OVIEDO, Fla. - The Oviedo City Council decided to call for the imediate removal of Flock cameras during a work session meeting on Monday evening.
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“By September 30th, they [Flock cameras] will be down one way or another,” Sladek said in an interview with WDBO. “City Council, after agreeing to not fund them [Flock cameras] moving forward, did give instructions to take them down as soon as possible.”
READ: Oviedo officials set to grill Flock Safety reps during Monday meeting
The move comes after the Florida Department of Transportation announced that it is ordering agencies to remove the license plate readers from state roads, or the department will remove them itself.
“The recent exponential increase in deployments along our rodways, coupled with concering reports of misuse, data privacy concerns and surveillance schemes merit immediate action to preserve Floridians’ sovereignty and quality of life,” the FDOT memo states.
READ: FDOT orders Flock cameras removed from state rights-of-way, halts new permits
The City Council approved an agreement in September 2025 to fund the installment of eight cameras around the edges of Oviedo.
“Not everyone supported installing Flock cameras in the first place, I did not support putting them in in the first place” Sladek explained. “They did not get installed until February 2026.”
However, council started reconsidering its decision surrounding Flock cameras after a resident asked “reasonable” questions about the equipment and followed-up with city officials about her concerns.
“Here we are less than a month later with this outcome,” Sladek said. “We got to this moment all because one person was concerned enough to come in-person and express some issues with it [Flock cameras].”
Karl Bach, a representative from Flock, addressed concerns about the cameras and answered questions from council members at Monday’s meeting.
“There’s a couple of myths out there that LPRs [license plate readers] violate the 4th Amendment and they can track people and show police everywhere they go,” Bach said while presenting “Myths” and “Facts” to the City Council on Monday.
Bach also went onto explain that Flock cameras automatically erase any data at the end of a 30-day holding period.
Though Bach gave this explanation, and others like it, the council still decided to remove them from Oviedo.
“From where we started when these cameras went in to now, I feel like every meeting the information has changed on what the software does,” Deputy Mayor Natalie Teuchert said to Bach at Monday’s meeting. “Originally, we were told you can’t look back at the past 30 days, but it sounds like according to your presentation, you can. Is that correct?”
Bach then said you could look back at data beyond 30 days “or whatever the local policy is on retention.”
This was not the first time members of the Oviedo community voiced their concerns or distrust in Flock cameras.
An Oviedo man was arrested after being accused of destroying a police “bait” camera in August.
According to an arrest affidavit, several Flock Safety cameras were stolen from the Lockwood Boulevard corridor between July 23 and Aug. 3. Police responded by installing replica cameras that resembled the real devices but did not collect data.
Oviedo police then arrested 24-year-old Evan Meyer near the area after he was found destroying the decoy camera.
After the incident, Sladek said in a Facebook post that City Manager Bryan Cobb confirmed the police department installed the decoy and monitored it until someone cut it down.
“It is not okay to vandalize anything,” Sladek said when speaking about the incident. “We [City Council] did not know about it [decoy cameras], and we shouldn’t know about police operations.”
Sladek went onto say that this was not an example of entrapment because this person had an independent idea to do this on his own.
READ: Man arrested in Oviedo for smashing fake police Flock camera
Now, Sladek said that the city does not know if it can take the cameras down or if Flock has to.
“We don’t know, anybody on our side can hypothetically take them down if allowed by Flock,” Sladek said. “Our actual officers did put up the decoy cameras, but we don’t know about the real cameras.”
Sladek also said that citizens have been responding in a positive manner to the new change, despite some pushback from law enforcement
“So far, the response from citizens has been overwhelmingly positive,” Sladek said. “There are a couple of people that are retired law enforcement or pro-law enforcement who don’t see this [banning Flock cameras] as supporting our officers.”
Listen to the full conversation with Mayor Sladek here:
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