A camera at the end of your street is hard to ignore. That may be why Flock Safety is now the face of the backlash against surveillance tech.
According to TechCrunch, at least 10 local governments and police departments have moved to end, curb or restrict Flock use since summer. Monroe, Newburgh, Richmond, Hopkinton, New Bedford and Lansing are cutting contracts. Asheville already lost access. League City, Texas voted against its police department’s license plate readers, and they’re coming down.
The reasons are concrete. An officer in East Texas went to prison for using Flock to stalk his ex-girlfriend and her family. A Missouri officer was accused of tracking his ex-wife. Ithaca, New York cited reports that ICE and ATF ran queries against local plate data, even without authorization from the city.
Flock says it does not sell data and has no ICE contract. Note the careful wording. That doesn’t address how other agencies reach data through customers’ sharing settings. The company did cut default retention for new customers from 30 days to seven and now requires a case code for searches. Fine, but a free-text case code is a thin guardrail, and the changes apply only to new customers.
The bigger story is process. Many cities adopted Flock quietly, often through police departments with little council oversight. South Windsor, Connecticut switched cameras on with no vote, then voted to remove them. The EFF’s Adam Schwartz says activists are pushing councils to use their purchasing power, and many are listening.
Not everyone is quitting. Cleveland extended its contract but blocked immigration-related searches and cut off a regional fusion center, while it reviews rival bids. That points to a likely outcome: fewer blank checks, more restrictions, maybe different vendors with the same problems.
Politics is shifting too. Florida banned plate readers on state highways, Texas paused state funding, and both Rep. Massie and a Sanders-led group have introduced federal bills. A Reuters poll found more Americans dislike Flock than like it. Expect this fight to continue.