08/28/2026
Great write-up by The Manhattan Uranus on the inaugural meeting of DeFlock Riley County, Kansas. https://www.facebook.com/share/1EV2JRzeUA/?mibextid=wwXIfr
DeFlock Riley County Meeting Recap
On August 27th, over 40 residents attended the first community meeting of DeFlock Riley County.
Organizer Al Terwelp started the meeting with an informational hour-long presentation. This included general information about the variety of surveillance products available in the law enforcement surveillance market, online resources where citizens can learn more, the state of the grassroots anti-surveillance movements across the US, and the state of surveillance in Riley County.
📹 THE STATE OF MASS SURVEILANCE 📹
Many brands of surveillance products exist. Some technology is older and more limited, others are ai-assisted and incredibly powerful. Flock’s line of products include the standard, fixed-view Flock license plate readers which were not originally AI empowered but are now. A mobile, trailer-mounted version also exists. Organizers identified 13 Flock cameras deployed in Riley County. The Flock Condor utilizes a pan-tilt-zoom function that is AI-enhanced and can zoom up to 30x in crystal clear detail. The Flock drone hive, which has already been deployed in Wichita, KS, houses quadcopter drones that can fly 60 miles per hour. They are equipped with extremely high-definition cameras that can read a license plate from 2,000 feet away, thermal imaging capabilities, and a laser rangefinder. A single hive can cover 50 square miles and features a charging station that can autonomously switch out a depleted battery for a new one in less than 90 seconds.
Verkada and Axon are also AI empowered. Verkada can understand and translate many languages in real time and comes standard with facial recognition software. Verkada has been widely deployed in Aggieville and Poyntz. Fixed-location Axon cameras fully integrate with police body cams, dash cams, and school bus cameras. RCPD uses the entire range of Axon products described except the school bus cameras.
Other surveillance products are not verified to be in Riley county. These include “gunshot mics” which are advertised to triangulate when and where a gun has been fired. The mics are much more robust than that and can eavesdrop on residents. Signal trace is a small white box that picks up the IP address and Bluetooth information for every device that passes nearby: bluetooth car radios, cell phones, tablets, and more. Terwelp surprised attendees with the fact that Signal Trace can even pick up the IP address of his pacemaker. Halo Sensors can detect cigarette and v**e smoke and eavesdrop on conversations. Gunshot mics and Halo Sensors can both be prompted to alert in real time based on certain keywords and also searched by keyword, instantaneously retrieving each instance that word was spoken within mic range. Halo Sensors are primarily being deployed in schools, especially school bathrooms.
A newcomer to the market, Ubiquia, has recently partnered with Flock. Ubiquia manufactures new streetlights with cameras and mics integrated into the light and camera/mic combos that can be retrofitted to existing infrastructure.
To learn more about surveillance systems, organizers found (sassisouth . org) to be factual.
🗣 PUBLIC SENTIMENTS 🗣
The local efforts to understand and oppose mass surveillance is part of a much larger movement grounded in American history, political ideology, and constitutional concerns. Mass surveillance backlash bridges both major political parties and includes many third parties. 54% of Americans disapprove of mass surveillance. 70% of Americans believe that the use of AI to monitor citizens without a warrant is a violation of the fourth amendment. And the backlash has been effective: as of August 5, 2026, over 100 cities have canceled Flock contracts.
🍎 STATUS IN RILEY COUNTY 🍎
While RCPD has not yet provided documents for a FOIA request the group submitted in early July, Terwelp was able to glean information from past Law Board meetings. In the minutes from the December 2023 Law Board meeting, Terwelp found a $35,000 expense to deploy “9-10” flock cameras “to evaluate if they are of benefit before expanding. Information from other agencies report some improvement in silver alerts, amber alerts, and crime.” According to Terwelp, there was nothing in the pre-published agenda of that meeting that specified Flock would be discussed. (The Manhattan Uranus has not had time to research these agendas, which regularly exceed 150 pages, unless y’all want to wait three weeks for this summary).
