St. Petersburg has 50 Flock Safety cameras reading license plates on its roads. Until this month, almost nobody at City Hall had talked about them in public.

That changed after Tuesday’s Primary. Charlie Crist led with more than 35% of the vote to Mayor Ken Welch‘s less than 21%, and the two are headed to a November runoff in which the cameras have become one of the first points of disagreement.

Crist wants a moratorium on any expansion of the program until the city knows what police are doing with it. He has also said he wants to meet with Police Chief Anthony Holloway.

“I have a concern about Flock cameras,” Crist told Bay News 9. “I think we ought to have a moratorium on them until we really understand comprehensively what they’re used for.”

Welch called that “knee jerk political theater that we do not need.” He said the city has privacy protections in place and that the cameras are “helping us track down people that make us less safe as a community.”

“If there’s a strong enough argument that it’s such an invasion, then we can take it down,” Welch said. “I haven’t seen that.”

There is a reason he hasn’t. Nobody was ever asked.

As I reported Aug. 2, the program started in 2022 as a 25-camera “test and evaluation” giveaway from Flock, run through the Police Department under Welch’s administration. No elected official voted on it. The words “Flock” and “ALPR” do not appear in the 2022 or 2023 City Council minutes.

The paid contract came up in January 2024, a five-year, $730,250 deal to double the network to 50 cameras. It went on the consent agenda and passed with no questions from Council and no public comment.

Opposition has been building since. The Tampa Bay Times’ Justin Garcia and Shreya Vuttaluru report that about 120 people showed up to the first DeFlock St. Pete meeting at the Obama Main Library on Aug. 15. The room was full 10 minutes before it began.

The Times also surveyed 21 area law enforcement agencies. St. Pete police said about a third of the department’s 567 officers can search a database covering 1,039 agencies nationwide. The department would not release its search logs, citing a security exemption in state law.

Other governments are backing away. Palm Bay has suspended its cameras. Pasco County is switching vendors. Leon County scrapped a $440,000 Flock purchase without a dissenting vote.

The issue has reached the Governor’s race, too. U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds has called for a “full pause” on the cameras and said Florida “will not become a surveillance state.”

The pushback isn’t coming only from the other side of the ballot. Andy Oliver, the Allendale United Methodist pastor who was among Welch’s most vocal allies in 2021, posted six arguments against the cameras on Facebook last week, pointedly answering the Mayor’s claim that he hasn’t heard one. Oliver’s list runs from the location records Flock keeps on people suspected of nothing to the risk that St. Pete’s data ends up feeding federal immigration enforcement. “In a free society, ‘Does this make it easier for police to solve crimes?’ is the beginning of the conversation — not the end of it,” Oliver wrote. As for the Mayor: “I’m not holding my breath waiting for Mayor Welch to start listening. Why would he start now?”

In St. Pete, the next step comes Thursday. City Council Vice Chair Richie Floyd has put Flock on the Aug. 27 agenda and is asking for a referral to the Public Services and Infrastructure Committee to review the contract and how the cameras are used. It would be the first public discussion of the program since the cameras went up.

Flock is not the only place where the two candidates differ on this kind of question. Crist has called for a one-year moratorium on data centers in the city. Welch has not said where he stands.

Welch’s support for the cameras (and his relative silence on data centers being built in the city) are shaping up as a stark contrast to Crist, who has changed parties more than once but has always come back to the same idea: people should be left alone by their government whenever possible.

A camera that reads every plate that passes is a hard thing to square with that. Welch is about to find out how many voters agree.

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Ed. note: Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee backing Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.