Somebody at an apartment complex on Jacksonville's north side looked up at the swimming pool and noticed a camera that had nothing to do with the pool. It was a Flock camera, one of the automated license-plate readers the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office spent August defending on local television. Residents objected. A reporter went and looked.

Elizabeth Caldwell of Jacksonville Today published what she found on August 24, and the story is not really the camera. It is who owns it. There is a Flock camera at the Mezza Premier pool. There is a second one at a complex called The Ridley. Mezza Premier belongs to Fundrise, a Washington, D.C. company that owns something like nine thousand residential units around the country. Caldwell also found that a tech-heavy investment fund Fundrise runs held about $23 million of Flock as of March.

The landlord put the camera up. The landlord's fund owns a piece of the camera company. Nobody took a vote on either one, and under current Florida law nobody has to.

Then the state pulled its own cameras, and the one at the pool stayed

A week after Caldwell's story ran, the Florida Department of Transportation revoked every license-plate-reader permit it had issued. Engineering and Operations Memorandum No. 26-01, dated August 31, 2026 and signed by chief operating officer Will Watts, tells local agency permitholders that all such approvals "are hereby revoked and must be removed by the permittee within 30 days of the date of this memorandum." Thirty days from August 31 is September 30, 2026. After that, the memo says, the department removes whatever is left itself. It is also refusing to issue any more.

The department wrote down its reasoning, which is not the sort of thing a state agency usually puts on paper about a police tool. The permits came out because of "the recent exponential increase in deployments along our roadways, coupled with concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes." Five days earlier, on August 26, Governor DeSantis had told reporters at Florida International University that the readers were "out of control" and that lawmakers should take the subject up, as News4Jax reported it. Statewide, as WFLX reported it, "More than 8,000 Flock cameras are documented across Florida, according to state records."

Jacksonville went further than the memo required. In a statement the same day, Sheriff T.K. Waters said his agency would "fully comply with FDOT's directive," then kept going: "Additionally, at my direction, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office will discontinue the use of LPR technology throughout Duval County effective immediately." The 150 devices counted in the next section are, by the Sheriff's own account, off.

Now read the order's actual reach, because it is narrower than the headlines. FDOT's authority here runs through s. 316.0777, Florida Statutes, and it covers placing a reader "within the right-of-way ... of a road on the State Highway System." Florida law limits those permits to law enforcement agencies to begin with, and the memo revokes approvals "issued by the Department to a local law enforcement agency." City streets, county roads and private property are not in it. The camera at the Mezza Premier pool is on private property. FDOT never permitted it, and FDOT is not removing it. On September 30, when the last permitted reader comes off the state right of way, that one is still pointed at the pool.

This is also an agency revoking its own permits, not a change in Florida law. No bill passed. No statute was amended. Which means nothing about the pool camera changed: the landlord put it up, the landlord's fund owns a piece of the camera company, nobody voted on either one, and under current Florida law nobody has to. What changed is that the state has now conceded, in a signed memo, that the surveillance it could reach had gotten out of hand. The camera it cannot reach is the one over the pool.

The memo's phrase "concerning reports of misuse" has a name attached to it. On August 11 the Haines City Police Department arrested one of its own, officer Christopher Goodson, 31, and charged him with official misconduct and with one count that FOX 13 and Action News Jax both print as "offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks, and electronic devices." Investigators say he ran his estranged wife's plate through the Flock database 717 times, from September 2024 to June 30, 2026, and that he typed law-enforcement reasons into the system to justify the searches. His department says she was not part of any investigation. All of that is an allegation in an arrest affidavit, as reported by FOX 13 Tampa Bay and WKRC Local 12; the arrest date is the one Action News Jax read off Polk County's online court records. He has not been tried. He is on paid administrative leave, and officials say he means to resign.

Notice what caught him: a search log. Who ran the query, against what plate, on what stated grounds. His own department had one and read it. Jacksonville publishes none at all.

