Berea Police Department Phases Out Neighborhood Grandmothers in Favor of AI-Powered Flock Cameras

BEREA — For nearly sixty years, the true backbone of public safety in Berea has not been the police department, but a loosely organized, entirely unpaid network of grandmothers who monitor every driveway, porch light, and “car that don't belong here” from their front windows with a rigor no city budget could replicate. That era, city officials announced last month, was coming to a close.

The Berea Police Department began installing a network of AI-powered Flock Safety cameras at intersections across town, part of a $340,000 contract department officials describe as “a modernization of situational awareness capabilities.” In practice, this means the cameras are taking over a job that, until last month, belonged almost entirely to women named Deloris, Faye, and Sue Carol.

“We appreciate everything these women have contributed,” said Officer Gary Robinson, the department's technology liaison. “But a camera don't need to take a break for its stories. A camera doesn't eat dinner at 5:30 and fall asleep during Jeopardy. A camera just watches.”

Deloris Ann Whitmer, 81, who has monitored the intersection of Forest and Center from her porch swing since back durin' what she calls “the shag carpet era,” called this “the single dumbest thing I have heard in my entire life.”

“Them cameras don't know pee-diddley-hoot',” Deloris said. “It just guesses and makes opinions. It cain't tell you that's Wendell Hutchins' Buick, and Wendell's supposed to be at the tire shop right now, and that Buick has been parked in front of Sherry Lynn Combs' place three nights a week since March, and Wendell's wife Patty thinks he's workin' a double. The camera sees a car in a driveway. I see a car in a driveway, a marriage fixin' to end, and a casserole I'm gonna need to make here directly.”

Within eleven days of installation, the Flock system had generated 214 alerts along Deloris's former route. Of those, city records show 198 were later closed as “non-actionable,” including four separate flags for what an internal memo described as “recurring nocturnal subject, unclear gait, possible loitering” — later identified, after Deloris personally called the department to clarify, as a possum that has lived under the Baptist church since sometime around when they redid the fellowship hall.

“Lord have mercy, that ain't no man, that's a possum,” Deloris told the dispatcher, according to a call log obtained by The Observer. “He ain't loiterin', he's huntin' grub worms under Brother Mark's boxwoods, same as ever'night. His name's Chester. He's older'n my youngest grandbaby. Y'all need to quit sendin' Officer Trundle out here to shine a flashlight on a possum mindin' his own business. He's got a bad hip same as me, he don't need to be crawlin' round Brother Mark's shrubbery at midnight.”

Flock Safety regional account manager Trent Ableson, who flew in from the company's Atlanta office for the rollout, described the transition as “a generational upgrade in coverage fidelity.”

“What Deloris and her network provided was, frankly, an unscalable model,” Ableson told council members at Tuesday's meeting, gesturing at a slide titled “Legacy Human Infrastructure: Limitations.” “It relied on one woman, one porch, one line of sight. Our system provides 24/7 coverage with zero need for a lunch break, a nap, or —” he paused to check his notes — “‘stories.’ We consider this a strict improvement.”

Asked whether the cameras could distinguish between a stolen vehicle and, say, a teenager driving five miles under the speed limit because his mother told him to, Ableson said the company was “still gathering data on edge cases.”

The city's transition plan initially offered the town's approximately forty active porch-watch grandmothers what a letter from the mayor's office called a “community appreciation package” — a certificate and a Cracker Barrel gift card, described in the letter as “well-earned retirement from decades of unofficial vigilance.”

“They give me a piece of paper and twelve dollars of Cracker Barrel for thirty-eight years of knowin' every car on this street,” said Faye Grissom, who monitored Chestnut Street. “My son wanted to frame the certificate. I told him frame the gift card instead, it's worth more and it don't lie to you.”

But within three weeks, the department quietly reversed course. After the system flagged a Domino's delivery driver eleven times as a “repeat suspicious subject” and failed to notice an actual break-in at a garage on Jefferson Street — the homeowner's own doorbell camera caught the culprit, but the Flock camera two blocks away registered only “vehicle present, no further action” — the department began soliciting what an internal posting called “auxiliary context consultants.”

The job, as it turned out, was exactly what the grandmothers had already been doing, now formalized with a badge, a lanyard, and a stipend of $11 an hour.

“They spent $340,000 to replace me. Then they hired me back for eleven dollars an hour to tell the $340,000 camera what it's lookin' at. I believe that's what you call progress.”

— SUE CAROL JENKINS, AUXILIARY CONTEXT CONSULTANT

Sue Carol said her new official duties include reviewing flagged footage and providing “narrative context,” which in practice means informing the department, alert by alert, which truck is just Earl haulin' his bush hog down to the church, which one belongs to the pastor's nephew who's “fine, just a bit slow,” and which one is, again, Chester.

“I told 'em to just put a little sign under the camera says ‘Chester lives here, leave him be,’” Sue Carol said. “They said that weren't ‘within the scope of the contract.’ Everything's a contract nowadays. Used to just be, you knew your neighbors, and you knew your neighbors' possums.”

Faye Grissom took the auxiliary job too, and now works one folding table over from Sue Carol two afternoons a week. She framed the gift card after all — “right next to my new badge,” she said — but signed on, she explained, mostly to defend one repeat target: the Domino's driver the system had flagged eleven times.

“That's just Ronnie Pruitt,” Faye said. “He ain't a suspicious subject, he's tryin' to find 34-B and them apartment numbers been wrong since they repaved and knocked down the address sign. Same boy, same little car, same pizza, ever' Friday night, and that camera acts surprised ever' single time. Fifty-thousand-dollar machine, and it never once thought to wonder why the criminal keeps showin' up with supper. I could've told 'em that for a gift card. Did, matter of fact.”

Deloris, who declined the auxiliary position on principle, said she still watches Forest Street and Center from her porch every day, camera or no camera.

“That thing's got a computer chip in it,” she said. “I got fifty year of knowin' who's up to no good just by the way they idle in a driveway. When that camera can tell you a man's fixin' to leave his wife by how long his Buick sits parked at Sherry Lynn's, you call me. Till then, I'll be settin' right here. For free. Same as always.”

Officer Robinson, asked whether the department had learned anything from the rollout, said the department remained “fully confident in the technology” and noted that false-positive rates were “trending in a positive direction, generally.”

As of press time, Chester had been flagged an additional two times, and the department was reportedly drafting a supplemental contract addendum.