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Flock claimed explicit permission to view cameras where children play. Dunwoody says no such permission exists.
There were two sets of promises made about Flock Safety’s cameras in Dunwoody. One was made to a private community center. One was made to the public. Both were broken by the same two parties.
In September 2024, Dunwoody PD Major Patrick Krieg requested access to the private security cameras at a community center on behalf of the department. When the community center pushed back and demanded to know what the access would be used for, Krieg was unambiguous: “This is solely for real-time critical incident response.” The community center agreed to share their cameras, including cameras in gymnastics rooms, pools, and fitness studios, with Dunwoody PD for emergencies.
To the broader public, the City made the same promise in a different form: Flock is a public safety tool that catches criminals and keeps your community safe. It’s only used for law enforcement purposes. When citizens raised concerns, we were given three minutes at a podium, requests for open meetings were ignored, and we were silenced by a unanimous vote.
Both promises had the same problem: while the city was making them, Flock employees were inside Dunwoody’s camera network, including a private community center’s cameras (the ones shared solely for emergencies) to allegedly pitch their product to other law enforcement agencies.
From 2023 through April 2026, Flock employees viewed live and recorded cameras in Dunwoody over 1,000 times. In 2025 alone, they searched Dunwoody citizens’ data over 400 times. No one in Dunwoody consented to this.
When I asked the City of Dunwoody to produce any agreement authorizing this, their answer was simple: “The City of Dunwoody found no records that are responsive to your request.”
There was no authorization or explicit permission. Just a promise to a community center, a promise to the public, and a company that treated both like an open door.
#Flock’s Response
Flock’s public statement in response to this information being revealed was unequivocal: “We work with cities and agencies, like Dunwoody, that have given authorized, explicit permission to be testing partners.”
Their CEO told a different story in private. In an email obtained through open records, Garrett Langley wrote to the community center’s CEO that Flock had “explicit permission from Dunwoody” and that employees “occasionally” accessed Dunwoody’s devices for testing and demonstration purposes, but that this was a “poor decision,” and Flock showed “a lack of thoughtfulness.”
Let’s start with “explicit permission.” I filed an open records request asking the City of Dunwoody for any agreement, contract, memorandum of understanding, or authorization, anything at all, governing Flock’s access to Dunwoody’s camera network for testing or demonstration purposes. I made the request as broad as possible because I wanted to know whether the city had decided it was acceptable for my family and me to be watched by Flock sales employees without our knowledge. I think any reasonable person would agree I should at least be able to find out if the city robbed me of consent, and if so, who made that decision.
The city’s answer: “The City of Dunwoody found no records that are responsive to your request.”
There was no explicit permission. There was no agreement. There was nothing.
Now let’s talk about “occasionally.” From 2023 through mid-April 2026, Flock employees viewed live and recorded cameras in Dunwoody 1,063 times. In 2025 alone, they searched Dunwoody citizens’ data 401 times directly through the Dunwoody PD network.
Maybe Flock and the rest of the world have different definitions of explicit and occasionally. Mr. Langley, if you read this, I personally offer to buy you a dictionary.
Flock’s blog went further, claiming the community center’s “camera was only viewed once during a routine demo.” This implies that only one camera was viewed. This is quite contradictory to public records, which show dozens of cameras in sensitive areas where children play being accessed, including in the private community center.
Either they are intentionally lying by stating only one camera was viewed, or they do not know how to read their own audit logs.
Neither explanation is acceptable.
Flock’s response doesn’t even commit to ending these demos. It makes clear that ordinary people across the country, going about their lives, will continue to serve as unwitting props in Flock sales presentations. Flock’s website still states, “Flock Safety does not access or monitor your footage without explicit request of the customer,” although the audit logs tell a different story.
Flock also said in a statement to 404 Media that “it is unequivocally false to assert that Flock, or the police, or city officials are doing anything other than using technology to stop major crimes in the city.” This is at the same time that their blog admits that they were looking at cameras where Dunwoody citizens and children could be. So which one is it? Are they hoping to redefine the words “anything other than”?
Flock Safety’s entire defense rests on the word “permission.” They used it in their public statement. Their CEO used it in his private email to the community center, and their website uses it.
But when I asked the city to show me that permission — any document, any email, any record of anyone ever saying yes — there was nothing. Not a contract, memo, email — nothing. The cameras were shared with Dunwoody PD for 911 emergencies.
That’s not permission. That’s not “explicit.” That’s a private company deciding that proximity to a law enforcement contract was close enough to consent, and a city that either didn’t know or didn’t care.
#Dunwoody PD Response
When the community center’s leadership found out their cameras had been accessed by Flock employees, they did what any reasonable institution would do: investigate and contact the police department that had promised to protect them.
Their understanding of the arrangement was explicit.
In an email exchange obtained through open records, the community center’s leadership wrote: “Our understanding was that DPD’s access to our cameras was limited to active-shooter or similar emergency scenarios: real-time tactical awareness, etc. Since no such event had occurred, we had no reason to believe anyone had actually viewed the feeds.”
