Hayden Bags Flock Cameras Despite Chief's Defense

Steamboat Springs —The plastic bags go over the lenses on a Thursday night, a quiet, almost ceremonial act of burial for two glass eyes that have been staring down U.S. Highway 40 for years.

It feels counterintuitive. You’d expect a small town like Hayden to cling to whatever scraps of high-tech surveillance it can afford, treating the cameras as a shield against the vast, empty darkness of the Western Slope. But the Hayden Police Department is doing the opposite. They’re terminating their contract with Flock Safety. They’re bagging the cameras. And they’re doing it while their own chief stands in front of the town council and tells them he’d rather keep them.

This is the part everyone skips past.

Chief Scott Scurlock gave a 30-minute presentation that read like a defense exhibit. He laid out the mechanics: the cameras passively log plates, the data is shared through Flock’s network, and it gets wiped after 30 days. He pointed to the two locations — one near mile marker 106 on Highway 40, the other at the intersection of Highway 40 and Routt County Road 27 — and noted the cost: $3,000 a year each, $6,000 total. Not a huge number. Not a tax burden that makes people wince.

Then he made his case. Of the roughly 788,000 police officers in the country, and the 7,000 agencies using automated license plate readers, there have only been about 200 known “incidents” of abuse. That’s a tiny fraction. A rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

“My professional recommendation is that we stick with (automated license plate reader) technologies,” he said. “However, I believe we should investigate new vendors to see what else is out there.”

He paused. Let the room breathe.

“Everybody around us has abandoned Flock for various reasons,” he added.

And that matters because it’s true. Less than a week before the Hayden hearing, the Routt County Sheriff’s Office announced it was terminating its Flock contract and deactivating its cameras. Less than two weeks before that, Steamboat Springs Police Chief Mark Beckett ordered the immediate deactivation of all Flock cameras within city limits. Beckett made that call just one day after a packed, often tense public forum where he defended the tech while neighbors grilled him on privacy, data sharing, and the specter of misuse.

So here’s the rub. Scurlock is defending a vendor that his neighbors have already ditched. He’s arguing for continuity while the ground shifts under his feet. He’s pointing to the transparency portal Flock launched in late August, a nice gesture, sure, but it’s still Flock’s portal, still Flock’s rules, still Flock’s data pipeline. And the town council? They invited the public to speak. About 50 people showed up, in person and via Zoom. Roughly a dozen talked. And they were overwhelmingly opposed to Flock.

Mayor Ryan Banks, after the presentation, said he trusts Scurlock. He trusts Routt County Sheriff Doug Scherar. But then he asked the question that hung in the air like smoke: does he “like the idea”? Does he like the sheer volume of surveillance? The ubiquity of it? The way it seeps into the fabric of daily life, invisible until you notice the lens, until you see the bag, until you realize the eye is closed.

The cameras sit on their poles now. Two black shapes against the pale sky. The bags are loose, fluttering slightly in the wind. No one’s going to take them down tomorrow. Maybe not next week. They’ll stay there, silent, patient, waiting to be removed or replaced or forgotten. And the highway keeps moving. Cars roll past, plates flashing in the headlights, unseen by the glass eyes that used to watch. The data stops flowing. The 30-day clock resets to zero. The network shrinks by two nodes. Somewhere in a server farm, a database entry goes dark. A record ends. A story closes.

But the question lingers, unanswerable, like a plate caught in a frame that no one will ever search. Did they see anything? Was it worth seeing? Or did they just look, and look, and look, until looking became the only thing they knew how to do?

The bags stay on. For now.