MARYVILLE, Tenn. — Police in Maryville began using Flock Safety license plate readers in 2020, but the City Council did not vote on the system until July 2024, records show. That vote came when the city needed a state right-of-way permit for the cameras, according to an explanation by the police chief at a recent council work session. The gap has prompted questions about who authorized the surveillance system and what say residents had before it was installed. Maryville, a city south of Knoxville, has 16 Flock cameras. Resident Kyle Skeen says he encounters one whenever he leaves his neighborhood. “The power should lie with the people, and these kind of systems, it tilts the balance,” said Skeen, a former Navy intelligence analyst who moved to Maryville in 2024. The debate extends beyond Maryville. Across the country, residents and elected officials have challenged local governments’ purchases of automated license plate readers, with some systems installed before public votes or without explicit approval from councils and commissions. Flock says local agencies are responsible for following their own procurement rules. In Knox County, the dispute focused on how purchases were divided. Records show the Sheriff’s Office bought cameras in batches of $24,990 — $10 below the $25,000 threshold that required review by the county mayor’s office — as well as through split invoices, according to county officials. Then-Mayor Glenn Jacobs questioned whether the contract was valid, saying required approvals had not reached his office or the County Commission. Commissioner Larsen Jay said the repeated purchases just under the review threshold raised concerns. County Law Director David Buuck described the contract as unusually structured, saying smaller orders appeared to renew it automatically. The sheriff’s office had 143 readers operating by the time county leaders addressed the matter, and more than $250,000 in taxpayer money had been spent, Jacobs’ letter said. Flock told investigators that purchasing thresholds and approval requirements are set by each public agency’s laws and policies. Knox County later declared its contract invalid and ordered the cameras removed. After the company missed the county’s deadline, public works crews covered them. The Sheriff’s Office has since said it no longer uses fixed license plate reader systems. Maryville officials, meanwhile, have said they are gathering information. Mayor Andy White said the council wanted to hear from residents and learn more about the technology during its work session. Skeen and other residents have raised concerns about privacy and transparency at public meetings. Flock says its network includes more than 120,000 cameras and connects more than 6,000 jurisdictions. The system allows participating agencies to share access to camera data, though the company says sharing is optional. Skeen said he found that cameras in his area received an average of about 63,000 searches a day, including searches originating as far away as California. That figure is his account of activity in the system, not an independently verified count. Flock describes the cameras as recording snapshots of vehicles in public places, rather than tracking individuals. Critics argue that compiling those images into a searchable database can reveal patterns of movement and that residents have limited visibility into who searches the data or why. Questions have also been raised about vehicle exemptions. Skeen said Maryville provided records showing three license plates on a list that prevents the system from flagging them, with no expiration dates and no names attached. He said the city told him there was no formal policy governing who could be added. Maryville’s police chief said those entries were created to stop repeated false alerts caused by the system misreading similar-looking characters on license plates. Flock said this type of entry, which it calls a “suppressed hit,” is different from a separate “Safe List” feature that the company says is no longer available to law enforcement customers. The company also said some of its procurement letters mistakenly referred to an “opt-out” feature for vehicles, which it says is no longer offered to law enforcement. But records reviewed by investigators included letters from 2020 through 2026 that described such privacy controls, including documents submitted this year. The Institute for Justice has counted more than 250 communities that have canceled or declined to renew contracts with Flock. Other jurisdictions continue to use the system, arguing that it helps solve crimes. The dispute has left Maryville and other communities weighing those public-safety claims against residents’ calls for transparent purchasing, limits on data access and stronger public oversight.