What was sold as a simple license-plate tool to catch car thieves has become a warrantless, nationwide tracking grid — and a stalking machine for cops with a grudge. Residents figured it out. Councils are finally listening.
Flock Safety planted tens of thousands of solar-powered cameras in 49 states. They don’t just snap plates. They log make, model, color, damage, and bumper stickers. Officers can search the network in plain English with an AI tool called Free Form. Data hops between agencies with almost no warrant and almost no friction. That is not “public safety.” That is a permanent record of where ordinary people drive, shop, worship, and sleep.
The Institute for Justice says more than 100 jurisdictions have canceled contracts with Flock and other automated license-plate reader vendors. Advocacy group DeFlock puts 2026 cancellations, rejections, and deactivations at 56-plus cities and towns — and climbing. The Washington Post documented at least 50 officers charged or accused of misusing these systems, many to hunt down wives, girlfriends, and exes. That is the product. That is why the cameras are coming down.
By the numbers — dragnet vs. backlash. 100,000+ cameras vs. 100+ contract endings, 56+ exits in 2026, and 50+ officers accused of misuse.
Arizona and Texas: The revolt hits home
Tempe, Arizona, flipped the switch this week. Mayor Corey Woods said the cameras helped solve crimes — and that wasn’t enough. “Recent misuse of automated license plate reader systems in Arizona and nationwide has raised concerns about the risks that come with the technology,” Woods said. “We have to be able to provide public safety in a way that maintains the trust of our community. For Tempe, that means taking these cameras down.” Tempe will not replace them. Data gets deleted unless it is tied to an active case.
Cave Creek terminated its contract the same day. Surprise canceled earlier in August. Flagstaff, Sedona, and South Tucson already walked away. An Arizona poll found a majority of voters opposed to Flock. Even in a state that likes law-and-order rhetoric, people drew a line at mass tracking.
Masses rising against FLOCK dictatorship cameras: 20,000 vouch for the guy
Texas is moving fast. Pflugerville’s council unanimously killed its deal and deactivated 28 cameras after learning hundreds of outside organizations had run nearly 1.6 million searches on local data in six months. Kendall County will not renew more than 50 cameras. In Hood County, Constable John Shirley didn’t wait for a polite removal. Officials unplugged units and covered them.
“These cameras were constantly scanning and recording regular folks just going about their day,” Shirley said. “That kind of permanent, warrantless tracking doesn’t belong in a free society. By unplugging and covering them, we’re making it clear: privacy isn’t optional, and mass surveillance isn’t how we do things here.”
X users cheered Tempe and Pflugerville within hours. One post put it bluntly: every city should do this. Another noted Flock sometimes refuses to yank hardware after cancellation, forcing towns to bag the lenses themselves. That is not a vendor. That is a company that treats your streets like its property.
The exit wave. Cancellations were a trickle through 2024. They exploded in 2026.
The stalking file is not a footnote — it is the product in action
Flock told cities it was a license-plate reader. Officers used it as a personal GPS on women they wanted to control.
A Washington Post investigation found officers using the network to track spouses, exes, and women they wanted to meet. In Georgia, a suburban police chief ran roughly 600 lookups on his ex and her teenage daughter. In Milwaukee, Officer Josue Ayala searched a partner and her ex about 179 times, then resigned and faced a misconduct charge. In Florida, former Orange City officer Jarmarus Brown allegedly queried his ex more than 100 times and shared video from a department laptop. In Kansas, a police chief was accused of tracking an ex 164 times — and confronting her while she was with another man. In North Carolina, a Mooresville officer allegedly ran 31 searches on her boyfriend’s ex-wife and logged most of them as “motor vehicle infractions.” A Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer was arrested for unauthorized Flock access. Five Albany, Georgia, officers were arrested. Greer, South Carolina, fired two.
