CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – The City of Charlottesville will not resume use of the Flock camera system, City Manager Sam Sanders announced during a council meeting Monday.

City Councilor Lloyd Snook told WINA Morning News that Sanders and City Police Chief Michael Kochis made the decision to cease Flock camera use after the pilot program expired in October after input from various City Councilors.

“The concern is always if you give that kind of information to the government, or make it subpoena-able by the government, or in some cases simply the government says, ‘Give us a back door into your data base and we’ll use it in real time,’ that that’s just giving the government too much power,” Snook said during an appearance on WINA’s Morning News.

Snook said Council never met as a whole, but Snook and Kochis told Morning News there were conversations with various councilors over the past few months where concerns were expressed any accumulated data from these systems could be used toward a federal government construction of a national data base.

“There are really two companies, one’s Palantir and the other Peregrine, which is an offshoot of Palantir, that seem to be developing techniques for synthesizing literally millions of data points about millions of people,” Snook said. “We don’t need that kind of centralization of the data.”

Last spring, the city had started installing Peregrine for a pilot program for police department data organization.

In June, Kochis announced the pause of the Peregrine pilot, for which City Council had previously approved a $150,000 grant.

Kochis had advocated using Peregrine because there are numerous inquiries for information CPD either cannot provide, or it’s very labor intensive to provide, because there is currently no integrated data systems.

An example he’s used is being asked how many crashes in the city involves bikes.

Also in June, Kochis disconnected Charlottesville’s Flock cameras from access with other localities out of concern the city’s camera data is left vulnerable in localities who have working agreements with ICE that Charlottesville doesn’t have.

While Snook said the City Manager and Police Chief made the decision to not continue the Flock cameras, Kochis did not indicate on Morning News that he was involved in that ultimate decision.

“I knew that was coming,” Kochis said saying he’d spoken with council members in great detail about the program over the last several months.

Kochis said he met with community members extensively who expressed support for the program the way Charlottesville Police was doing it.

“You know whether the Rose Hill, 10th & Page, Fifeville, Venable, met with a lot of groups, and went over what the pilot did and the results of it and I’ll tell you the feedback I got was overwhelmingly in support of it, but mostly because of how we did the program,” Kochis said.

He said the conversations he had with councilors were thoughtful, “They are thoughtful individuals, every one of them, they were all very respectful, they care about public safety, but there are other outside influences that they are concerned with.”

Kochis speaking of this program before has said Council is the ultimate decision maker because they hold the purse strings.

“It’s our form of government, right? And so I respect their decision and ultimately we’ll move forward and do the hard work of trying to solve cases.”

Nonetheless, he said the one piece he’s working through now is, “Cops, the folks in our organization are like ‘geez, we did everything they asked us to do and we did it right… why?”

In fact, Kochis said, “Not only did we have the most restrictive policy in the Commonwealth, and it still worked, we were looked at in the Commonwealth as a model.”

“And the PCOB (Police Civilian Oversight Board) executive director actually wrote a letter reporting from their random audits of the pilot that they found not one case of misuse, and that they found no concerning trend.”

The City Manager told Council Monday night, “There has been a request for a technology work session so we can dig into how systems like this and other things are becoming a part of the normal use in law enforcement activities around the country, and we need to have more discussions about that.”

But Sanders said they will not continue the use of the Flock programs and the cameras are being removed.

“It’s not the only system, which is why we’re interested in having the technology conversation.”

Sanders noted the technology work session will be in the schedule for the upcoming work sessions for 2026 that councilors will receive.