The first camera was simply pointed the wrong way. In early April 2025, Jerry Reina, leader of a local neighborhood watch in the Harbor View area of Suffolk, Virginia, noticed that one of their community's six Flock Safety cameras had been turned away from the road it was installed to monitor, according to his testimony at a preliminary hearing reported by WAVY. A Suffolk police sergeant who helps oversee the city's camera program soon found another aimed into a wood line. By summer, entire poles were down. Some cameras were thrown from the Hampton Roads Parkway onto Interstate 664 below, where they shattered on the pavement, the sergeant testified. The tampering continued for six months. In October, Suffolk police arrested Jeffrey Sovern, 41, an engineer and mechanic in the U.S. Air Force, according to his defense attorney, Cole Roberts. Sovern faces 13 felony counts of destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny, and six counts of possession of burglary tools, tied to 13 Flock cameras that were damaged across North Suffolk between April and October 2025, court records show. He has pleaded not guilty. A local vandalism case would normally stay local. This one has become a national boiling point in the ever-burgeoning fight over automated license plate readers. Privacy advocates across the country have donated more than $15,000 to Sovern's legal defense, and his case is unfolding in Hampton Roads, a region that holds one of the largest concentrations of military personnel in the country, as well as more than 600 of the cameras.