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Miami, Florida - Who watches the Flock surveillance cameras in Miami-Dade County? The county government received a free surveillance pilot in 2022. The County's own rules said someone would check whether it worked. Four years later, nobody outside county government ever has.
Seven Flock Safety surveillance cameras are still reading license plates across Miami-Dade County. They were supposed to be a 12-month experiment. Nobody can produce the report that was supposed to end it. That gap — between what the county promised and what it can show — is this story. Not a conspiracy. A paper trail that stops at our county government.
The Resolution
The Miami-Dade Police Department wasn't yet the Sheriff's Office in October 2022. It answered to a County Manager and the County Mayor, the way Dade County's police had since voters abolished an elected Sheriff in 1966 after a corruption scandal. A 2018 constitutional amendment eventually forced every Florida county to elect its Sheriff again; Miami-Dade County didn't hold that election until November 2024.
Into that pre-election gap came Resolution R-997-22, adopted October 18, 2022 — sponsored by Commissioner Sally Heyman, co-sponsored by fellow Commissioner Javier Souto, an ex-State Senator, and signed by County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. It gave MDPD 25 solar-powered Flock surveillance cameras, free, for a year-long trial, plus a data-sharing agreement routing access through the Panama City Beach Police Department — a small Panhandle agency that, on paper, opened MDPD's cameras to a nationwide search network far bigger than 25 units.
One line in that Resolution mattered more than the rest: "Major George Perera, of the MDPD's Professional Compliance Bureau, will track and monitor both Agreements." Not the County's independent Inspector General. Not a civilian board. The department watching itself — specifically, the officer who ran the unit most invested in the technology succeeding.
Seven Months, No Cameras — Then Nothing
The County's own follow-up report, a May 3, 2023 mayoral memo on pilot programs conducted under Implementing Order No. 3-38, shows the pilot program hadn't even finished installation by then. Other pilot programs on that same memo reported real numbers — one 911 video system had logged over 113,000 calls. The Flock line said only that things would start "the second quarter of 2023." Seven months in, the clock on the promised crime-and-arrest report hadn't started.
The memo also reframed the program: no longer MDPD running a vendor trial, but MDPD "participating in a study by the National Police Foundation," a real independent research nonprofit — a better structure, if true, but no published study has surfaced to confirm it happened. The listed contact wasn't even Perera; it was a Lieutenant, Jaime DePaz.
Nothing more comes after that. No further Commission update. No NPF report. No competitive bid, the kind the Resolution anticipated once the free trial ended. Just seven cameras, still running according to a September 2025 device list cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Atlas of Surveillance. A temporary trial became permanent infrastructure without the paperwork that was supposed to justify it.
Why It's Not Just Paperwork
Courts have long treated a license plate glimpsed once as public information. But the Supreme Court's 2018 Carpenter ruling found that continuous tracking — a searchable history of everywhere someone's gone — crosses into Fourth Amendment territory, even though no single photo would do so. In June 2024, a Norfolk, Virginia court applied that logic directly to Flock, ruling that the data from Flock couldn't be used as evidence without a warrant. That decision only binds Virginia. But it's why a camera on a pole has become one of the most litigated pieces of technology in American policing, and why three unmonitored years matter more than a filing cabinet.
A stray, earlier trace: the Town of Surfside, Florida's June 2020 commission packet — over two years before the county's pilot — includes an Axon body-camera contract with a "Flock Software Terms of Use" appendix attached. Likely boilerplate, not proof Surfside ran its own cameras. But Surfside is also where Collins Avenue condo buildings keep surfacing as donor addresses in this newsroom's separate campaign-finance reporting, so the coincidence is worth a records request. It doesn't, however, connect to Commissioner Sally Heyman, whose name appears twice in that packet, both unrelated to cameras.
What Flock Does With the Data
Flock Safety — founded in Atlanta during 2017, still privately held, valued near $8.4 billion, CEO Garrett Langley its largest shareholder — has long said customers own their data and it isn't sold. That's gotten harder to square with the company's own moves: a 2025 product called Nova pulled in data-broker and public-records information to build fuller profiles of people, prompting the Electronic Frontier Foundation to call it a "dystopian panopticon." A Ring data-sharing deal was announced and killed within weeks after backlash. Nationally, Flock's "National Lookup" feature — letting one agency search another's cameras — is the mechanism researchers call the "side door:” officers running searches for federal immigration agents even where local policy forbids it, thousands of times in some jurisdictions. In May 2026 the FBI solicited a contractor for real-time access to the entire network. A San Francisco lawsuit alleges 1.6 million improper federal queries of that city's cameras in seven months.
Florida has its own instance, and it's the line connecting this back to Miami-Dade County: Suncoast Searchlight found Miami-Dade among a handful of Florida counties that ran a small number of their own immigration-related Flock searches during last spring's Operation Tidal Wave — fewer than a dozen, similar to Lake, Putnam, Volusia and Bay counties. That doesn't prove which camera, or that policy was broken. It proves the capability isn't hypothetical here. Separately, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian litigation group, has counted at least 18 officers nationally caught using Flock to stalk exes, several criminally charged — none in Miami-Dade, but proof that an unaudited, self-reported search system gets misused, in departments with more oversight on paper than Miami-Dade's single-monitor pilot ever had.
