Marietta Cancels Its Flock Cameras Over Data Retention. It Was Sharing Plate Data With Cooke County.

A city 25 miles north of Gainesville shut off its license plate readers Thursday night after a Flock Safety representative told its council the company retains camera data indefinitely, and until this week that city was trading plate data with the Cooke County Sheriff's Office. The Marietta City Council voted unanimously to cancel the contract, ending a trial of five cameras that had run about three months.

The reversal came from the city's own police chief, in the middle of the meeting, after he had opened it by asking the council to keep the cameras.

Marietta, the seat of Love County, Oklahoma, sits a half-hour up Interstate 35 from Gainesville. Its council called Thursday's meeting for the single purpose of deciding whether the trial cameras would stay.

Police Chief Brett Harris made the case for keeping them. "Having an extra set of eyes to catch crime or assist in investigating that crime is definitely a benefit," Harris said, according to KXII, which covered the meeting. He said the department had worked successful cases during the trial.

Residents objected on constitutional grounds. "We are slowly losing more of our fundamental rights by consenting to these types of illegal searches and seizures," resident Jeanette Perez said. "The main issue again is the Fourth Amendment, you know, protection against unwarranted surveillance."

About an hour in, a Flock representative joined by video call to take questions. Both KXII and KTEN reported that the representative said the company retains camera data indefinitely. Harris walked to the council table, spoke with members briefly, and the council voted on the spot.

"I was not made aware, at least from Flock, that they do keep your data," Harris said. "Although our retention policy is 30 days and we no longer have access to it, they're retaining data indefinitely. That's exactly what our residents were here to complain about — that the data doesn't disappear like they say it does."

He set the limit at the term the city thought it had bought. "At the end of the day, what we're not going to support is the retention of data beyond what we ultimately agreed upon, which was the 30 day mark," Harris said. "The data is not gone, and so that's not something I'm going to support."

He told the room, per KTEN, that "Marietta city limits won't have Flock cameras," and that "this system is not for Marietta, Oklahoma." Residents applauded. Harris said the camera feeds would be shut off immediately and Flock would remove the hardware soon after, and that he would look for other technology with community support.

Marietta's police and the Cooke County sheriff were sharing plate data

The plate readers on this side of the Red River belong to the Cooke County Sheriff's Office, not to any city police department; GvilleTX's review of Gainesville's check registers turned up no plate-reader purchase by the city. The sheriff's office publishes a Flock transparency portal listing every outside agency it shares plate data with, and every agency that shares data back. GvilleTX captured that portal on Aug. 10 while reporting on the sheriff's first public statement about the program.

On that date, "Marietta OK PD" — the city police department, not the Love County Sheriff's Office, which appears on neither list — was on both. It was among the organizations granted access to Cooke County Sheriff's Office data, and among the organizations sharing their data with Cooke County. The arrangement ran in both directions.

GvilleTX captured the portal again on Saturday, two days after the vote. The word "Marietta" no longer appears anywhere on the page.

Sharing lists change routinely, and the comparison shows that: seven entries came off the list between the two captures and eleven went on, two of them renamed versions of agencies already there. Marietta's removal sits inside that ordinary movement, and the portal does not say why any entry changed. What the two captures establish is the sequence — listed on Aug. 10, a unanimous cancellation vote Thursday, a police chief saying the feeds would go dark immediately, and gone from both lists by Saturday.

Other Oklahoma agencies remain on Cooke County's lists, including Thackerville, which sits between Gainesville and Marietta, along with Ardmore and Oklahoma City.

Cooke County's retention figure is the same one Marietta rejected

The Cooke County portal reported 16 cameras, all license plate readers, and a data retention period of 30 days when GvilleTX checked it Saturday. That is the same figure Chief Harris said he could no longer rely on.

Search activity on the county's cameras eased slightly between the two captures, from 117 logged searches to 109, with hotlist hits falling from about 16,300 to about 13,300 over the preceding month. The most common stated reason for a search remained a traffic infraction, a point GvilleTX raised in August because the portal separately lists traffic violation enforcement as a prohibited use.

