The Records Problem Glenrock Built for Itself

The Glenrock Town Council met Monday night, October 26, and spent much of its time on a problem the town did not have two years ago: public records requests.

The full meeting is posted on the Town of Glenrock's YouTube channel Town Council Meeting - 10/26/2026

Town Attorney Amy Iberlin used most of her time at the table on records and how the town handles requests for them. Town Clerk Tammy Taylor told the council that until recently, a records request in Glenrock usually amounted to a piece of paper or two. Now the town is looking at building an entire records system to keep up.

Police Chief Colter Felton was not there. He was away at training. Chief Felton is the man who signed the Flock Safety contract, the administrator of the system, the department's designated auditor, and its heaviest user. After the meeting adjourned, Mayor Bruce Roumell was observed going to speak with him.

The questions our members have asked about Flock remain unanswered.

What WY4Privacy put on the table

That is about as polite an offer as a council will ever get. Nobody is asking these officials to write anything. The work is done. All they have to do is read it and vote.

Our members handed each council member a draft resolution titled "Resolution to End Glenrock's Relationship with Flock Safety and to Require Guardrails Be Adopted Prior to Any Future Use of Automatic License Plate Readers."

Alex Smith of Rolling Hills introduced it from the floor:

"Across several of these meetings I have presented constitutional, moral, and security reasons to remove the Flock cameras. In this time I continue to hear from frustrated members of our community. People perceive inaction and indifference from this council. Personally, I think you all are good people and I wanted to help you show this, so I have drafted a resolution for your consideration."

That is about as polite an offer as a council will ever get. Nobody is asking these officials to write anything. The work is done. All they have to do is read it and vote.

What the resolution would do

In plain terms, the resolution asks the town to do four things.

End the Flock contract by every legal means available, ideally within four weeks of passing the resolution.

Stop every town agency and employee from using Flock cameras and the Flock database immediately.

Order Flock to pull its cameras within two weeks. If the company does not, the town removes them itself and sends Flock the bill for removal and storage.

Refuse any future license plate reader contract with any company until the town holds a public hearing, decides openly whether it wants these cameras at all, and writes firm limits on how they are used, who the data is shared with, and how long it is kept.

That last part matters most. It does not ban anything forever. It says the people of Glenrock get a say before the town buys surveillance, not after.

Checking the resolution against the record

The resolution makes a series of claims about Flock as a company. Several of them can be checked against Glenrock's own paperwork and against reporting from around the country.

The resolution says Flock's contracts give the company a perpetual, royalty-free license to use the data its customers collect. Glenrock's own Master Services Agreement, obtained through a Wyoming Public Records Act request, says exactly that. Section 4.3 grants Flock a perpetual, worldwide license to use Town data, including to train its artificial intelligence. Put simply, the pictures of your truck driving down Birch Street are not only the town's. Flock gets to keep using them, forever, anywhere in the world.

The resolution says Flock's system accepted "hehehe" as a reason for a search. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, reviewed Flock search logs from departments across the country and found officers entering reasons like "LOL," "LMAO," "Hehe," "idk," and keyboard gibberish before searching tens of thousands of cameras at once. Flock later replaced the free-text box with a dropdown menu. A dropdown does not prove the reason is true. It only makes the excuse look neater.

The resolution says Ring, the Amazon-owned doorbell camera company, ended its relationship with Flock in February 2026. That is accurate. Ring canceled its planned integration with Flock on February 12, 2026. Ring's official explanation was that the project would take more time and resources than expected. It came days after a public backlash over Ring's Super Bowl ad and fears that doorbell footage could flow into Flock's network. When a company in the home surveillance business decides Flock is more trouble than it is worth, that tells you something.

Why the records requests exist

One of our members told the council what the whole room already knew. The flood of records requests, the attorney's time, the clerk's workload, and the new records system the town is now considering all trace back to one thing: a camera system built to watch everyone.

