EVEN THE LAPD IS WALKING AWAY FROM FLOCK

The Los Angeles Police Department, the second-largest police force in the country, just let its three-year contract with Flock Safety expire, effective July 11, 2026. This isn't some small suburban department making a symbolic gesture. This is one of Flock's biggest government customers stepping back and citing "serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues," with unresolved questions over data-sharing terms and privacy protections. If LAPD, with all its resources and legal firepower, couldn't get comfortable with Flock's data practices, that should tell every city council and county board still holding a contract exactly what kind of risk they're signing up for.

THE NUMBERS ARE ACCELERATING, NOT SLOWING DOWN

This isn't an isolated incident. It's part of a rapidly growing wave. Since 2021, 82 Flock contracts have been canceled across 28 states, and 39 of those cancellations happened in just the first five months of 2026 alone. That means the pace of cities walking away has roughly doubled this year compared to the previous four combined. Separately, one industry tracker counted at least 53 cities canceling amid Flock's expansion past 100,000 installed cameras nationwide.

The reasons keep repeating across every region: coastal California, the Pacific Northwest, New England, the Midwest, Virginia, Texas.

• Unauthorized or unclear access by outside and federal agencies (especially ICE/CBP) to local license plate data.
• Local data quietly exposed through Flock's national data sharing network, beyond what individual cities ever approved (Mountain View found 250+ unauthorized agencies ran roughly 600,000 searches on its data).
• New or existing state privacy laws creating compliance and legal liability that cities weren't prepared to absorb. (Are Dare County departments that contract them following the laws set out in Chapter 20, Article 3D of the North Carolina General Statutes?)
• Vendor misrepresentation of what the cameras actually do, which is the next point worth expanding on.
• Broader civil liberties pushback from residents and groups like the ACLU's "Get the Flock Out" campaign.
  
  THEY'RE NOT JUST READING PLATES AND CITIES ARE CATCHING ON

This is the part that should alarm anyone who was told these were simple license plate cameras. Oshkosh, Wisconsin rescinded its contract after the police chief said Flock misrepresented the system's ability to build a vehicle "heat map," essentially tracking movement patterns over time, not just snapping a plate number in passing. That's a fundamentally different capability than what most councils approved when they signed on.

Dayton, Ohio went further: after finding roughly 7,100 immigration related searches had run against explicit city policy, officials reportedly covered 72 cameras with garbage bags to physically stop the data collection while they sorted out the fallout. That's not a hypothetical privacy concern. That's a city government treating its own surveillance infrastructure like it had become a liability overnight.

And Mountain View's audit is maybe the clearest evidence yet: 250+ agencies outside the city, including out of state ones, ran hundreds of thousands of searches against local plate data because of a "nationwide" search setting Flock had enabled without full disclosure. That means the cameras weren't just reading plates for local traffic and crime purposes. They were feeding a searchable national network that local officials didn't fully understand or consent to, and in some documented cases, agencies used that network in ways that directly contradicted city policy.

Between misrepresented tracking capabilities, undisclosed national data access, and confirmed policy violations involving immigration enforcement, the pattern is consistent: these systems are doing far more than advertised, and cities are only finding out after the fact. LAPD's decision to walk away adds serious weight to that pattern, and it's a strong argument for why more departments should be demanding full transparency, or canceling outright, before they end up in the same position.

It's also worth pointing out that Flock's Transparency Portal, the tool meant to let residents see how their local cameras are actually being used, is entirely optional, and adoption right here on the Outer Banks proves how inconsistent that "transparency" really is. Duck has its portal fully turned on, giving residents real visibility into camera activity. Southern Shores and Nags Head only share partial data, leaving gaps in what the public can actually verify. Meanwhile, Nags Head's own police department data and the Dare County Sheriff's Office have no portal turned on at all, meaning residents have zero visibility into how their license plate data is being collected, searched, or shared. If transparency is optional and inconsistently applied even within a single department, that's not a technical detail. That's a decision. You can view the available information by accessing their portals on deflock.org.

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