“The Worst Threat to Freedom” (Flock Surveillance Cameras) – Awaken with JP
The Institute for Justice’s abuse database now lists well over 100 incidents: romantic stalking, bogus stops, and non-law-enforcement fishing. Investigators say the published cases are the ones that leaked. Most victims only learned they were being hunted after they searched their own plates on public audit sites. That is the opposite of a tightly controlled investigative tool.
Flock’s answer was to shrink default retention from 30 days to seven and add more audit logging. Civil-liberties lawyers called it window dressing. If the search box still works without a warrant, a shorter timer does not fix the Constitution.
Where cities are dumping Flock. Midwest and Northeast lead the named list; Texas and Arizona are the live news wave this week. Counts are documented names in reporting, not a full census.
Cities from coast to coast are dumping the contract
Midwest and Great Lakes. Dayton, Ohio, became the symbol of the revolt: workers climbed ladders and pulled trash bags over 72 cameras after an audit found more than 7,000 immigration-related searches that violated city policy. Appleton, Wisconsin, shut the system off because officials no longer trusted Flock’s “integrity.” Oshkosh and Verona fought to get hardware removed. Sheboygan covered units and demanded they come down. Evanston and Oak Park, Illinois, canceled after a state audit showed Customs and Border Protection had been given access in violation of Illinois law. Flock later reinstalled some Evanston cameras without permission. The city sent a cease-and-desist. That is how a “partner” behaves when the customer says no.
City roll call. Drop this as a full-width graphic in the “coast to coast” section.
Minnesota’s backlash is spreading: St. Paul, Duluth, Sherburne County, Isanti County, West St. Paul, Columbia Heights, Brooklyn Park, and Shorewood have ended or paused use. Cameras have been smashed, stolen, or cut in Faribault, Winona, Edina, Plymouth, Eden Prairie, and Nowthen. Residents did not wait for another council study.
West Coast. Mountain View, California, shut its network after learning federal agencies had accessed local data without the city’s knowledge — including a statewide lookup setting that had been on almost from day one. El Cerrito let the contract die. LAPD declined to renew after an audit found a 32.3 percent false-positive rate on stolen-vehicle alerts. Eugene, Springfield, Bend, and Woodburn, Oregon, pulled out. Redmond, Washington, voted unanimously to cancel and remove 24 readers. Olympia suspended its pilot. Edmonds followed. Shoreline rejected a proposal before a single camera went up.
FLOCK 2.0 IS HERE — THEY’RE PUTTING AI DICTATORSHIP CAMERAS ON GARBAGE TRUCKS TO SPY ON EVERY HOME
Northeast. Cambridge, Massachusetts, terminated after Flock technicians installed new cameras after the council had already ordered a shutdown — a “material breach of trust,” the city said. Framingham, Salem, Bellingham, and Littleton cut ties. Littleton had to order cameras powered down again after Flock restored power without notice. At least nine Massachusetts communities have walked. Ithaca and Tompkins County, New York, ended contracts. Saranac Lake banned the cameras outright. Narragansett, Rhode Island, voted unanimously to cancel. South Portland, Maine, terminated immediately. Harrisonburg, Virginia, went dark after a unanimous council vote citing Fourth Amendment concerns.
Elsewhere. Monroe County and Bloomington, Indiana, canceled. Fort Collins, Colorado, terminated and took 15 cameras down in days. Bandera, Texas, voted them out. Menominee, Michigan, ended an arrangement after cameras were activated without council approval. Hillsborough, North Carolina, terminated after finding contract language that let Flock share data with almost any government entity on a “good faith” belief. Arkansas cities have started pulling the plug as well.
The pattern is the same everywhere: officials were told they were buying a plate reader. They got a searchable national dossier on everyone who drives past a pole. Then they discovered other agencies — and individual officers — were already inside the data.
Stalking lookups One officer, one bar. A Georgia police chief ran ~600 plate searches on his ex and her daughter.
