Cities pull back on Flock Safety

A camera that was sold to cities as a way to spot stolen cars is now getting ripped out by those same cities. In Mountain View, California, the City Council voted on February 24 to terminate its Flock Safety contract after an audit found federal agencies had accessed local license plate reader data without the city’s permission. (mountainview.gov) That was not a one-city glitch. Since the beginning of 2025, at least 30 localities have deactivated Flock cameras or canceled contracts, according to National Public Radio’s reporting, with places like Cambridge, Eugene, Santa Cruz, and Flagstaff all becoming part of the backlash. (wbur.org) Flock Safety is an Atlanta company that sells automated license plate readers, which are roadside cameras that photograph passing cars and turn those images into searchable records. The company says it works with more than 12,000 public safety customers, and its platform advertises nationwide network sharing and more than 20 billion monthly plate reads. (flocksafety.com 1) (flocksafety.com 2) The pitch is simple: a camera catches a plate, tags the time and location, and lets police search later for where a vehicle was seen. Flock says the default retention period for that data is 30 days, and that access is permission-based, logged, and controlled by the agency that owns the camera. (flocksafety.com 1) (flocksafety.com 2) The political problem starts when a tool built for one city behaves like part of a much larger network. Flock’s own product pages promote nationwide sharing between agencies, and critics say that turns a few cameras on local poles into a map of where people drove across town lines and state lines. (flocksafety.com) (wbur.org) In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city terminated its contract in December 2025 after Flock disclosed that two cameras had been installed in late November without the city’s awareness, even though the City Council had already paused the program. Cambridge called it a material breach of trust and removed the cameras. (cambridgema.gov) In Eugene, Oregon, police ended their Flock contract effective immediately on December 5, 2025. The department said it found vulnerabilities and limitations that raised concerns about operational needs, data security requirements, and community expectations. (eugene-or.gov) In Flagstaff, Arizona, the City Council voted in December 2025 to terminate the contract, and the city said all cameras covered by the deal were immediately turned off. By February 19, 2026, Flagstaff said the cameras had been physically removed. (flagstaff.az.gov) The Mountain View episode made the fear more concrete. Local reporting said at least six offices across four federal entities accessed data from the city’s first Flock camera between August and November 2024, and city leaders later shut the system down and ended the pilot. (localnewsmatters.org) (mountainview.gov) Flock has tried to answer that criticism in public. The company says there is no open access, no automatic sharing, and no federal access without approval, and in a 2026 post it said Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have direct access unless a local agency deliberately allows it. (flocksafety.com 1) (flocksafety.com 2) But city fights are no longer just about what the policy says on paper. They are about whether councils, police chiefs, and residents believe they can actually control a system once it is connected to a national law enforcement network and once a vendor has the technical ability to shape how sharing works. (flocksafety.com) (cnet.com) That is why this story keeps spreading from one council chamber to the next. A contract for 16 or 32 cameras now gets debated like a decision about building a citywide tracking layer, and in 2026 more local governments are deciding that the political cost of saying yes is higher than the policing case for keeping the cameras up. (cambridgema.gov) (flagstaff.az.gov)