Cities Are Finally Kicking Flock Out. It's About Time.
The main thing that changed is that people started reading the contracts and asking Flock direct questions in public meetings. And it turns out Flock's answers have not held up well.
Back when I wrote about Flock's cameras being exposed to the open internet, I said the abuse of these systems was already documented, and it was only going to get worse as they got cheaper to deploy. That was six months ago. Since then, it has gotten worse, but it's not all bad news. Some cities started ripping the cameras out of the ground.
If you missed my other posts, Flock Safety is the company that makes license plate reader cameras you've probably driven past a hundred times without thinking about it. They started in 2017, hit a $3.5 billion valuation by 2022, and now have somewhere around 80,000 cameras in 5,000 communities across 49 states. Their pitch to police departments is that they can track any car in the country, in real time, and share that data with any other agency running Flock.
The good news is that some cities are seeing the light and kicking Flock out.
Here are cities that have canceled their Flock contracts in the last few months:
- Fort Collins, Colorado — 6-1 vote, cameras ordered removed (KUNC)
- Framingham, Massachusetts — canceled after public backlash (Privacy Guides)
- Columbia Heights, Minnesota — unanimous vote, all 12 cameras coming down (Utica Phoenix)
- Edmonds, Washington — unanimous vote, after the mayor and police chief tried to cancel by letter and had to concede only the council could actually terminate the contract (HeraldNet)
The ACLU is calling the campaign "Get the Flock Out," which is objectively a great name.
What Made Them Rethink Flock?
The main thing that changed is that people started reading the contracts and asking Flock direct questions in public meetings. And it turns out Flock's answers have not held up well.
The clearest example happened in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Flock's own chief information security officer stood in front of the city council and told them the system doesn't "create a pattern or heat map of an individual's movement." Then, after the vote, they had to publicly walk that back and admit that yes, the system does create a heat map showing every place your car has been photographed for up to thirty days (ACLU). Flock called this "one small misconception" and a "minor nuance." Oshkosh called it a lie and revoked their approval the next day. That's the shortest gap on record between approving a Flock contract and canceling one.
Then there's the ICE thing. Flock published a blog post literally titled "Does Flock Share Data With ICE?" What that post did not mention is that ICE didn't need a direct contract with Flock, because they could access the data through state and local agencies that already had contracts. Flock's own CEO eventually admitted the company "communicated poorly" and "inadvertently provided inaccurate information." I don't know how else to describe that other than lying and then apologizing for the wording.
There's more. A Flock executive claimed on social media that the company had partnered with the ACLU of New Mexico to help pass the state's ALPR law. The ACLU had to publicly clarify that no, they have never partnered with Flock on anything, in any state. Ever.
And then there's the "Proactive Search Term Tool," which Flock rolled out to reassure the public that police couldn't misuse the system for things like abortion enforcement. The tool requires officers to enter a reason before running a search. In one Oregon police department last September, officers ran searches after entering the word "hehehe" twenty times, and "investigation" one hundred and eleven times (ACLU). If that's the oversight, there is no oversight.
The Receipts Keep Coming Out
While Flock is putting out fires in council chambers, actual audits are showing what's been happening inside the systems the whole time.
Westchester County, New York, is currently being sued for running a network of nearly 600 license plate reader cameras that generated 1.6 billion scans and shared them with more than fifty outside agencies, ICE included, without any authorization from the county legislature to do so (Fortune). One of the plaintiffs' cars had been photographed more than 2,400 times.
San Francisco's police department ran a compliance audit in May and found something similar. Over the previous year, a regional intelligence center had used SFPD's Flock login 299 times to run searches for federal and out-of-state agencies, which is against California law. Every one of those searches was simultaneously fanned out to between 531 and 763 other law enforcement agencies. That's not local law enforcement using local cameras for local problems. That's a national data-sharing network with SFPD's login on it (Fox LA).
This is all on top of what I wrote about in the earlier piece. The cameras themselves being exposed to the open internet with no password, and Flock's training documents suggesting camera data was being reviewed by workers overseas. None of that has been fully resolved either. It just got buried under new news.
Not Everyone is Walking Away
I don't want to make this sound like a national wave, because it isn't. Some cities are actually doubling down.
Alameda County, California, just voted 4-3 to renew their Flock contract, at a meeting that started with the sheriff's office admitting there had been 140 unauthorized searches of the Flock data in the past year (CBS News). That is not a typo. They admitted 140 unauthorized searches and then still voted to keep the system.
Stockton, California, went even further. They extended their Flock contract through 2031 and added a fleet of six autonomous drones on top of the 120 license plate cameras they already run. The vote came after more than an hour of mostly opposed public comment (Stocktonia). Stockton's mayor called drones as first responders "the future." I guess.
So, the country is split. Some places are yanking the cameras out. Others are handing Flock keys to the city. The only real difference is whether anyone showed up to say something in the room where it got decided.
What This Actually Means
The sales cycle for these systems always follows the same pattern. The vendor offers a free trial. The department installs the hardware before the contract goes to council. The data-sharing agreements get quietly signed at the state or regional level. By the time residents figure out what's actually happening, the cameras have been rolling for months and the police union is talking about how many stolen cars they've recovered.
That model works because most people never look. What's different now is that people are looking.
I said in my earlier piece that these companies need to be more transparent about how they handle data and who has access to it. I still think that. But I no longer think transparency is enough. Transparency assumes the company is telling the truth once you ask them the right question. Oshkosh asked the right question, and Flock answered it wrong on purpose. New Mexico asked the right question, and Flock made up a partnership with the ACLU to answer it. What Flock says to a city council appears to have very little to do with what the system actually does.
The Mayors Innovation Project put out a piece last week framing the whole thing as a question of whether local governments actually control the data or just rent access to a national network they don't fully understand (Mayors Innovation Project). I think that's exactly right. When your license plate is scanned by a Flock camera in your hometown, you're not just being watched by your local police department. You're being logged into a system that hundreds of other agencies can query, and that Flock itself controls the default sharing settings on.
That's not a local safety tool. That's a national surveillance product with your town's logo on it.
If your city has Flock cameras and you don't know how the contract works, this is the moment to find out. Ask who signed off. Ask what the data-sharing settings are. Ask if anyone has audited the search logs. If your council can't answer those questions on the spot, that's your answer.
Fort Collins figured it out. Edmonds figured it out. Columbia Heights figured it out. Nothing is stopping your town from being next on that list.
If you want the earlier pieces, you can find them here:
Grant Allen
Grant Allen
