Flock Safety Ignores City Contract Cancellations: CX Lessons for Exit Terms

What happened

Flock Safety, the vendor of automated licence-plate reading cameras used by local authorities, is failing to act on some city governments' decisions to end their contracts. Plymouth, Minnesota's city council voted in September to terminate its agreement, but Flock did not respond to the city's cancellation request, and the cameras remained in operation for more than a month afterwards.

According to The Verge, Plymouth is not an isolated case. More municipalities are moving to cancel, yet a similar number are finding that leaving the arrangement is difficult in some instances. The available reporting centres on unanswered cancellation requests, and it does not set out the full contractual mechanics behind each case.

Why it matters

For public-sector technology, the end of a contract is a service moment as significant as the start. When a council votes to stop a service and the vendor's systems keep running, the gap between a governance decision and operational reality becomes a customer experience for the officials accountable for it. This is a digital transformation issue as much as a legal one: offboarding, device deactivation and data handling need to be designed to reverse cleanly.

The case also sits within a wider market of AI-enabled, subscription-based monitoring tools sold to public bodies. Procurement teams increasingly need exit terms that are as explicit as their entry terms, including named service contacts, defined deactivation timelines and written confirmation that a system has been switched off. Whatever view one takes on the technology itself, the operational lesson holds.

The Renascence take

Most of the coverage will centre on the policy debate. The more useful signal sits in the service design, where a vendor that does not answer a cancellation has effectively treated the customer's exit as an edge case.

Most readers will focus on the surveillance debate and miss the operational signal: a vendor that does not answer a cancellation has built its service around acquisition, not exit. The behavioural principle underneath is friction asymmetry, where signing up is designed to be effortless while leaving depends on someone else's inbox. Any public body or enterprise buyer should write the off-boarding journey into the contract before signature, with named owners, service levels for deactivation and independent confirmation that the system is actually switched off.