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Fighting over Flock | Inquirer Greater Abington. Plus, a quaint Jenkintown alley sees a business boom. by Laura Smythe, Staff Published Aug. 25, 2026, 5:45 a.m. ET The Abington Township Police Department is ending its contracts with controversial surveillance company Flock Safety after data was leaked about searches from Abington - and Cheltenham, too. The township will decide Thursday whether to replace the Flock network with a five-year contract with Axon Enterprise, another surveillance vendor. Also this week, under-the-radar Jenkintown alley Yorkway Place is experiencing an unexpected business boom, and Willow Grove Park Mall is in the process of being sold to a group of New York-based buyers. P.S. Pat Garrett love hearing all of your questions about town! Submit any queries you might have about the region to Curious Greater Abington, and Pat Garrett'll see if its journalists can dig up some answers to the local mysteries that keep you up at night. Inquirer Greater Abington Want to get Inquirer Greater Abington straight to your inbox every week? Sign up here for its guide to the news, stories, and events shaping life in your community. The Abington Township Police Department is ending its contracts with surveillance startup Flock Safety after thousands of its searches leaked to the public. Additional Flock searches went public from Cheltenham - where law enforcement doesn't hold Flock contracts, but can access the national network through subscriptions held by local businesses. Flock cameras log license plates and vehicle features such as bumper stickers for every passing car, and employ AI to identify cars that often travel together. The network of public and private cameras enables police to search for vehicles by behavior rather than plate number. Now, as surveillance regulations face national scrutiny, Abington will vote Thursday on whether to replace Flock with a five-year contract with Axon Enterprise, another surveillance camera system. Community news. * Yorkway Place, the secluded, 1930s Tudor-lined alley in the heart of Jenkintown, is experiencing a business renaissance thanks in part to a meadery there. * Cheltenham residents voiced concerns at last week's commissioners' meeting over their lack of input in the township's Melrose pool project, which a private company is developing. New plans for the controversial $4.5 million mixed-use development indicate more than two dozen more houses than originally proposed. * A group of New York firms is buying the Willow Grove Park Mall. The pending deal is among the latest shakeups to greater Philadelphia's 17 malls amid the retail sector's 21st-century evolution. * SEPTA's new bus network is officially here. Check out its tool to figure out how the system update will impact your next jaunt around the region. * A casino cleaner looking to support his daughter, a home health aide trying to pay rent, and a Philadelphia police officer were among recent plasma donors at the Wyncote location of B Positive Plasma, which is on track to see a record year as area residents try to make ends meet. * The fifth-annual Montco Jazz Fest will bring outdoor concerts to parks across the county next month, including in Wyncote. * A lane will be closed through Friday from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. on Church Road between Township Line Road and Route 73 in Cheltenham Township for paving. During the same time frame, utility adjustments and milling will close a lane along Ashbourne Road, Montgomery Avenue, and Central Avenue between Washington Lane and Route 73, and again between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. * Cheltenham police are advising residents to keep small pets indoors after multiple reports of an aggressive coyote in Wyncote. They also say to avoid the animal if seen. Schools briefing. * The 2026-27 academic years for the Cheltenham and Jenkintown school districts begin Monday. * In case you missed it, the Cheltenham school board appointed veteran administrator Chris McGinley as interim superintendent through the end of the 2026-27 school year. * Five of the people criminally charged in relation to two assaults in Cheltenham High's locker room last year face a preliminary hearing on Thursday. On its plate. * Fast-growing chain 7 Brew Coffee is seeking Montgomery County's approval for two proposed locations: one in Wyncote at 1000 S. Easton Rd. and another in Willow Grove at 1130 Easton Rd. * Speaking of 7 Brew, investors in the food and beverage space are keen to pinpoint the next category that could rise to the level of popularity of the Arkansas-based coffee chain, and bagels might just check that box, The Inquirer's Michael Klein writes. He takes a look at the "bagel boom" hitting greater Philadelphia as a PopUp Bagels franchisee scouts potential Montgomery County locations. * Rob Woloshin, owner of Manny's Deli Stop in Willow Grove, talked to Klein about visiting Steve Stein's Famous Deli - which closed in Northeast Philadelphia over the weekend after more than 60 years - as a child. The stalwart deli informed his own shop's business model. Things to do. Best of the 2000s: Britney Spears, burning CDs, Juicy Couture tracksuits... If these aughts buzzwords piqued your interest, consider joining this trivia night for a dose of nostalgia. Wednesday, Aug. 26, 7 p.m. Pay as you go | King's Corner Pub, Jenkintown High Altitudes and High Stakes: Join this virtual discussion with thriller author Lucy Foley about her newest book, Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, which comes out next month and will revive Agatha Christie's iconic Miss Marple character for the first (authorized) time in 50 years. Thursday, Aug. 27, 2 p.m. Free | Virtual, sign up via Abington Township Public Library So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience: Robert Neary, a Broadway, television, and film icon, performs a two-hour tribute to the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter. Thursday, Aug. 27, 8 p.m. $41.71-$116.25 | Keswick Theatre, Glenside Battle of the Breweries: Sample "Cheltenham-inspired" beers from local breweries and cast your vote for the champion at this event, which is part of the Cheltenham Celebrates America 250 lineup. Sunday, Aug. 30, 4 p.m. Pay as you go | Gimbel Field, Elkins Park Philadelphia Flyers' Community Caravan: Beloved mascot Gritty will make an appearance at the Jenkintown stop of the team's 10th annual event, complete with giveaways and bites from local vendors. Monday, Aug. 31, 5:30-7:30 p.m. Pay as you go | Jenkintown Square On the market. Five bedrooms plus a dedicated office space give space for options in this Abington abode, constructed in 1966. It features two full bathrooms, two half bathrooms, a loft-style gym complete with the equipment, and a four-vehicle driveway plus a garage. Vaulted ceilings in the kitchen and living room create an open feel, and out back, there's s a covered lower deck. Price: $600,000 | Size: 2,786 SF | Acreage: 0.29 What other Greater Abington residents are reading this week: By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer's Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10. This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer's high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.

