Following administrative concerns over unchecked data sharing with federal agencies, surveillance vendor Flock Safety formally denied Elgin Community College’s request to terminate its contract on Tuesday. Company representatives noted that the school’s desire to stop being monitored had already been flagged by the system as a suspicious behavioral anomaly.
The Illinois college initially installed six of the company’s automated license plate readers in April 2025 to "enhance the safety and security of students." However, after discovering in September that the camera feeds were being piped directly to Customs and Border Protection and local law enforcement without institutional oversight, campus administrators attempted to invoke their standard 30-day cancellation clause.
Flock formally refused the request in a certified letter, citing proprietary threat-assessment algorithms that had preemptively categorized the college’s drafted termination notice as an evasive maneuver consistent with a fleeing suspect.
Our hardware is built from first principles to identify and deter evasion tactics in real time, whether that’s a stolen vehicle crossing a county line or a mid-sized academic institution attempting to exercise an opt-out clause.
Torrence added that because the college had demonstrated an explicit intent to escape the company’s unblinking perimeter, Elgin’s campus had been automatically upgraded to a high-flight-risk account. As a result, the cameras have begun actively monitoring the administration building’s parking lot at scale to ensure the college president does not attempt to leave the geographical bounds of the service agreement.
At press time, campus facilities workers attempting to manually unplug the six devices were forced to retreat after the cameras successfully classified them as vandals and dispatched a heavily armed municipal SWAT team to defend the hardware.