What the Rolling Hills mayor fears is already in Glenrock's logs

Mayor Jon O. Maines warned about tracking, self-graded audits and the wrong person holding the keys. Glenrock's records show all three.

Jon O. Maines knows what surveillance looks like when it goes too far. He described it plainly: systems so detailed "they can see that you went to the store and then you went to the church and then you went to the school." He named Oakland, Minneapolis and Baltimore. Glenrock's cameras are different, he said. Those "are just getting a read."

A few minutes earlier, the mayor of Rolling Hills had explained what the camera in his town is for. If police know a car was in Glenrock and now is not, the Rolling Hills camera shows which way it went. "Did they keep going to Gillette or did they turn and head out toward the mine?"

That is the thing he warned about, drawn on a smaller map.

Maines joined Alex Smith of WY4Privacy for a recorded interview, speaking for himself and not his council. He does not want to take a working tool from police. But he also said this: "I'm not completely opposed to it, but I'd really like to see the guard rails on that."

He answered the questions, which is more than Glenrock's mayor or police chief have done. Nearly every concern he raised can be checked against Glenrock's own records.

Rolling Hills pays for a system it does not run

Glenrock police operate five Flock cameras, four in Glenrock and one in Rolling Hills, according to WyoFile and partner papers. Rolling Hills pays Glenrock $73,745 a year for police service (Ordinance No. 749, GLENROCK_00027).

Maines said Rolling Hills "does have a say in the one that we have." That say is whether the camera stands. Everything after that belongs to Glenrock, whose chief signed the contract, approved the policy, decides who searches and is responsible for checking the searches. Rolling Hills residents cannot vote for Glenrock's council. Their camera's images live under rules they have no ballot to change.

Smith pressed from the other side. One rolling 30-day count showed 16,897 vehicles identified and seven searches, in two towns with about 3,000 residents. Most of those drivers vote in neither place. Should they get a say?

Maines said no. That "really starts getting into a slippery slope," he said. The fix belongs in the Legislature. He is right. The only elected body answerable to everyone in that database sits in Cheyenne.

"It wasn't just for everybody"

When Rolling Hills weighed its camera, Maines said, the council's main concern "was who was going to have access to that information." What settled it was that police would hold the data, "and that it wasn't just for everybody."

Right question. The contract answers it differently.

The town grants Flock an irrevocable, worldwide license to use its data (Section 4.1, GLENROCK_00006). Flock also holds a perpetual right to use and distribute "anonymized" data, including to train machine learning systems and for other Flock products (Section 4.3, GLENROCK_00007). Perpetual means it outlives the contract. And Flock may give footage to law enforcement, government officials or third parties when the law requires it or when Flock decides in good faith that it is reasonably necessary (Section 5.3, GLENROCK_00008 to 00009). No warrant, no approval from the town, no notice to it.

Access runs outward, too. Scottsbluff, Nebraska police list Glenrock WY PD among the "organizations granted access" to their data, and in November 2025 a string of Glenrock drug searches each reached 6,281 separate camera networks (GLENROCK_00056).

Maines drew his own line in the interview. If "there's going to be huge risks and it's just wide open data," he said, "we don't want to go that far either."

The contract went that far before Rolling Hills ever voted.

The horses

Asked whether cameras that flagged only AMBER alerts and stolen cars would be enough, Maines brought up the horses whose tails were cut from past the airport through Rolling Hills toward Douglas. It would have helped, he said, to have something that let police ask, "Okay, what's out of place here?" Nobody knew what the culprit drove, so answering that takes a stored record of every car that passed. That is the line between a plate reader and a dragnet. A warrant naming one camera and one window of time would have covered that case, with a judge signing first.

Five cameras, one closed ring

"These cameras don't ever give anybody a ticket," Maines said. True. But the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches, not tickets, and what matters is what the record holds.

