Flock Safety's camera network is losing cities fast as backlash spreads

League City, Texas just handed Flock Safety another loss. Residents voted this week against letting their police department keep using the company's license plate readers, and the cameras are now slated for removal. That vote lands on top of a wave of exits: Monroe, Ohio; Newburgh, New York; Richmond, Virginia; Hopkinton and New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Lansing, Michigan have all moved to end their Flock contracts in the past three months. Police in East Bridgewater and Grafton, Massachusetts have also announced plans to walk away.

Flock, founded in 2017, sells license plate readers, drones and microphone-based edge devices that listen for gunshots and other sounds to help crack cases like stolen cars and missing people. More than 100,000 of its cameras are running nationwide. The retreat isn't brand new: Asheville, North Carolina lost access after its city voted to terminate in August, and the El Paso County Sheriff's Office in Colorado said in September it would stop using the cameras. Sheriff Joseph Roybal said in a press release that dropping Flock was the right call for the county, adding his deputies have the tools and experience to catch criminals without it.

Flock isn't taking it quietly. The company told TechCrunch that police departments nationwide use its tech daily to solve violent crimes, find suspects and locate missing people, and that pulling a working tool pushes public safety backward. It also insists every customer owns its data and controls who sees it, that it doesn't sell data, and that it has no contract with ICE. In August, Flock shortened the default storage window for new customers to seven days, down from 30, and started requiring agencies to enter a case code before searching its database.

Misuse allegations have added fuel. In August, an officer in Brentwood, Missouri was accused of using Flock cameras to stalk his ex-wife during their divorce, and in September an East Texas officer was sentenced to prison for stalking his ex-girlfriend and her family with the system. Immigration access is another flashpoint: Ithaca, New York passed a resolution in March to terminate its contract, citing what it called proven instances of federal agents tapping Flock infrastructure without the contracting locality's authorization, and reports that ICE and the ATF used query results from its license plate database to investigate immigrants.

Privacy advocates say the anger was predictable. Tatiana Rice of the Future of Privacy Forum told TechCrunch that a camera at the end of your street feels tangible in a way that everyday online data trading does not, which is why Flock draws fire. Adam Schwartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said many cities adopted Flock a few years back without residents knowing, similar to data centers appearing before communities understand what's happening. In South Windsor, Connecticut, cameras went live last year with no public warning or vote — and in October the town voted to remove them.

The fight has gone statewide and federal. Florida barred license plate readers from state highways this summer, while Texas paused state funding for Flock. In September, President Donald Trump said he liked the technology because of law enforcement, even as a Reuters poll that month found more Americans dislike it than like it. Rep. Thomas Massie introduced the Flock-Off Act to block federal money for Flock-style surveillance, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Jeff Merkley rolled out the Ban Flock Act in October. Not everyone is bailing: Cleveland extended its Flock contract this summer but restricted immigration-related searches and limited database access to Cleveland Police alone, cutting off a regional fusion center that had been given access.