That understanding came directly from what the PD told them, but it was wrong.
They were immediately given two very different answers:
Deputy Chief Oliver Fladrich said, “I certainly had my eyebrow going up about Flock checking in your system.”
Major Patrick Krieg: “It is becoming clear that we have an individual or small group that is continuing to produce misinformation to our partners in an effort to disrupt operations.”
Read those two responses again. One senior officer acknowledged that Flock being inside the community center’s cameras was unexpected. The other called it misinformation.
I found this particularly weird since they work in the same department, have seen the same evidence, and Krieg himself was the one who promised the community center in writing less than two years ago that access was “not recording your video, nor will we have any rights or ability to disseminate it otherwise, it is solely for real-time critical incident response.”
At this point I am assuming that the community center agreed on that basis, and they had no reason to believe anything else was possible.
Just like everyone else in Dunwoody, they found out this promise had been broken from a private citizen. Not from the police department that made the promise. Not from the officers overseeing the Real Time Crime Center who should have been the first to notice that Flock employees were inside a network explicitly labeled “Do Not Share.” From me — a dad in Dunwoody who filed open records requests.
But those officers were busy. They were at steak dinners with Flock employees.
The community center was betrayed by the people tasked to protect them just like the rest of us.
We were all told the same story: that Flock was a law enforcement tool, that our cameras were for emergencies, that the system had safeguards. Someone, either Dunwoody PD or Flock or both, decided that our neighborhoods, our parks, our pools, and our children’s gymnastics rooms were fair game for a private vendor’s access.
Nobody asked us for our consent, and when a private citizen found out and raised the alarm, one of those officers called it misinformation.
That’s not a miscommunication, that’s a choice.
#City of Dunwoody Response
At the April 13th City Council meeting, Mayor Lynn Deutsch said she “sought a solution” and that “where we landed is that Flock will no longer use Dunwoody for demonstration projects.” She also said the city was “trying to be transparent.”
So let’s talk about that transparency:
Before this story broke publicly, I had emailed the mayor fourteen times about concerns with Flock. She never responded to one. When I offered to meet with her directly to walk through what I had found — audit logs showing Flock sales employees watching cameras inside a children’s gymnastics room — she ignored me.
Mayor Deutsch and the rest of the council have also refused every request from citizens for an open public meeting on Flock, which makes it particularly remarkable that on the 13th, an hour after ignoring those requests, Councilman Joe Seconder suggested an open meeting about a completely different topic.
The “solution” she announced came less than a week after she met privately with Flock’s CEO at a coffee shop, a meeting she didn’t disclose publicly until I brought it up, arranged through text messages obtained through open records.
This is the same CEO who has gone on television and lied about Flock’s relationship with ICE and the federal government, and lied directly to other city council members. I had made Mayor Deutsch aware of both of these facts in February.
For her, “we” doesn’t mean the families of Dunwoody. It means her and the CEO of the company under scrutiny, meeting privately, before she championed a legal agreement and contract expansion that required nothing of Flock, held no one accountable, and changed nothing materially about how our data is used.
There was never an explicit authorization allowing any of this to happen. Not for the demos, searches, or for a single Flock employee to open a single camera feed inside a private community center, or at our parks and playgrounds.
Without authorization, public accountability, and the public’s consent, the City of Dunwoody, the Dunwoody PD, and Flock turned our neighborhoods, our parks, our pools, and our children’s gymnastics rooms into a virtual human zoo for a private company’s ‘sales pitch.’
Nobody asked us, or told us, and when we found out, the mayor’s solution was a private coffee meeting with the CEO.
So here is the question nobody in Dunwoody has been willing to answer: who authorized this? Not who enabled it technically. Not who facilitated the integration. Who decided it was acceptable for Flock sales employees to have access to cameras inside a private community center, and our parks and playgrounds? Who decided that was consistent with what Dunwoody PD promised us and the JCC in writing? Who decided that 401 searches of Dunwoody citizens’ data in a single year by Flock employees was within the scope of what this technology was sold to us as?
The mayor met with the CEO, then the council voted unanimously to expand the contract, the officers responsible went to dinner with Flock employees, and the cameras, microphones, and drones are still on.
#What’s Next?
That can’t be the end of this story. The residents of Dunwoody deserve a city that works for them: not one that meets privately with the companies it’s supposed to oversee and calls it transparency. Zach Humphries, Sean Collins, and I are launching Dunwoody Forward because we believe this community is capable of something better.
We want to build something that goes beyond Flock: a vision for what Dunwoody looks like when the voices of citizens carry more weight than the interests of corporations. We’re still figuring out what this non-partisan group looks like, and we need your help.
Join our Facebook group and let’s figure this out together :)
Join the Dunwoody Forward Facebook Group →
This piece was originally published on Jason Hunyar’s Substack, and is republished here with permission.