Flock Safety's Private Surveillance State: 80 Cities Are Pulling Out

In June 2026, workers in Dayton, Ohio pulled black trash bags over 72 automated surveillance cameras mounted on city streets. The cameras belong to Flock Safety. The city had just finished auditing its Flock data logs and found more than 7,000 searches conducted for immigration enforcement purposes: searches explicitly banned under the city's own policy. They couldn't immediately remove the cameras because of contract terms they weren't sure how to exit. So they bagged them. ^[1]

Dayton isn't alone. By May 2026, at least 80 U.S. cities had canceled or deactivated their Flock Safety contracts. ^[2] Evanston, Illinois. Mountain View, California. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eugene, Oregon. Santa Cruz. Flagstaff. A list that's added names almost weekly through 2026.

The revolt is real. But so is Flock's growth. The company raised $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in March 2025. ^[3] It still has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 6,000+ communities across 49 states. Its cameras scan over 20 billion license plates per month. ^[4]

To understand how this happened (how a startup that launched in 2017 built the largest private vehicle-location database in American history, how federal immigration agents got inside it, and why cities are now lining up to leave) you need to understand the business model. It's not about cameras. It's about data.

How Flock Built It: The SaaS Playbook for Surveillance

Flock Safety launched in 2017 out of Atlanta. The pitch was simple: small police departments wanted surveillance cameras but couldn't afford sophisticated infrastructure. Flock would provide cameras cheap (sometimes free upfront) in exchange for a subscription contract and data rights.

The subscription runs roughly $3,000 per camera per year. ^[5] For a small-town police chief, that's less than half a year's salary for a patrol officer. For a homeowners association (HOAs were Flock's first major customer base and still represent 40% of the company's business), it's affordable monthly dues math.

What the contracts didn't emphasize (what many signing officials say they didn't fully understand) was the data-sharing model underneath.

Every Flock camera logs every license plate that passes it. Timestamp. GPS coordinates. Direction of travel. Vehicle description. That data goes into Flock's proprietary system, called Safety Network. And Safety Network has a checkbox called "Enable National Lookup."

Toggle it on, and your agency's camera data gets shared with every other agency in Flock's national network. In exchange, your officers can search every plate captured by every other Flock camera in the country. It's designed to be irresistible: the more you share, the more you get. The more cities that join, the more valuable the product becomes for everyone already in.

This is the mechanism that built the national database. Not a government program. Not an act of Congress. A checkbox in a software interface, checked off by thousands of local police administrators who wanted better crime-fighting tools and didn't fully clock what they were building together.

By 2025, that network had crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue: growing roughly 70% year over year. ^[3] Investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Tiger Global had poured a total of $658 million into the company. ^[5] By April 2026, the company's internal valuation had climbed to $8.4 billion. ^[5]

Y Combinator, which backed Flock early, has since publicly defended the company against critics. Flock's CEO has called DeFlock (a crowdsourced map that documents where Flock cameras are located) "terroristic." ^[6]

Who's Actually in the Network

The question of federal access to Flock data has multiple answers, depending on how you count the pathways.

Front door: Some federal agencies have formal agreements with Flock or with specific local departments that authorize direct access. ICE agents have reportedly asked local police departments to run Flock searches on their behalf: more than 4,000 searches conducted for immigration purposes, according to reporting. ^[9]

Back door: In Washington state, at least eight local law enforcement agencies enabled direct data sharing with U.S. Border Patrol during 2025, in some cases without the knowledge of the cities that owned the cameras. The Washington state legislature passed SB 6002, the Driver Privacy Act, in 2026 specifically to close this pathway: requiring warrants for most ALPR data sharing with federal agencies. ^[10]

Side door: The Mountain View and Illinois examples show a third pathway: unauthorized or unauthorized-but-tolerated access through default data sharing settings that agencies didn't actively monitor.

The SFPD case illustrates scale. A class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court in February 2026 alleges that out-of-state and federal agencies (including ICE, CBP, FBI, and ATF) queried SFPD's Flock cameras more than 1.6 million times in seven months. ^[11] That's 1.6 million searches of a single city's cameras. California's ALPR Privacy Act explicitly prohibits sharing ALPR data with federal agencies without case-by-case authorization. The lawsuit is seeking $2,500 per violation.

In Dayton, the 7,000 immigration searches discovered in the audit came from outside agencies. The city's own policy prohibited using Flock data for immigration enforcement. Nobody was monitoring whether outside agencies were violating that policy until the city ran the audit. ^[1]

The school camera problem adds a layer. Flock has contracts with hundreds of K-12 school districts. An investigation by The 74 found that in a single month, more than 3,100 police agencies ran over 733,000 searches on cameras belonging to just one Texas school district: the Alvin Independent School District, which paid for eight cameras. More than 620 of those searches were immigration-related. Thirty law enforcement agencies from Florida, Georgia, Indiana, and Tennessee ran immigration checks on a school parking lot camera in Texas. ^[12]

The Revolt: How 80 Cities Got to No

The turning point wasn't a single scandal. It was accumulation.

In early 2025, a few dozen cities had rejected Flock contracts on privacy grounds. By February 2026, NPR reported that at least 30 localities had deactivated cameras or canceled contracts since the start of 2025. ^[2] By May 2026, that number had climbed past 80. ^[13]

What changed was the Trump administration's immigration enforcement intensification. When ICE began large-scale operations in early 2025, sanctuary cities started looking at their Flock contracts differently. A surveillance system that was supposed to catch stolen cars could be (and was being) used to locate undocumented immigrants. Cities that had explicitly passed sanctuary policies were funding a network that made those policies irrelevant.