The Marietta vote changes nothing about Cooke County's program. The distinction Harris drew applies to any agency publishing the same number: by his account, a 30-day policy governed how long his officers could reach the data, not how long the data existed.

What Flock's written policy says

Flock's published evidence policy contradicts what its representative is reported to have said in Marietta. The policy states that the company's standard retention period is thirty calendar days from capture, that all plate-reader data is permanently deleted and irretrievable once a customer's retention period expires, and that Flock cannot restore that data in response to legal requests after deletion. The Cooke County portal carries the company's assurance that a community owns all of its own data and that the data will never be sold.

The company's own documents do describe records that outlive the window. Agencies may buy extended retention of up to a year, but only with approval from an elected official or governing body. Data pulled into a case file, exported, or shared with another agency then follows that recipient's rules rather than the original window. Neither of those is the same as retaining everything indefinitely, and neither distinction was offered publicly at the meeting in the two published accounts of it.

No public statement from Flock addressing what its representative told the Marietta council could be located. GvilleTX has not obtained an explanation from the company reconciling the two accounts and cannot say which description of its retention practice is accurate.

The timing sits close. On Aug. 13, a week before the Marietta meeting, Flock chief executive Garrett Langley announced changes that cut the company's recommended default retention from 30 days to seven, made multifactor authentication mandatory, and set end-of-year requirements for case codes on searches and automatic lockouts on accounts showing abnormal activity. Existing customers keep whatever retention their jurisdiction already approved. Cooke County's remains 30 days.

Two Oklahoma councils, one week, opposite results

Marietta was not the only Oklahoma council weighing the cameras. Two days earlier, the Oklahoma City Council voted 5-3 to renew its contract with Flock, which the city has held since 2023, according to KGOU. Ward 8 council member Mark Stonecipher was absent. Council member Camal Pennington said the arrangement should end, and council member Jo Beth Hamon criticized the company.

Oklahoma City did not renew on the old terms. The amended agreement gives the city, rather than the vendor, sole authority over whether its data goes to federal agencies. Police Chief Ron Bacy told the council the department was cutting its retention period from 30 days to seven and had turned off automatic national sharing, which he said could be switched back on for significant incidents case by case. He described a manual audit every 30 days for improper searches on top of automated checks, and said one officer had been suspended for three days for tapping the database for personal use over five months in 2024 and 2025. Bacy credited the cameras with recovering 1,280 vehicles, locating 210 missing people and assisting in 60 murder investigations.

Both councils moved on the same two settings: how long the data is kept, and who else can see it. Those are the two settings Cooke County has not publicly changed.

What is not established

Whether the Flock representative's statement was accurate remains unresolved. The record consists of the company's written policy and two consistent news accounts of what was said on the call, without the company's explanation of the difference between them.

Whether the vote caused Marietta's removal from the sharing lists is also unconfirmed. The timing fits and the chief said the feeds would be cut immediately, but the portal gives no reason for any change, and the county controls its own sharing list.

Cooke County's contract terms remain unpublished. Earlier GvilleTX reporting established $83,550 in payments to Flock Group Inc. through the county check registers, but not what the agreement says about retention. No public statement addressing whether the sheriff's office will revisit its 30-day period in light of Flock's new seven-day recommendation could be located.

Texas has no statute setting a retention limit or restricting out-of-state sharing for license plate readers. Virginia does, and a federal judge relied on it when he declined to treat Norfolk's camera network as a Fourth Amendment search. In Texas the limit is whatever an agency and its vendor agree to, which is the term Marietta's chief said he could not verify.

The Cooke County Sheriff's Office transparency portal is public, and includes the full sharing lists and a downloadable log of the past month's searches. The county's plate-reader policy, Chapter 32, took effect July 1, 2026. Earlier coverage: the contracts and payments, the sheriff's first public statement, and the technology inventory beyond Flock.