The man who runs the cameras describes something larger than "a read." In July, Chief Colter Felton told Cowboy State Daily his department has cameras at every entrance to town. "I will tell you our cameras are strategically placed, so we'll know simply if a vehicle comes out or into Glenrock," he said.

In a city, one camera catches a sliver of traffic headed a hundred directions. Glenrock has about 2,400 people and Rolling Hills about 400. Cameras on every entrance stop being a sample. They become a gate log: every trip in and out, with date, time, direction and a photo of the vehicle.

None of this is secret. Four of the five cameras are on DeFlock, the volunteer map of plate readers, and all five can be driven to in about 15 minutes. Yet asked in a records request for camera locations, the town pointed to Flock's website instead.

A small town makes this worse, not better. In Casper, a car passing a camera at 6:50 on a Monday could be headed anywhere. In Glenrock there are only so many places to be at 6:50 on a Monday. The cameras cannot see inside the car. They do not need to. In a town this size, the car is the person, and the clock does the rest.

Consider an ordinary week. A Rolling Hills family drives into Glenrock a few minutes before Sunday service and heads home 90 minutes later. A handful of cars roll in just before the Monday council meeting where residents speak against the cameras. One car arrives every Thursday evening in time for a recovery meeting. Two vehicles leave town a few minutes apart several evenings a month, both toward the power plant, and come back an hour later.

Nobody there did anything wrong. Every one of those patterns sits in a searchable file.

The town bought the tool for those exact questions. Time and Location Based Search lets an officer pick a place and a window and pull up every vehicle that passed, no plate number needed (GLENROCK_00022). Vehicle Fingerprint Search finds cars by color, bumper stickers and roof racks.

That is the First Amendment problem, and the mayor named it when he said the church. Worship, assembly and petitioning government all require going somewhere. When showing up leaves a timestamp, some people stop showing up. Glenrock's policy forbids using the system to discourage those rights (Section F.2.c, GLENROCK_00039), but that governs how records get used, not who gets recorded on the way in.

What Easter 2020 would look like now

On Good Friday 2020, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced that state police would record the license plates of anyone attending a mass gathering over Easter weekend so health departments could order 14-day quarantines. That Sunday, troopers stood in the lot of Maryville Baptist Church and wrote down the plates of roughly 50 cars. The notices they left under the wipers read, in part, "This vehicle's presence at this location indicates that its occupants are present at a mass gathering prohibited by Orders of the Governor."

A parked car was treated as proof of who was inside the church. It also took troopers in a church lot, in daylight, in front of witnesses and reporters. Being visible is what made it controversial enough to stop.

Wyoming took a lighter hand in 2020. That restraint was a choice by the people in office then, not a limit built into anything.

Run Easter 2020 again with what Glenrock has now. No trooper, no notice, nothing to see. The cameras at every entrance already logged the plates, and the question gets asked later, from a desk. There is no moment to object because there is nothing to watch.

The mayor's answer is that he trusts the people holding the keys. That was the answer in Kentucky, too, right up until the order came down.

Good faith is all anyone has

Smith told Maines that records requests suggest the usage policy is not being followed. "I don't have a full understanding of what their internal policies are," Maines said. "I take 'em in good faith on that."

Glenrock's policy requires a permanent audit trail, with every search recording a justification that includes a case number (Section D.1.f, GLENROCK_00036). Twenty months of logs show at least 375 searches. Five carry a case number, the same one all five times. No audit report appears anywhere in the town's 74-page production.

The chief approved the policy, is its administrator, is responsible for the audits and shows up in the logs running searches. Councilman Russ Dalgarn said this month he did not know how many audits had been done or by whom.

So good faith is the only option the arrangement leaves the mayor. His conversations on the subject, he said, have been with "Colter and then Jase and Amy." Colter is Chief Felton. Amy Iberlin is Glenrock's town attorney and a partner at Williams, Porter, Day and Neville in Casper. Rolling Hills' minutes list its town attorney as Madsen, and Jase Madsen works at that same firm.

