Flock Safety makes the automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras that have quietly become one of the most widespread surveillance networks in the country — and one of the most contested. Here’s where things stand.
The pitch vs. the problem
Flock’s cameras do help solve real crimes: recovering stolen vehicles, closing hit-and-runs, supporting Amber Alerts. But the business model is what draws scrutiny. Instead of a department running its own local camera, Flock stitches thousands of cameras together into one searchable, nationwide network — often with far less judicial oversight than a traditional warrant process would require.
What oversight actually works
- Full contract cancellation. The only measure with a real track record. At least 30 cities have canceled their Flock contracts since the start of 2025, with some counts putting total terminations as high as 82 across 28 states — and the pace accelerated through 2026.
- Independent audits of search logs, done by a third party rather than self-reported by the department. Columbus used this approach to catch an officer whose search patterns pointed to unauthorized immigration-related lookups.
- Explicit, verifiable bans on data sharing with ICE/CBP tied to a court-order requirement — but only where a city has an independent way to confirm compliance. Reporting has shown that despite Flock’s denials of a direct ICE contract, roughly 4,000 immigration-related searches flowed through local departments as a “side door” to federal data access.
What’s mostly PR
- Flock’s own press-release-style “policy enhancement” announcements, issued in response to local pressure, with no independent way to verify compliance.
- “Kept the cameras, added safeguards” outcomes that amount to paper policy with no built-in audit mechanism.
- Flock’s decision to redact officer names from audit logs — marketed as a privacy improvement, but criticized by the ACLU and others for gutting the exact mechanism that catches misuse.
- Security fixes like two-factor authentication that arrived only after a breach was reported publicly, not proactively.
- In Evanston, after the city canceled its contract and ordered the cameras removed, Flock left some up and reinstalled others without authorization — they weren’t fully gone until early 2026. That’s a trust violation, not a messaging problem.
The pushback is real, and it’s not one-sided
The coalition raising alarms spans the usual privacy-left (ACLU, DSA chapters) and the libertarian-leaning Institute for Justice, which has independently documented at least 22 cases nationwide of officers using ALPR data to track romantic interests. Criminal charges are now reaching internal-affairs investigators, not just line officers — including a Milwaukee case in July 2026 where the detective assigned to investigate one stalking complaint was himself charged with misusing the system.
The ACLU has been blunt about it, publishing a piece titled “Flock Safety Credibility Lost as it Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police Departments, and Public Across the Country.”
DeFlock: the crowdsourced counter-map
One of the more effective pressure points hasn’t come from a city council or a regulator at all — it’s come from a volunteer-run map. DeFlock.me, created by developer Will Freeman, is a crowdsourced, OpenStreetMap-based project that lets ordinary people submit and browse the exact locations of ALPR cameras nationwide. As of mid-2026 it has logged nearly 96,000 Flock cameras specifically — roughly five out of every six branded ALPR camera in its dataset — giving drivers, journalists, and city councils an independent, public view of just how dense Flock’s network has actually gotten in their area.
DeFlock has also become a direct adversary of the company. Flock sent Freeman a cease-and-desist letter in late 2024 claiming the project’s name diluted its trademark. The Electronic Frontier Foundation took up his defense, telling Flock the demand was groundless since noncommercial, critical use of a trademark is squarely protected speech. Freeman refused to take the site down, and it’s still running.
The project’s own tally credits it with helping drive at least 68 cities to reject Flock’s technology since 2021 — through canceled contracts, deactivated cameras, or outright ALPR bans — by giving local officials and residents hard evidence of scale that the company’s own marketing never volunteers. DeFlock has also directly challenged Flock’s headline claim that its cameras help solve 20% of cleared cases in coverage areas, arguing there’s no independent evidence tying ALPR deployment to actual crime reduction.
Bottom line
If a city or department wants oversight that actually holds up, it needs an independent audit mechanism and a verifiable data-sharing carve-out — not a press release. Everything short of that has, in case after case, turned out to be negotiable. And increasingly, it’s grassroots efforts like DeFlock — not just formal policy fights — that are surfacing the evidence those fights run on.
Sources: ACLU, GovTech, Malwarebytes, Tech Times, Futurism, State of Surveillance, EFF.
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