Think about how this works. Flock cameras photograph every vehicle that passes, not just suspects. Every search an officer runs is supposed to be logged with a reason, and Glenrock's own policy requires it. The only way a resident can find out whether those searches were proper is to ask for the logs.

When residents did ask, here is what came back. Glenrock's 74-page records production shows 375 searches over twenty months. Only five case numbers appear, and all five belong to a single case. About 98 searches are labeled only "Test" or "Training." On December 8, 2025, Chief Felton ran two hit-and-run searches and then 48 more labeled "Test." Six of those filtered for the same vehicle make. No audit document appears anywhere in the production, even though the chief is the designated auditor.

The records are posted in our public source folder so anyone can check them: public source folder

When the system's own paperwork cannot answer basic questions, people keep asking. That is not harassment. That is what the public records law is for.

The Fourth Amendment is a negative right

This is the point the council needs to sit with.

the cheapest way to honor [the Fourth Amendment] is to simply not do the thing. A town that does not run a mass location tracking system does not need an auditor for that system. It does not need a records system to handle requests about it. It does not need its attorney spending council meetings explaining how to manage the fallout.

The Fourth Amendment says the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures "shall not be violated." It does not order the government to build anything, buy anything, or run any program. It is a negative right. It tells the government what it may not do.

That means the cheapest way to honor it is to simply not do the thing. A town that does not run a mass location tracking system does not need an auditor for that system. It does not need a records system to handle requests about it. It does not need its attorney spending council meetings explaining how to manage the fallout.

The Supreme Court has been moving in this direction for years. In Carpenter v. United States in 2018, the Court held that police generally need a warrant to collect a person's long-term cell phone location history, because a record of everywhere you go reveals your whole life. Flock builds that same kind of record from license plates, without a warrant, and keeps it in the hands of a private company. Wyoming's own constitution goes further than the federal one. Article 1, Section 4 requires a warrant to be supported by affidavit, a sworn written statement, not a dropdown menu.

Without Flock, there would be none of these problems and none of this expense.

Glenrock is not the only town paying this bill

Across the country, towns are learning the same lesson.

In Wenatchee, Washington, police shut their Flock cameras off late last year on advice from their lawyers, partly because Flock data counts as a public record and the department faced requests officials said could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fill.

In Texas, North Richland Hills issued a public records invoice reported at $2 million for Flock records. A Houston television station was quoted $121,000 for Flock records, even though smaller departments handed over thousands of similar pages for free.

Look closely at what happens next in those places. A town that keeps the cameras has two choices. It can spend taxpayer money to be transparent, or it can charge residents huge fees to see what the government is doing with their location data. The first costs you money. The second costs you something worse.

Why the First Amendment is in this too

Records requests are not paperwork for its own sake. They are how ordinary people and the press keep watch over the government. The First Amendment protects the freedom of the press and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Asking for the logs, standing up at the podium, and handing the council a written resolution are all of those rights at work.

When a town answers that kind of scrutiny with price tags, delays, or silence, it puts a cost on citizenship itself.

There is a second First Amendment problem. A camera network that logs every car does not care where you are going. It logs the trip to church, to a protest, to a lawyer's office, to a newspaper, to a political meeting. People who know they are being tracked behave differently. They go to fewer places. They speak less. Courts call that a chilling effect, and it does not require anyone to be arrested to do its damage.

What Glenrock residents should be watching

If the town builds a new records system, residents are paying for it. That cost belongs in the same column as the Flock invoices, because it would not exist without them.

The council now has a finished resolution in hand. Whether it ever appears on an agenda is up to them.

The chief has still not answered the questions about December 8, the "Test" searches, or the missing audit.

One promise

WY4Privacy member and independent journalist John Gallaway put it this way:

"The records requests will continue until the protection of our rights improves. Not as a threat, and not even from me. This is the nature of putting so much power in the hands of an individual or a small group of individuals to violate the rights of Americans."