Minutes from two additional Law Board meetings in March and April 2024 indicates the finalization of Flock agreements. They are on page 112 of the April agenda and page 48 of the May agenda.
None of these agendas include the contract or service agreement between RCPD and Flock. Lately, this topic has gained renewed attention. City Commissioner and Law Board Member Jim Morrison requested the contract on July 20 and again on August 17. RCPD Director Brian Peete said that he emailed those documents to the Law Board on July 27th and that he could “personally drop it off at [Morrison’s] home now.” Members of RCPD’s Community Relations Board have requested the same documents and were denied access to the information.
RCPD does have a real time information center (RTIC)-- a sophisticated IT workspace with many monitors, where integrated mass surveillance hardware delivers live feeds to a technician who monitors them. This includes flock cameras, body cameras, dash cameras, traffic cameras, and feeds from local businesses and churches.
Residents wonder if this level of surveillance is necessary. Terwelp cited a Riley County crime rate that has been in decline since at least 1970, and a crime rate that is 30% below the state average. In fact, Riley County’s crime rate has been below the state average for 21 years. During Terwelp’s presentation, he indicated that RCPD Major Brad Jaeger had said himself that the majority of crimes in Riley county are solved by citizen assistance and good, old-fashioned detective work—not mass surveillance.
Terwelp said that RCPD has worked hard to build a solid relationship with the public, grounded in mutual trust, but that the pursuit of a mass surveillance model of policing threatened the foundation they had so painstakingly built. “I’m not anti-police,” he said, “I’m pro-Fourth Amendment.”
🚓 THE FUTURE OF RILEY COUNTY 🚓
Terwelp turned the audience’s attention to Wichita as an example of Manhattan’s possible future, as a much larger neighboring city which has embraced policing through surveillance. Wichita Police Department (WPD) is home to 191 Flock cameras, a Flock drone hive, and a more advanced RTIC than RCPD has. The initial press release for Wichita’s RTIC indicated that there are over 1500 video streams that feed directly into this center. From June 26 to July 27, Wichita’s center generated 904,603 license plate searches and 2,513 user searches.
They received federal grants to purchase part of this equipment, but the maintenance costs and subscription services of $477,500 were absorbed into WPD operating expenses, and do not cover the hive or the RTIC—just the cameras. It also does not include annual expenses for 19 Flock cameras on Wichita State University campus with a price tag of $118,175; cameras from 14 Home Owner Associations which feed into the center, traffic light cameras, body cameras, dash cameras, or cameras privately owned by businesses that feed into the information center.
Ballooning costs are not the only concerns. Former Sedgwick Police Lee Nygard resigned in disgrace after multiple verified allegations of misconduct using Flock cameras. Nygard searched the tags of his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend 228 times in four months. The reasons he logged included a missing child, drug use, and suspicious activity.
Constitutionality is also a concern cited by organizers and attendees. This type of policing is referred to as a “dragnet,” after a fishing method that uses a large net to scrape all life off of a seabed. In ecology, this results in the death of thousands of marine animals in each catch that are not desirable or edible. In communities, it means that thousands of law-abiding citizens are being tracked without probable cause or a warrant. Opponents of dragnet policing challenge this method as a violation of the 4th Amendment. In Wichita, the Kansas Justice Institute has filed suit against the City of Wichita under the state constitution’s Article 15, which upholds the Fourth Amendment. The case has not yet been set for trial.
One resident said that they wholeheartedly trust RCPD’s current staff but recognize that this is infrastructure that will outlast the current organizational chart. Another said that they trust RCPD’s current staff but do not trust Flock, Axon, or Verkada, which stores information collected from each camera across the US in their own cloud and can use it for their own purposes. Another criticized these companies for their lack of end-to-end encryption, leaving them vulnerable to hackers.
👟 NEXT STEPS👟
DeFlock Riley County has already begun a petition to remove Flock cameras from Riley County. They are organizing a petition canvassing event in Aggieville on September 5th at 7pm. They will meet on the sidewalk in front of Auntie Mae’s Parlor.
The next general meeting will be Tuesday, September 29th at 7pm at the Library Auditorium.
