state government, the feds, everyone. Yes, there are good people too, but they tend to keep their heads down and avoid trouble, while the bad folks are the ones constantly chasing promotions and getting into positions of authority.
J.R.R. Tolkien said it best: “The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”
In summary, there will never be a government agency that only uses this kind of surveillance technology for purely benevolent purposes. It will always be abused by someone. And if it’s just a cop who can’t get over his ex-girlfriend, you should count yourself lucky, because I promise there are people who have much worse ideas in mind (and they probably think it’s a really “good idea” too). And thats why this technology shouldn’t exist at all.
I live in Nebraska and I am 100 per cent against Flock cameras. We don’t need them. No more government spying and control.