Boulder is putting mass surveillance technology before civil liberties. As Boulder considers a long-term contract for automated license plate readers, city officials should establish stronger safeguards, public oversight and vendor accountability before selecting a provider. August 12, 2026 This commentary is by Olivia Mendoza, executive director of the ACLU of Colorado. Cities across the state and nation are quietly building a mass surveillance infrastructure, one unregulated contract at a time. Its most vulnerable communities are falling victim to this rapidly advancing technology, which threatens the constitutional rights of people across Colorado, including in Boulder. This mass surveillance infrastructure has the power to track where you go, who you are with and what you do, with almost no legal guardrails. These technologies are not being used in isolation. Corporations implementing mass surveillance systems may offer several tools, including drones, body cameras and automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. Data from these systems can be integrated and, depending on an agency's policies and settings, shared across jurisdictions. The surveillance technology market is exploding, and law enforcement and government agencies are among its biggest customers. The City of Boulder is currently reviewing several proposals for a new long-term ALPR contract. City officials have declined to name the bidders, and there is no public comment period dedicated to the decision. The city initially expected to select a vendor in September, but the timeline is now unclear. Officials are expected to make the decision without a council vote or any formal mechanism for Boulder residents to weigh in. Currently, Boulder holds a contract with Flock Safety for more than 30 cameras at key intersections. Until June 2025, Boulder's license plate data was searchable by thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide. According to city records, U.S. Border Patrol searched Boulder's data more than 100 times before the city cut off national sharing. One likely bidder in Boulder's procurement process is Axon. The city already uses other Axon products, including an AI tool that transcribes body-camera footage, and requires the selected ALPR system to integrate with its existing Axon technology. A major federal law enforcement contractor, Axon has rapidly expanded from manufacturing Tasers and body cameras into ALPRs, drone fleets and real-time streaming capabilities that stitch together a continuous picture of people's movements through public space. This escalation in surveillance was predicted years ago, not by outside critics, but by Axon's own Artificial Intelligence and Policing Technology Ethics Board. In 2019, that board warned that without regulatory intervention, market competition would encourage "a race to the bottom of more pervasive and more powerful surveillance." Three years later, nine of the board's 12 members resigned after Axon announced plans to develop Taser-equipped drones despite the board's objections. In their resignation letter, they wrote that the company had proposed surveillance so sweeping it would "undoubtedly harm communities of color and others who are overpoliced." When a company's own ethics board quits in protest, that is not a footnote. It is a warning Aclu Co should all heed. Surveillance technology is not experienced equally. Facial recognition systems, now being rebranded as "face matching," have documented error rates significantly higher for people with darker skin. People of color are disproportionately impacted by this mass surveillance technology that saturates their neighborhoods. Across the country, facial recognition errors have contributed to wrongful arrests, with devastating consequences for some of those misidentified. ALPRs build a record of movement over time: where you worship, seek medical care or attend a political meeting. Each observation may appear to be a simple data point. But aggregated over months, those observations can create a detailed map of your life, one that federal agencies can use to target immigrant communities. Some surveillance systems provide real-time or near-real-time alerts, potentially giving law enforcement the ability to track individuals as they move through the world, without a warrant, without suspicion and without their knowledge. The gap between what these tools can do and what the law regulates is not merely a matter of timing. It is, in many cases, deliberate. Vendors move fast, offering free pilots and subsidized trials that make it easy to implement their systems but costly to end them. By the time a community learns that a technology has been deployed, it may have been running for months, if not years. One of the central deceptions of the surveillance industry's marketing is the suggestion that public safety and civil liberties are competing priorities. They are not. Effective, accountable policing and robust civil liberties protections can coexist if city officials do the hard work of establishing clear guardrails before technologies are deployed. Boulder should establish binding rules, mandatory impact assessments, meaningful public input, independent oversight with real authority and enforceable vendor accountability before making its procurement decision. Every contract signed without adequate safeguards sends a clear message: Coloradans' civil liberties are not a priority. Networked surveillance represents one of the most significant expansions of government power in the history of the United States, and Boulder should treat it accordingly. Just because this technology exists doesn't mean the Constitution no longer does. By completing this form, I agree to receive occasional emails per the terms of the ACLU's privacy statement. All fields are required unless labeled optional.