A mystery Flock Safety license plate reader camera that turned up on Millcreek city property in late July is now collecting dust in a city building basement, and no one is looking for its owner.

City Manager Mike Winder said in a Salt Lake Tribune article published Monday, Aug. 24, that Millcreek is not actively working with Flock Safety to determine where the camera came from, effectively closing the book on an episode that drew national attention and landed the city in the Institute for Justice's database of ALPR abuse.

Winder said the city discovered the device on July 29 after crowdsourced tracking maps on the website DeFlock flagged its location in the parking lot north of 3300 South, between Millcreek Common and Highland Drive, next to City Hall. Public works crews removed it two days later, on July 31.

"That's when we looked into it with the police and any of our departments and realized nobody knew who put it there and why," Winder said. "So we certainly took it down, and nobody's missed it since."

The camera was dormant when removed. Winder said it "probably hadn't been doing its thing for a number of years." City officials used Google Street View histories to determine it was installed sometime in the first half of 2022, before Millcreek purchased the property for the Millcreek Common parking lot.

Two theories remain. Either a previous business owner installed the camera before the city bought the land, or Flock Safety failed to retrieve it after Unified Police Department's contract with the company expired. UPD Assistant Chief Justin Hoyal said that contract ended three or four years ago, and the department has not been able to determine whether it owned the device.

Millcreek has never had its own contract with Flock Safety.

Mayor Cheri Jackson told ABC4 she first noticed social media chatter about the camera, then checked DeFlock and found the Millcreek location flagged. She confirmed neither UPD nor any city department knew who installed it.

The incident comes as Gov. Spencer Cox on Thursday, Aug. 20, said he is "deeply troubled" by reports of Flock camera misuse statewide and asked the Utah Privacy Governing Board and Utah Privacy Commission to review regulations. Utah law already restricts ALPR data access to four law enforcement scenarios, with misuse classified as a Class B misdemeanor. Three bills to tighten those rules have failed since 2025, including HB468, which passed the House but died in the Senate.

Flock Safety, which operates more than 80,000 cameras in over 6,000 communities nationally, has not publicly responded to the Millcreek incident. ABC4 reported it had reached out to the company and was awaiting comment as of Aug. 24. Millcreek has not announced any plans to bring a surveillance camera ordinance or ALPR policy before the City Council.