The Receipt

Flock Safety builds automated license-plate readers. A Flock camera photographs the plate of every vehicle that passes it, along with the make, the color, and identifying marks, and files that record in a searchable network. Nothing about it is aimed at a suspect. It is aimed at everyone, and the search happens later.

Every public argument about these cameras is an argument about police departments, because that is where the paperwork is. A police contract has a procurement file, a dollar figure, and usually a vote. It generates records a citizen can request.

The growth is somewhere else. Per Flock's own website, as Jacksonville Today reported it, "Homeowners associations are the biggest users of Flock cameras as a group." Taken as a group, the biggest users of the most powerful mass-surveillance product currently sold in America are not cities. They are HOAs, and behind them, the companies that own the buildings the rest of us rent.

An HOA camera has no procurement file. A landlord's camera has a lease. There is no council meeting, no bid, no public docket, and no line item anyone can point at. The record just does not exist, which is a different thing from the record being clean.

What the Sheriff's Office Says, in Its Own Numbers

Take the other side seriously first, because the other side has a case.

JSO told News4Jax on August 19 that it ran 141 fixed license-plate readers and 9 mobile ones across Duval County, 150 devices in all. Over the past two years, JSO says, those readers "helped investigators solve 15 murders, 17 kidnappings, 6 forcible sex offenses, nearly 100 shootings and 172 missing-persons cases." On misuse, the agency's position was direct: "If someone misuses the system, we will address it." On the broader point: "Our goal is to use technology responsibly to help keep our community safe while maintaining accountability and trust."

Those numbers deserve a label, and the label is not "proof." They are the agency's own assertion, relayed by a television station. They are not audited clearance data, nobody outside JSO has checked the file behind any one of them, and "helped solve" is doing work in that sentence that nobody has defined. So they get reported here as what they are, which is the Sheriff's Office's own count.

It also gets taken at face value, because 172 missing-persons cases are 172 real people, and a family that got a phone call because a camera caught a plate is not going to be argued out of it. The question this piece is asking is not whether the cameras work. It is who can see them, who profits from them, and how anyone outside the building would ever know.

Which is exactly what JSO offered. Accountability and trust. Good. Here is what accountability looks like on this product, and Jacksonville does not have it.

Why It Costs You

Rory Safir, a criminal defense attorney quoted in Caldwell's reporting, put the legal gap in one line: "There are statutes that govern Flock for public roads, but there are not for HOAs, condominiums, apartments."

So the protections, such as they are, attach to the cameras with the paperwork, and evaporate on the ones without it. And the ones without it are pointed at where you live.

Safir's second point is the one that should decide this for anybody who rents. "If you're an apartment tenant, you can't opt out. It's not like you even opted in."

Look at the class shape of that. A homeowner in an HOA at least gets a board, and a meeting, and a vote she can lose in public. A tenant gets a camera in the parking lot and a renewal notice. The people with the least ability to say no are the people getting the most surveillance, and it arrives as an amenity, described in the leasing brochure as security.

Then it stops being about the parking lot. A license-plate record is a record of where a car was and when. Do that continuously for a year and you have not built a crime-fighting tool, you have built a movement history: the clinic, the lawyer's office, the union hall, the recovery meeting, the other apartment complex somebody sleeps at twice a week. Nothing about a plate reader distinguishes those trips from a stolen Camry. The database does not care why you drove somewhere.

How the Machine Actually Works

Here is where the two layers join, and it is one sentence in Caldwell's story. A JSO spokesperson told her the agency can get into some privately held cameras, and would not say which ones.

Read that again with the ownership in mind. The private camera has no procurement file, no vote, and no public record. Law enforcement can reach some of them. Which ones is not disclosed. Jacksonville Today has a records request pending on exactly that question and does not have an answer yet. And the Sheriff's August 31 announcement said the agency was discontinuing its own use of the technology. It did not say whether the access to privately held cameras ended too. From outside the building there is no way to tell, which is the same problem wearing a different hat.