The Monitor Builds a Company — Then Defends It
Since 2022, Sheriff Deputy Perera's authority over the Flock cameras in Miami-Dade Coutny has only grown — and no record found in this reporting shows anyone ever replacing him as the pilot's designated monitor. He commanded the Cyber Crimes Bureau, and is now Chief of Technology and Information Security for the entire Sheriff’s Office. He co-signed a cybersecurity partnership between MDSO and Florida International University alongside Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz. The 2022 monitoring assignment was never reassigned; it just rode along as his job got bigger.
In May 2024 — two years after being named the county's Flock monitor — Perera co-founded Hyperion Gray Services LLC, a Davie, Florida company, with Manuel Caceres, MD, and Alejandro Caceres. That second name matters: Alejandro Caceres, known online as "P4x," is a nationally-recognized offensive-security researcher, profiled by Wired in 2022 for reportedly disabling North Korea's internet after a state hack targeted him. His established firm, Hyperion Gray, LLC of Charlotte, North Carolina, does DARPA- and IARPA-adjacent research. The Davie entity Perera co-manages is separate and newer, and no public record found in this reporting shows either company holding a contract with Miami-Dade County, MDSO, or FIU — not proof none exists, since the County's procurement tools aren't easily searchable, but an open question that a records request could close.
It didn't stop there. Facing public criticism over its security, Flock's own blog announced that Deputy Perera's Cyber Crimes Bureau had conducted an "independent" assessment of Flock's cameras and "found no issues," pointing to a company-produced interview with Perera as proof. On June 30, 2026, Flock's official X account said its chief information security officer had flown to Miami specifically to brief Perera's Electronic Crimes Task Force on "independent findings" about the platform's security. The same official named the County's monitor in 2022, who now co-owns a cybersecurity firm, is publicly vouching for Flock's product to counter its critics — not a historical conflict, a current one.
Nothing here proves wrongdoing on its own — a disclosed outside business for a Sheriff’s Deputy isn't a scandal. What's documented, without inference, is the sequence: the Deputy appointed to police a vendor relationship went on to co-run a private cybersecurity firm and publicly defend that same vendor, while his authority over the Sheriff Office's technology kept expanding. Whether any of it was disclosed to the County isn't on record either way.
He's not alone. Major Rita Rodriguez, a 25-year veteran on the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, holds a parallel post as an adjunct professor at FIU's disaster-preparedness academy. Two senior officials, two university appointments, no public record of pay or disclosure for either.
Who Was Supposed to Catch This
Miami-Dade County's independent Inspector General still investigates the Sheriff’s Office jointly on other matters — a fraud case this February, a theft case last September, both confirming its reach survived the 2024 transition from the county government’s police department to an independent sheriff’s office. Nothing shows that the Inspector General has looked at Flock, or at Perera's company. It would cost the County nothing to ask.
MDSO's own Public Corruption Section says its job is investigating misconduct touching "public officials, County employees, lobbyists, and private vendors." That's exactly this case. But a unit investigating its department's own leadership, through that department's chain of command, isn't independent oversight — it's the thing independent oversight exists to check.
And there's a rule that may not even apply anymore. The County's Ethics Code bars former employees from lobbying their old agency for two years — written for "county officer, departmental personnel or employee." MDSO hasn't been a county department since November 2024; it's now a separately elected constitutional office, like the Property Appraiser. No Ethics Commission opinion addresses whether the rule survived that switch. No MDSO policy fills the gap. A Major leaving tomorrow could, as far as anyone has documented, walk straight into lobbying the department — not because anyone decided that was fine, but because nobody seems to have decided anything.
That's the story here. Not a scheme. A seam. Fifty-six years of appointed oversight, replaced by an elected Sheriff’s office in 2024 — and at least one piece of county business that seems to have crossed that line without anyone checking whether the old rules made the trip.
Questions for the Record
1. Was the crime-and-arrest report promised in R-997-22 ever finished and given to the Commission?
2. Did the National Police Foundation's study ever produce a published result?
3. Why was a Major from the same department policing his own pilot — and why was he never replaced as monitor even as his job title changed twice?
4. How did a stalled trial become permanent infrastructure with no report and no bid process?
5. Has MDSO's Flock system been used for federal immigration enforcement?
6. Did Surfside police ever activate Flock service under its 2020 Axon contract?
7. Was Perera's stake in Hyperion Gray Services LLC disclosed to and approved by the county?
8. Has either Hyperion Gray company ever held a Miami-Dade, MDSO, or FIU contract?
9. Are Perera's and Rodriguez's FIU roles paid, and by whom?
10. Does the county's Two-Year ethics rule still bind MDSO — and if not, what does?
11. Was Perera's "independent" Flock security assessment reviewed by anyone outside his own chain of command before Flock used it publicly.
Miami-Dade voters waited 58 years, from 1966 to 2024, to elect their own Sheriff. They've had it for less than two years. Whether the mechanisms meant to hold that office accountable made the same trip is still open — and this newspaper intends to keep asking until someone answers on the record.
