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Cities Are Dumping Flock’s Surveillance Cameras — Here’s What the Network Was Actually Used For

Cities Are Dumping Flock’s Surveillance Cameras — Here’s What the Network Was Actually Used For

In August, an American city or county walked away from Flock Safety's camera network roughly every eight hours. Ninety jurisdictions terminated contracts that month alone — a fourfold jump from July, and part of a run of 214 cancellations since 2021, according to the Oakland-based watchdog group Secure Justice. The reason isn't cost overruns or buyer's remorse about a gadget. It's that the country's largest privately run license-plate surveillance network has been quietly doing things nobody signed up for: helping a Texas sheriff's office hunt for a woman who'd had an abortion, letting federal agents pull the identities of people who showed up to a gun show, and giving at least one police officer the tools to track an ex-partner. The pullback is small against Flock's claimed 5,000-plus customers. But the pattern underneath it — a surveillance system built faster than anyone could govern it, deployed with almost no public debate, and now unwinding case by case as communities find out what they actually bought — is the story.

A camera network that grew faster than anyone was watching

Flock Safety sells automated license-plate reader cameras to police departments, cities, homeowners' associations, and private customers, then stitches the footage into a single searchable network. The pitch was simple: help departments recover stolen cars and locate suspects faster. The product that shipped is something else — a system where any participating agency can query plates, and increasingly faces and behavior patterns, across a shared national dragnet that most residents of the towns hosting the cameras never voted on or were told about in any meaningful way.

That scale is the entire business model. Flock's value to a police department rises with the size of the network it can search, which is exactly why the recent wave of cancellations worries the company more than the raw numbers suggest. "When you see that now 165 [cancellations] are just in the first almost eight months of this year... At that speed, if it goes another year, we're talking serious money," Brian Hofer of Secure Justice said. Flock disputes that the trend is a crisis, telling reporters new city partnerships are outpacing nonrenewals about ten to one. The company won't say how many new customers it actually added this year.

What the cameras were used for

The list of documented misuse is the part Flock would rather not have go viral, and it keeps growing anyway. A Washington Post investigation this year found more than fifty law enforcement officers who had been accused, charged with, or convicted of misusing the ALPR system — including using it to track former partners without their consent. UC Berkeley law professor Catherine Crump has cited reporting that a Texas sheriff's office ran searches connected to a woman who had obtained an abortion, and that federal agents used the network to identify people attending a gun show. Two Florida police officers were arrested this year over alleged misuse serious enough to draw a public rebuke from Governor Ron DeSantis. In a separate incident, Florida police built a decoy Flock camera for a sting operation and then charged a man with three felonies for destroying it.

None of this required a warrant, a court order, or, in most cases, any notice to the person being searched. The infrastructure that made stolen-car recovery faster also made stalking, reproductive surveillance, and political monitoring faster — the same tool, pointed wherever the person with query access decided to point it.

Damage control, and a Senate investigation

Flock has responded with policy changes rather than a change in business model. CEO Garrett Langley announced the company would cut its default data retention window from 30 days to seven, and Flock updated its terms of use to explicitly bar customers from using the system to "mislead, harass, or stalk" someone. Neither change addresses the structural issue: the network's value depends on maximum participation and minimum friction, and friction is precisely what public accountability requires.

The political response has outpaced the corporate one. Senator Josh Hawley announced he's investigating how Flock collects, retains, and shares the data its cameras sweep up — notable bipartisan interest in a Congress that rarely agrees on tech oversight. Jake Laperruque of the Center for Democracy and Technology frames the trajectory bluntly: cameras that used to just clock a passing car are now searchable by keyword and person, some municipal networks are layering in real-time facial recognition, and Border Patrol is already using AI to flag "suspicious" driving patterns in ALPR data and pull people over on that basis. "We're already seeing how AI can morph ALPRs into a mass surveillance dragnet," he said.

The part that doesn't cancel

Ninety jurisdictions walking away in a month sounds like a movement. It's also true that Flock says it's still winning new business ten-to-one, that the company has never disclosed real customer-acquisition numbers to verify or refute that ratio, and that a camera taken down in one town does nothing to the footage a neighboring town's cameras already fed into the shared network last month. Cancelling a contract is a local decision. The data that contract already generated, and the precedent it set for how casually a searchable surveillance grid can be sold to a city council on a slow Tuesday night, doesn't cancel with it.

Sources

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