Every Flock Camera in a Minnesota City Was Sawed Off Its Pole and Stolen

Someone sawed down all eight of the automated license plate reader cameras that watch the roads in and out of Winona, Minnesota, and hauled the cameras away. Two more cameras on a nearby Mississippi River bridge were taken the same way.

According to Valley News Live, investigators believe the theft was coordinated. Winona police discovered the loss on August 1 after an officer on patrol noticed one pole down in the weeds with its camera gone. That prompted checks at the other locations, where officers found the poles cut near the base and the cameras removed. Police believe the thefts happened between July 29 and August 1, and the cameras had not been recovered as of August 4.

The eight cameras were positioned at the gateways where main roads lead into and out of the city: close to Highway 61 by Bundy Boulevard, Highway 43 by Homer Road, Highway 14 by Knopp Valley Drive, and at the junction of Highway 61 and Highway 14. Two more Flock cameras belonging to Buffalo County, mounted on the Mississippi River bridge, were taken by the same method. Each camera and pole runs about $3,000 to replace, putting the total loss at roughly $24,000, a cost that falls on the police department's budget. Winona police Sgt. Nicholas Quimby told the Star Tribune that either opposition to the cameras or a desire to sell the components for cash "are definitely possibilities as far as motive, but we haven't been able to talk to any suspects yet."

This is not an isolated event. Flock cameras have been cut down, smashed, and spray-painted in cities across the country over the past year, and reporting has put the running national tally at more than two dozen destroyed cameras across five states dating back to April 2025. Minnesota alone has seen a cluster: Duluth police reported six incidents of cameras stolen or vandalized, and Edina, Eden Prairie, and Plymouth have logged damage too. A Faribault man was recently charged with theft after a camera there went offline and was found with its cables cut. Quimby confirmed similar incidents have happened across the border in Wisconsin.

The backlash is tied to how these cameras get used after they collect data. Flock is an Atlanta company whose license plate readers are deployed at a large scale, with roughly 80,000 cameras nationwide and thousands of law enforcement agency customers. The cameras log your plate, your car's make and model, and a timestamped photo, and that record can be searched. Reporting and public records have documented federal agencies gaining access to local Flock data through various routes, and immigration enforcement lookups have been run through local departments. Flock says federal agencies were removed from its national search network in August 2025, and the company maintains that customers own and control their own data. Even so, the concern is a two-step problem: a local camera captures a plate, and a separate agency later searches that network, sometimes across state lines. That distinction is where much of the legal fight now sits, and it exposes real gaps and inconsistencies in state privacy and data-sharing law rather than any single national rule. That tension is why some city councils have canceled contracts.

Lead image by Bruxton - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145049971.