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Someone cut down two more Flock Safety cameras in Yakima this month, bringing to three the number of city-owned license-plate readers knocked offline in about six weeks — the latest sign that the county’s fast-growing surveillance network is running into just as fast a backlash on the ground.
Yakima police said the newest pair went dark at 66th Avenue and Englewood Avenue and on Summitview Avenue between 94th and 96th Avenue, according to a report published Sept. 21 by NBC Right Now. Officers are now leaning on Flock’s camera-health portal to catch outages faster; the damaged units were retrieved and are expected to be replaced.
The vandalism isn’t confined to city limits. Yakima County Sheriff Robert Udell told reporters the county has lost five to six of its own cameras to similar damage. Udell was careful to frame it as property crime, not protest: “This is criminal activity,” he said, distancing the incidents from the national “DeFlock” movement that has organized against the automated license-plate readers in cities from Bellevue to Wichita.
Whether protest-driven or not, the timing lands squarely on top of the county’s biggest bet yet on the technology. Yakima County commissioners this year approved a two-year pilot adding 150 live-feed Flock cameras countywide at a projected cost of $2 million — on top of the roughly 50 to 70 cameras the county already had in place, and separate from the city of Yakima’s own network. Commissioner LaDon Linde told NBC Right Now he backed the expansion because he’d seen the investigative payoff firsthand, while acknowledging the privacy questions it raises.
Yakima police, for their part, point to a track record they say justifies the network: the department reports its cameras have supported 688 investigations since the system was installed in 2022, including 392 stolen-vehicle recoveries and 11 homicide cases, plus hit-and-runs, assaults, robberies and fraud, according to figures cited by The Center Square. County deputies used the cameras as recently as last week to track down a hit-and-run driver who’d falsely reported his own vehicle stolen to cover his tracks.
But the same reporting that documents those wins has also aired residents’ complaints that the county’s public-facing Flock Transparency portal doesn’t clearly show how many cameras are deployed, where they sit, or which outside agencies can pull data from them. Advocates quoted by NBC Right Now argued the decision to blanket the county in license-plate readers was significant enough that it should have gone to voters — that anything short of a ballot measure was, in their view, unacceptable. Washington’s newer state privacy law does limit how long agencies can retain Flock data and restricts access tied to sensitive locations, protections the ACLU of Washington has called unusually strong compared with other states, but critics say the guardrails don’t answer the local question of who, exactly, is watching Yakima’s roads.
That question is likely to keep coming back. The city’s cameras were vandalized once in the weeks before this month’s incidents, with repair or replacement of a single unit estimated at roughly $2,000 — a small line item next to the county’s $2 million pilot, but one that adds up unit by unit if the cutting continues. Neither the sheriff’s office nor Yakima police has announced an arrest in any of the camera-tampering cases so far, and neither agency has said whether the cameras themselves — devices built to read license plates — captured any usable images of whoever did the cutting.
For now, the county’s 150-camera rollout continues on the timeline commissioners approved, with the two-year pilot meant to answer, county officials have said, whether the system proves its worth enough to become permanent. Residents who want to see what the transparency portal currently discloses can find it at yakimacounty.us/3140/Flock-Transparency. The next test of how the debate is landing with the public will likely come whenever county commissioners next take it up in a public meeting — no date for that has yet been announced.
Sources: NBC Right Now, The Center Square, NBC Right Now
