Flock Safety contract cancellations have now exceeded 55 localities in the past year alone, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, as communities across the United States pull back from a surveillance network that spans more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states.
The pace of departures is accelerating. Data from Secure Justice, an Oakland-based advocacy group, shows that in August alone, 93 US jurisdictions ended their contracts with Flock Safety. Since 2021, a total of 214 jurisdictions have installed and then removed the company’s automatic licence plate reading cameras. The ACLU reports that more than 55 localities have now ended contracts within the past year, and NPR reports that at least 30 of those departures have happened since the beginning of 2025, with much of that activity concentrated in just the last three months.
How Flock Safety Contract Cancellations Are Reshaping Local Policing
The concerns driving these decisions range from documented abuse by individual officers to the sheer scale of data sharing baked into the platform’s architecture. The ACLU has highlighted the case of the Syracuse police department, whose local automatic licence plate reader data was inadvertently shared through Flock’s nationwide system, allowing that data to be searched 4.4 million times in a single year. The Syracuse case illustrates a problem that goes beyond any single officer’s misconduct: local forces signing up for what they understood to be a community tool have found their data folded into a national lookup network they did not explicitly choose to join.
Some jurisdictions are now drawing tighter boundaries rather than walking away entirely. NPR reports that the Flagstaff Police Department removed the city’s data from both Flock’s national and state-wide lookup networks, opting instead to share data with two local agencies only. That middle path reflects the dilemma facing many local authorities: the technology has real operational value, but the default data-sharing settings carry risks that local governments may not have fully understood when they signed on.
Senator Josh Hawley described the situation in stark terms, stating that in a few short years Flock has assembled an unprecedented national surveillance network, processing more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. ‘Instead of serving discrete local investigations, as contemplated by our constitutional processes and safeguards, these camera networks harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search,’ Hawley wrote, announcing an investigation into Flock Safety’s collection, retention, and dissemination of data.
Errors and Abuse Cases Fuel the Public Debate
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the network’s growth across his state ‘out of control’, pointing specifically to a case in Haines City where a police officer was arrested after colleagues found he had used Flock to track his estranged wife’s movements. A separate case from Sarasota involved an officer checking surveillance on the same licence plate number more than 300 times without investigative reason. WFLA news reported on both instances as being under investigation.
Misidentification has also produced serious consequences. Business Insider investigated a case in Toledo, Ohio, where driver Brandon Upchurch was attacked by a police dog after a Flock camera misread the ‘7’ on his licence plate as a ‘2’. In Roseville, California, a separate Business Insider investigation found that Flock incorrectly read licence plates in 71% of 1,427 stolen-vehicle and felony alerts issued during 2023 and 2024.
Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center of Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, told Ars Technica that the nature of the technology has changed what surveillance means in practice. ‘Maybe in the past it didn’t feel like every red light cam really meant a pair of eyes was watching you, but with AI, that’s increasingly becoming the reality,’ he said. ‘Flock lets its cameras be searched for keywords and people, cities are incorporating real-time facial recognition into camera networks, Border Patrol is using AI to scan [licence plate] data for driving patterns, and pulling people over whenever the AI deems their driving “suspicious.”‘
A Berkeley law professor characterised the platform as ‘yet another Silicon Valley product threatening to change people’s lives [that no one asked for].’
Flock Safety has pushed back on the narrative surrounding departures. The company told Ars Technica that contract cancellations are outnumbered by new county and municipal partnerships by 10 to 1, and that further improvements to its privacy standards are underway. CEO Garrett Langley announced that the data retention period for any photograph has been shortened from 30 days to 7. The company also routinely states that its cameras have helped law enforcement prevent hundreds of potential crimes, return thousands of stolen cars, and identify hundreds of wanted criminals.
The ACLU’s documentation of more than 55 localities ending contracts in the past year, combined with NPR’s finding that at least 30 have done so since the start of 2025, suggests the community reckoning with this technology is not slowing down.