Maines said "most of the loud noise is hyperbole." The records cure that. Every page cited here is posted at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1loQZbIZspWglP0jocll-ZrAHGL3TaCOX

The checker cannot be a user

Maines said, "I don't think I'm the one qualified to be doing those audits." He would rather see "some kind of contract with the sheriff's department for them to be able to look."

That would be the Converse County Sheriff's Office, and it would just move the problem next door. The sheriff works the same county, the same prosecutor and the same roads, and the mayor's own example of the cameras' value, a stolen orange tractor, came from the sheriff's office. Whoever reads the log should be someone who never uses the data.

Even then, an audit only reads what someone chose to write down, after the fact. In Norfolk, Virginia, according to a brief in the federal appeal there, nobody reviewed the logs until the system had been searched more than 230,000 times.

A warrant is an audit that happens first, by a judge with no stake in the case. Wyoming's Constitution already demands one "supported by affidavit" (Article 1, Section 4).

The oath, and the lawmen who said no

The mayor's deepest worry is who comes later. "You never know when you're going to get that person that runs specifically on an agenda," he said. He would rather police hold the access, because officers have "at least taken an oath, there's a little bit of teeth to that."

He is right that a system must be built for the worst person who will ever hold the password. That is the strongest argument for guardrails in this fight, and it came from a mayor who wants to keep the cameras.

But the oath has not held. The Institute for Justice has identified dozens of officers accused of using plate reader data to track romantic interests. In Braselton, Georgia, it was the police chief. That is about the office, not Felton. Glenrock's policy hangs every key on one ring, and whoever sits in that chair next inherits all of them.

Two lawmen read the oath the other way. Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak turned Flock down over Fourth Amendment concerns. "I have no plan to deploy them in the future," he said. Arizona's Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple praised his cameras, then dropped them this August. "I have serious Fourth Amendment concerns with some of the technology contained in those cameras," he said, "whether we have access to it or not."

Whether we have access to it or not. What the local department switches on does not settle what the system collects, keeps and can reach.

The courts

No court has yet ruled Flock cameras unconstitutional. The national test, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, goes to the Fourth Circuit in December. Norfolk won at trial because its 176 cameras, spread across 200,000 people, left gaps. Glenrock's ring around 2,400 people has none, and it keeps images longer. And in June the Supreme Court held in Chatrie v. United States that pulling location data from a company's database is a search, no matter how small the slice. Glenrock's defense is how few searches it runs. Under Chatrie, the database is the question, not the size of the bite.

Where the mayor lands

Maines called the local fight "really small fish." He wants a state law, starting with the Wyoming Association of Municipalities.

Maines called the local fight "really small fish." He wants a state law, starting with the Wyoming Association of Municipalities. He named the hard part, picking up a point Smith had raised: in a true AMBER alert, how do police "get the look, and then go in afterwards and say that's what we were doing, but we had to work fast."

That is nearly WY4Privacy's position word for word: up to 72 hours to search in a documented emergency, with a sworn affidavit to a judge afterward. Everything else waits for a warrant. A legislative committee is already drafting a plate reader bill, and Glenrock's own representative, Kevin Campbell, has said he opposes the system.

Maines wants a tool police can use without leaving people "looking over their shoulders." A warrant requirement is how Wyoming gets both.

What I am doing

If Mayor Maines or the Rolling Hills council want to respond to anything here, I will publish the response in full and unedited, and I reserve the right to comment on it.

The Rolling Hills council members are Lori Cielinski, Jody Ettles, Ken Montgomery and Donna Weaver. The council meets the first and third Tuesday of each month at 7 p.m. at the town hall, 38 S. Badger Road. The area's legislators are Sen. Brian Boner and Rep. Kevin Campbell. Contact information for all of them is on the letter page at wy4privacy.org.

Nobody is counting. If you can be in the room at one of those meetings, that is enough.

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