Part 2 - Flock Cameras and the Surveillance Network Around Mableton
Part 2 of 2 — Who's Watching the Watchers? Mableton's Surveillance Cameras Have No Local Owner
By Stephanie Hanlon
Drive Veterans Memorial Highway near Maxham Road, pass through the Oakdale neighborhood, or head south on Mableton Parkway toward the Chattahoochee, and there's a good chance a camera has already logged your license plate, your car's make and color, and the exact minute you passed.
There were only a handful of Flock automated license plate readers in Georgia in 2024 with the number soaring to nearly 10K and counting daily.
As Part 1 of this series laid out, only about 40 of them in Mableton are directly owned and operated by Cobb County Police, the agency currently providing law enforcement to Mableton under a contract running through May 2027. It is unclear how many there are that belong to HOAs, businesses, and other public or private parties.
That leaves a basic question: who in Mableton is actually accountable for the cameras residents are living under?
After three rounds of questions to the city over more than a week, the honest answer appears to be: no one yet.
What the city will and won't say
Mayor Michael Owens, through spokesperson Justin Barr, said the cameras in Mableton "are not deployments by the City of Mableton." Some are tied to Cobb County law enforcement, others to private property owners.
The city, Owens said, "has not undertaken an inventory of privately owned surveillance systems throughout Mableton, nor has the City established or authorized a municipal FLOCK/ALPR deployment program" — and has had no discussions with Cobb County or Flock about deploying its own.
Asked directly whether the city had ever been given access to the cameras already operating within its limits, how many exist in each category (police, HOA, business), or whether officials had thoughts on where cameras are currently clustered versus absent, the response redirected the questions to Cobb County.
Asked whether the city's incoming public safety leadership — including Dr. Kerry Stallings, who previously worked within the University System of Georgia, a system that has documented at least one case of Flock misuse of its own — could speak to his personal experience with the technology, Owens said it "would not be appropriate" for Stallings to offer a personal assessment of technology "currently deployed by another governmental entity or by private parties."
Owens did commit to one standard going forward: when the city does consider its own surveillance technology, he said, the community "should expect us to explain what problem we are trying to solve... what information it collects, who can access it, how it is protected, how long it is retained, and what safeguards and accountability mechanisms are in place" — a promise of transparency for a decision that, by the city's own account, hasn't been made yet and has no timeline attached.
The view from inside government
Mableton City Council Member for District 5, T.J. Ferguson said the local government is still catching up to a technology already deployed at scale around it. "We're flying the AI ship as it's being built," he said.
Ferguson didn't dispute that the tool is useful — "being able to use license plate readers is critical," he said. "It's necessary for policing but it needs to be done properly, in a more secure way." What worries him is how far ahead of policy the technology has moved.
"Technology is necessary but it has to be perfected," he said. "Technology in general is scary for people. We have to put safeguards in place."
Asked how much surveillance is too much, he didn't offer a number but said: "Simply having to ask that question says it's too much."
He was most pointed on who currently owns the data Mableton residents are generating. "That is a flaw in the contracting," he said of Flock's model, where the company itself owns the underlying technology. "We need to own our data." He argued the fix belongs above the local level entirely: "It has to start somewhere, it should start at the federal level and trickle down to the states. There is a lot of crossing lines, so it has to start at the federal level. You start with the money."
Looking back at how the county got here, Ferguson was candid about the pace of adoption: "I don't think it was fully understood what was being purchased... whether Cobb County jumped the gun on leveraging this technology."
He also connected the dots between local cameras and the broader AI infrastructure buildout discussed in Part 1, confirming "there is a connection" between surveillance expansion and data center capacity, and he framed his own preference for the technology's limits in blunt terms: "I should be able to take images, then process that image... and then delete the image."
On what happens once Mableton stands up its own department, Ferguson described current thinking inside the city: "We are 100% gonna look at having technology in place to help officers do their job better," pointing to incoming leadership with a cybersecurity background. "If it doesn't exist, we go ahead and flex the muscle of being a city," he said, adding that the working position is that the city would own any data it collects going forward — but that the roughly 40 Cobb-owned cameras already inside city limits are a separate problem: "that would have to be a negotiation with Cobb County."
He was direct about why the issue matters to him personally, not just as a council member: "I live in this city as well, so the things we do, I'm 100% thinking about myself, my family, and also the city, so I'm not gonna do anything that puts us in jeopardy."
The view from outside government
Mableton resident Matthew Nicholson put the underlying worry in plainer terms: "I think Flock cameras are a risk to the privacy of the residents of Mableton, in short, and there is not enough oversight and too much potential for abuse... I don't like the idea of being watched all the time and I don't want to live like that."
Nicholson pointed to the same structural issue Part 1 raised — that Flock employees, and other agencies inside Flock's data-sharing network, aren't bound by the same rules as local police, and that the technology's constitutionality remains genuinely contested rather than settled.
What's actually at stake by 2027
Strip away the statements, and the timeline is what matters: Cobb provides Mableton's policing, and by extension controls most of Mableton's police-owned camera network, only through May 2027.
Whatever data-ownership and camera-transfer arrangement gets negotiated between now and then — or doesn't — will determine who controls the surveillance of Mableton residents once the city's own department stands up. Right now, by every official account gathered for this story, that negotiation hasn't started, no inventory of the non-Cobb cameras exists, and Mableton residents have not been asked what they want that arrangement to look like.
Good insights to understand how this technology is being used