The mail thefts at Blackstone were solved by USPS, not by cameras. The thief was a seasonal USPS employee with key access.

Blackstone had six Flock cameras at the entrances when this happened. They didn't catch it — a USPS worker arriving in a USPS vehicle is exactly what entrance cameras are designed to ignore.

More cameras pointed at residents wouldn't have caught this thief. They'd just track every resident's movements while missing the next one.

The Flock license plate readers at the entrances are a separate, older system. The Board voted unanimously to cancel that system on October 27, 2025. The hardware is still physically mounted at the gates.

The Verkada cameras going in now are a fundamentally different product from the older license-plate readers. These run continuous high-resolution video with AI analytics, not just plate capture, and the deployment is far larger.

The Board has never released an official camera count or a location map to members. The only visual ever circulated was an unlabeled map in a newsletter, and an owner's count off that map came to roughly 65.

That residents have to guess at the number is part of the problem.

You don't get to decide what looks suspicious tomorrow. These cameras don't know your intentions — only your movements. A visit to a friend, a doctor's appointment, time at the pool with your kids — all of it gets logged, stored, and made searchable by AI. What's considered suspicious can change. The data doesn't.

And even if you're comfortable with the surveillance itself: the Bylaws still required a member vote for a capital expenditure of this size.

That requirement doesn't go away based on whether the spending is popular.

Continuous 4K video of anyone in their field of view. Verkada's AI makes the footage searchable — by vehicle, by person, by appearance.

The Dome cameras at the pool and other common areas can store footage for up to 365 days.

The Remote cameras at perimeter and street locations retain 30 days of cloud video with unlimited archive storage.

Whoever holds the Verkada Command login. Members of this community have not been told who that is, what data-sharing settings are enabled, or what law-enforcement requests would or would not be honored.

For cloud-based surveillance systems generally, access depends entirely on the operator's choices — which is why disclosure matters.

Yes — repeatedly, and recently. Verkada itself was the subject of a 2024 FTC enforcement action after a hacker accessed approximately 150,000 of its live customer camera feeds, including inside psychiatric hospitals and women's health clinics. The company agreed to a $2.95 million penalty and a federally-mandated information security program.

Surveillance-camera systems run by HOAs, municipalities, and law enforcement have been used for stalking by officers with access, cross-state tracking of individuals (including a Texas sheriff's nationwide search of 83,000 cameras tracking a woman who had a self-administered abortion), and queries unrelated to any reported crime. These aren't hypothetical risks. They're documented cases.

Verkada's 2024 FTC penalty followed a breach that exposed 150,000 live customer feeds. Camera-surveillance vendors more broadly have a documented pattern of security failures — in November 2025, security researchers found Flock login credentials for sale on Russian cybercrime forums, and 67 Flock cameras streaming live to the open internet with no password.

The system that will hold a year of footage from our pool and common areas runs on a platform whose track record is already documented.

A special meeting under Bylaws Section 4.2.6. At 35 signatures — 5% of our 687 lots — the Board is required to call one. At that meeting, members can put the procurement, contract, and policy questions to the Board on the record, in front of the community.