{"id":304611,"date":"2026-05-07T17:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T17:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/304611\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T17:59:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T17:59:10","slug":"flock-drones-ethics-and-the-recall-of-dave-woodward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/304611\/","title":{"rendered":"Flock drones, ethics, and the recall of Dave Woodward"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, hundreds of Oakland County residents packed a Pontiac meeting room. They came to speak against a proposal that would put surveillance drones, built by a company called Flock Safety<\/a>, into the hands of the county sheriff.<\/p>\n

Police nationwide have used Flock cameras to run thousands of immigration-related searches on behalf of ICE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Many residents did not get a chance to speak. Just before the discussion began, Commission Chair Dave Woodward held a vote to move public comment to the end of the meeting<\/a>, after the contract had already passed.<\/p>\n

When Commissioner Charlie Cavell asked for a roll call vote \u2014 to make every commissioner go on the record \u2014 Woodward denied it<\/a> and moved on.<\/p>\n

The drones were approved, 14-4.<\/p>\n

After that meeting, residents launched a campaign to recall Woodward, and by late April, petition language was approved<\/a>.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday, Woodward appealed that approval in Oakland County Circuit Court<\/a>. If a circuit judge upholds the petition language, organizers will have 60 days to gather roughly 9,000 signatures across Royal Oak, Birmingham, and parts of Troy.<\/p>\n

Woodward has called the recall \u201ca distraction.<\/a>\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss the recall effort, his business connections that have prompted ethical concerns, and whether he should have handled that April meeting differently.<\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s note: During this conversation, Woodward said some people involved in the recall campaign are advocating for political violence. The Metro reviewed the social media posts Woodward referred to. In one, a person involved in the recall effort praised Luigi Mangione \u2014 the man charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December of 2024 \u2014 calling him \u201cthe closest thing to a superhero we have.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, hundreds of Oakland County residents packed a Pontiac meeting room. They came to speak against a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[4598,468,6740,6743,28555,118504,2871,1071,118505,143,128386,145,144,37902,5285,13447,9550],"class_list":["post-304611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-birmingham","tag-civil-liberties","tag-dave-woodward","tag-ethics","tag-flock-safety","tag-i-am-oakland-county","tag-ice","tag-local-government","tag-michigan-politics","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-county-board-of-commissioners","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-public-comment","tag-royal-oak","tag-sheetz","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}