The Cookeville City Council approved a two-year contract with surveillance company Flock Safety to maintain a network of automatic license plate readers despite a wave of public opposition during a meeting Thursday.
Mayor Chad Gilbert said the council did not take the decision lightly but ultimately determined the technology provides a significant benefit to community safety. Gilbert said the system magnifies the ability of the police department to locate missing children or suspects more effectively than manual patrols alone.
“The way it’s been explained to me that it’s constitutional and the way that our the data that is are just snapshots of license plates, no different than you see when you drive down the road and people have have chosen to put their license plate out there,” Gilbert said. “The camera takes a picture of it and then it purges it.”
The approved $60,000 contract consolidates two existing agreements for 10 cameras into a single two-year lease. Police Chief Scott Winfree said the department follows strict general orders that restrict the use of the system to public safety missions and require audits of officer searches.
“Our cameras only take still pictures of a vehicle and the license plate,” Winfree said. “There is no video that’s taken by these cameras and we do not take pictures of people.”
Dozens of residents attended the meeting to voice concerns regarding privacy, data security, and the potential for government overreach. Resident Austin Fife said the council should reject the contract because it entrusts sensitive location data to a private company with a record of mishandling information in other cities.
“The question is not simply whether Flock can help solve crimes, it is whether Cookeville will hand a private surveillance company the power to turn ordinary people’s routine movements into a searchable record,” Fife said. “That is that is time. That is not another police tool, it’s an invasive, intrusive surveillance system.”
Other speakers questioned the accuracy of the technology and the psychological impact of constant monitoring. Resident Ryan Moore said his own audit of publicly available police search logs showed that the vast majority of searches conducted by the department lacked specific case numbers or clear justifications.
“Of the 8,789 searches that are publicly available, only 106 of them had case numbers associated with them,” Moore said. “Prior to December 29th, 2025, the majority of search justifications only had abbreviations such as INV, F, or even just the letter E.”
City Attorney Danny Rader said that while the topic is passionate, courts have uniformly held that such surveillance is constitutional based on the lack of an expectation of privacy in public spaces. Rader said the city would respond if any future court rulings determined the technology violated constitutional rights.
“People have challenged it both as people who’ve been arrested and the evidence was used against them at their trial and they’ve moved to suppress it as you would unconstitutionally obtained evidence, and they’ve lost, the courts have held that it’s constitutional,” Rader said.
Vice Mayor Luke Eldridge said the technology has already proven its worth locally by helping authorities locate missing persons and individuals with dementia. Eldridge said that while there are risks to any technology, the benefits to the community outweigh the potential downsides.
“I feel comfortable moving forward and going on,” Eldridge said. “But if you want to talk with me afterwards, I will be here all night.”
The council voted 4-0 to approve the contract renewal.