Broken promises and a company that will not leave
Flock told the public these were local tools. In practice, a “national lookup” setting quietly opened local cameras to far-flung agencies. Illinois law barred using plate data for immigration or abortion investigations. An audit found the company had still given CBP a pipeline. Cities that thought they had opted out discovered they had not. When contracts ended, some towns found cameras still live. Dayton bagged them. Hood County covered them. Verona and Oshkosh had to fight to get hardware collected. Evanston and Littleton caught units coming back online. That is not a glitch. That is a company that treats cancellation as a suggestion.
Bellingham, Massachusetts, Police Chief Kenneth Fitzgerald said the quiet part out loud: features “go beyond what most people would think of as a traditional license plate reader.” He had told the public the system was plates only. It wasn’t.
How ALPRs are being abused. Institute for Justice catalog: 140 documented incidents — 39 romantic stalking, 55 other officer misconduct, 31 wrongful stops/errors.
Institute for Justice attorney Michael Soyfer put the legal point cleanly: “Rather than narrowly target criminals, [ALPRs] collect troves of data on ordinary people’s movements and compile them in a database officers can freely access on demand. That has predictably led to widespread abuse, which will continue until we implement robust safeguards like a warrant requirement.”
Flock still markets crime stats. Some departments say the cameras helped find stolen cars or a suspect. Fine. A useful lead does not justify logging the movements of everyone else. A free country does not need a private firm to build a real-time map of its citizens so a jealous officer can refresh it on his phone.
Watch the next trick. Several cities that dumped Flock immediately signed with Axon — body-cam giant, Taser vendor, and now street-light and “real-time crime center” player. Canceling Flock is not the finish line if the replacement hides in the lamp head and pipes private doorbells into the same map. Denver and Longmont already walked that path. The fight is against warrantless location dragnets, not one logo.
What this actually is
Flock built a product that lets government watch the innocent by default and the guilty as a bonus. Officers used it to stalk. Federal agencies used it in ways local councils never approved. The company kept selling, kept expanding past 100,000 cameras, and treated public outrage as a PR problem instead of a constitutional one.
Tempe, Cave Creek, Pflugerville, Dayton, Cambridge, Mountain View, Evanston, Eugene, Hood County, and dozens more decided they would rather solve crime the old way than keep feeding a machine that records every trip to church, the grocery store, and a girlfriend’s apartment.
That is the correct default in a republic. If your city still has these poles up, the question is no longer whether Flock “works.” The question is why your council is still renting a stalking database and calling it public safety.
—-The Whatfinger News Team: Sgt Pat and Alex
Resources
Vids on FLOCK
Outside Links
- Map Shows Cities, Counties Canceling Flock Cameras Amid Backlash — Newsweek
- Nearly 100 Local Governments Across U.S. Have Turned Off Their Flock Cameras — Mediaite
- Flock Camera Cancellations: City Tracker — Finding Flock
- The IJ Database of ALPR Abuse — Institute for Justice
- Minnesota communities reconsider using Flock cameras — Star Tribune
- Flock cameras: Which Arizona cities are reconsidering? — KTAR
- Mountain View police turn off Flock cameras, allege unauthorized use — San Francisco Chronicle
- Why Cities Are Putting Trash Bags Over Flock’s License Plate Readers — Business Insider
- Their cities dropped Flock surveillance cameras. They’re still being watched — The Guardian
- Flock Safety Crosses 100,000 Cameras as 53 Cities Cancel Over Unauthorized Federal Data Access — TechTimes
- Who Approved This: Flock Contract Tracker
- Flock Contract Cancellations ledger — Who Approved This
- Ban Flock Cameras tracker
- CMPD officer arrested on charge of Flock camera misuse — News & Observer
- Mooresville officer arrested for Flock camera misuse — News & Observer
- North Carolina police officer arrested for alleged illegal use of Flock cameras — The Epoch Times
- Flock announces platform changes after public backlash — The Epoch Times
- “Get the Flock out”: The growing backlash to AI Flock cameras, explained — Vox
- Flock AI cameras allegedly used by police to stalk ex-girlfriends and partners — TechSpot
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