The specific communities that canceled in 2026 include:

Mountain View, CA: unanimous council vote, February 2026, after discovering 600,000 unauthorized searches ^[7]
Evanston, IL: contract terminated after state audit found CBP pilot program ^[8]
Dayton, OH: program suspended after 7,000 immigration searches found, cameras bagged in trash bags, June 2026 ^[1]
Santa Cruz, CA and Santa Clara County: contracts terminated, 2026 ^[14]
Hillsborough, NC: terminated after finding contract language allowing Flock to share data with any government entity based on "good faith belief" of need ^[2]
Woodburn, OR: program suspended for 60 days over ICE concerns ^[15]
Los Altos Hills, CA: terminated in January 2026 after ICE concerns ^[15]
Edmonds, WA: the third city in Snohomish County to cancel, May 2026 ^[16]

The resistance has also taken legislative form. Colorado passed SB 26-070 in 2026, requiring a warrant before police can share ALPR data with federal agencies. ^[17] Kentucky passed HB 58, limiting ALPR data retention to 90 days: the first state to cap retention this way. Maine passed a comprehensive ALPR privacy law. Washington's SB 6002 restricts bulk data sharing. Illinois's existing law against using ALPR data for immigration or abortion enforcement was what caught the Evanston CBP issue in the first place.

Columbus, Ohio was still debating in early June 2026. City Council member Emmanuel Remy said he wanted to review whether the city's Flock contract exposes residents to immigration enforcement. ^[18] The city's contract totals $228,000. No cancellation as of this writing.

The Legal Front: What the Courts Are Saying

The constitutional question (does pervasive ALPR tracking constitute a Fourth Amendment search?) has started getting judicial answers in 2026, and the answers are mixed.

In Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, decided January 27, 2026, a federal court ruled that Norfolk's 176 cameras across 75 locations didn't constitute an unconstitutional search. The plaintiff, Lee Schmidt, had been logged 526 times in three and a half months without being a suspect. The court held that individual location snapshots, even frequent ones, don't add up to a comprehensive enough catalogue of movement to require a warrant. Schmidt and his co-plaintiff Crystal Arrington (849 camera hits in the same period) announced plans to appeal. ^[19]

In Washington, the Court of Appeals in State v. Simonson held in January 2026 that an ALPR capture on a public road is equivalent to an officer manually noting a plate: no Fourth Amendment protection. ^[19]

But the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has documented a court that reached the opposite conclusion (vehicle fingerprinting through pervasive camera surveillance "likely violates the Fourth Amendment" based on the mosaic theory) that tracking a vehicle's movements over time constitutes a search even if individual sightings don't. That case is working its way through the system.

The civil litigation is more immediate. The San Francisco class action seeking $2,500 per violation across 1.6 million unauthorized federal queries exposes Flock to potential liability in the billions. A separate Home Depot class action argues that parking lot ALPR cameras operated by Flock amount to unlawful commercial surveillance of customers. ^[11]

Flock's legal team is busy. The company's public response to each new lawsuit has been to emphasize that it "takes privacy seriously" and that any unauthorized access resulted from configuration issues, not design. Critics note that a "configuration issue" that created 1.6 million federal searches of California data suggests the design made that outcome easy.

What Flock Says

Flock Safety maintains that it's a crime-fighting tool, not a surveillance infrastructure. The company says the cities leaving are a small fraction of its customer base. CEO Garrett Langley has said that the number of new agencies joining the network still significantly outpaces the number leaving. ^[2]

On federal access, the company's line: customers control their sharing settings. If they chose to share with federal agencies, that was their choice. When Flock discovered access happening without clear authorization (as in the Illinois CBP pilot), it moved to correct it.

The $275M funding round in March 2025 was announced with language about expanding crime-solving technology and strengthening communities. The lead investors (Andreessen Horowitz's Bedrock fund) didn't publicly comment on the immigration enforcement use cases. ^[3]

What the company doesn't advertise: 99.5% of license plates logged have no connection to any active investigation. Every plate on every car that drives past any Flock camera gets logged, regardless of whether the car is connected to anything. That's the model. That's also the problem.

What You Can Do

Find out if your city has Flock cameras. Many cities post their surveillance technology inventory online. If yours doesn't, file a public records request. DeFlock (deflock.me) has mapped roughly 90,000 ALPR cameras across the country: searchable by location.
Attend city council meetings and ask specifically about federal sharing settings. The Mountain View and Dayton revelations came from audit logs: publicly available data that few cities had bothered to examine. Your city probably has similar logs.
Contact your state legislators about ALPR legislation. Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Washington, and Illinois have passed meaningful protections. Most states have nothing. A state law requiring warrants for federal data sharing changes the legal calculus for every city in the state.
Know your state's existing protections. If you're in California, the ALPR Privacy Act already prohibits some of what Flock enabled. Find out what's in your state.
Support the class action if you drive in California. The San Francisco lawsuit is seeking plaintiffs who drove near SFPD Flock cameras between August 2024 and February 2025. Gibbs Mura has details.

The Bottom Line

Flock Safety didn't build a surveillance state in secret. It built one in public, one city council vote at a time, with a product that genuinely does reduce car theft and catch some criminals. The privacy costs were in the fine print of the data sharing agreements, and most signing officials didn't read the fine print carefully.

Now the fine print is being read. By city auditors in Dayton. By state investigators in Illinois. By lawyers in San Francisco. By activists with crowdsourced maps and city council attendance sheets.

Eighty cities is not a rounding error. It's also not yet enough to break Flock's business. But the trash bags on cameras in Dayton are a specific image for a specific moment: a city that couldn't figure out how to cancel its contract, so it covered up the product instead. That's not a surveillance system running smoothly. That's one cracking under the weight of what it built.

References

Published: June 5, 2026