So the accountability the public thinks it is getting from the police contract does not cover the private layer, and the private layer has no accountability of its own. That is not a loophole somebody forgot to close. It is the product's most attractive feature to the people buying it.

Now the part that would fix half of this in an afternoon. Some police departments run public Flock transparency portals carrying audit logs and access permissions, which is a record of who ran searches and who is allowed to. Caldwell checked. Jacksonville does not have one.

That absence is a choice, not a technical limitation. Every argument JSO makes for these cameras is an argument the public could check, if the log were public. The log is the difference between "we will address misuse" and a resident being able to see whether there was any.

And the money is sitting on top of all of it. The Fundrise fund's Flock position is a disclosed holding, surfaced by Caldwell rather than by any filing this show pulled itself, and it is not a scandal on its own; funds hold what they hold. It is worth knowing that the company deciding whether to put a camera at your pool has a financial interest in the company that sells the camera. That is what "follow the money" looks like when the money and the camera end up in the same hands.

The contract nobody will hand over

The Jacksonville Flock contract is not in the public record. I looked. There is a dollar figure circulating online for what the city or the Sheriff's Office pays, and I am not printing it, because it traces back to a single explainer that links no document, and a number with nothing under it is exactly the thing this show does not do. The county's legislative database will not return the file to anything but a live browser session. That makes the contract a public-records request, not a research problem, and it is the biggest open question in this story.

Same for the searches. With no public audit log, nobody outside JSO can say who has queried Duval's plate data, how often, or for what stated reason. Not me, not you, not a defense attorney with a client. That is the whole point of a log, and there isn't one.

What You Can Actually Do

Three things, and none of them are "raise awareness."

Ask for the log anyway. Switching the cameras off does not erase the record of who searched them while they were on. The specific, checkable ask to the Sheriff's Office and to your council member has not changed: a public Flock transparency portal with audit logs and access permissions, the same thing other departments already publish, covering every search Duval ran while the system was live. It costs nothing to turn on and it settles the argument in either direction. A department confident in its numbers should want it, and a department that has just discontinued the program has one fewer reason to withhold it. Watch who says no.

Ask your landlord or your HOA board, in writing. This is the layer the state order does not touch, so it is the layer where asking still does the work. Four questions, and keep the answers: Does this property have Flock or any license-plate reader? Who can access the footage? How long is it kept? Has any law-enforcement agency been given access to it? An HOA board is the smallest, least-watched governing body in your life and it is voting on surveillance contracts with a handful of people in a clubhouse. That pattern should look familiar. It is the same math that decides a school board seat: whoever shows up wins, and almost nobody shows up.

Do not assume a local rule would survive. If Jacksonville ever did write an ordinance governing private plate readers, the next question is whether Tallahassee lets it stand. Florida's habit of voiding local decisions after the fact is documented, and this show traced one version of it in what SB 180 does to votes that already happened. Any local fix here should be written with that in mind from the first draft.

The residents at Mezza Premier did the hardest part already. They noticed. Somebody looked up at a pool camera, thought that is not a pool camera, and said so out loud, and a reporter went and pulled the thread until it reached a fund holding about $23 million worth of the camera company. Seven days later the state pulled the plug on the cameras it owned the paperwork for. On September 30 the last permitted reader comes off the state right of way, and the one at the pool is not one of them. Everything after that is still just asking for the log and writing down who won't give it to you.

Come back for the rest

We do this every week. The official-sounding reason on top, the money underneath, every number traced back to the document it came from so you can go check it yourself. Pour something cold, pull up a chair, and let us send you the receipts before the next round of nonsense clears your feed. Subscribe to The Long Pour. The free newsletter where the week's little robberies and the one big one land in your inbox together.

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The Receipts

Every claim above traces to a source you can open yourself.