What began as a trickle of municipal protests has become a torrent. Across the United States, cities and counties are severing ties with Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company behind the most widely deployed automated license plate reader (ALPR) network in the country. The numbers tell a striking story: at least 214 communities have dropped Flock since 2021, with 90 of those cancellations occurring in August 2026 alone — an average of three localities per day walking away from the technology, according to data compiled by Secure Justice, an Oakland-based anti-surveillance advocacy group.
From a Trickle to a Flood
Early in 2026, reporting indicated that approximately 30 cities had canceled or deactivated their Flock cameras since the start of 2025. By September of the same year, that figure had swelled to at least 54 cities voting to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock contracts just since the beginning of the year, according to data collected by the Washington Examiner. Those rejections span 23 states, with California and Wisconsin each recording seven cancellations or deactivations, followed by New York, Washington, and Massachusetts with four each, and Virginia with three.
Brian Hofer, executive director of Secure Justice and a former decade-long chair of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, described the trend in stark terms. Looking at the cancellation data, he noted it had “gone parabolic,” adding: “At that speed, if it goes another year, we’re talking serious money. That number is going to get huge, fast.”
The LAPD Audit That Changed the Conversation
Perhaps no single event crystallized the growing skepticism more than the Los Angeles Police Department’s decision to non-renew its longstanding contract with Flock Safety. The decision was driven by a searing internal audit that examined the company’s technology over a two-month window. That audit found that Flock’s ALPRs contributed to 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts during that period, producing a false-positive rate of 32.3 percent. For a city the size of Los Angeles, the implications of sending officers to confront drivers based on faulty data were impossible to ignore.
The LAPD’s departure from Flock carried symbolic weight beyond its operational significance. It signaled that even large, well-resourced police departments — the very institutions Flock’s technology was designed to serve — were not immune to the mounting questions surrounding the company’s accuracy and reliability.
Privacy, Immigration, and the Data-Sharing Question
The cancellations are not driven by a single concern. According to NPR’s reporting, cities across the political spectrum began reassessing their Flock contracts when questions arose about who could access the data the cameras collect. Flock’s AI-powered cameras scan license plates and capture vehicle details including make, model, and color, feeding into a national network that police can query to track specific vehicles well beyond their own city limits.
As federal immigration enforcement escalated in early 2026, residents in cities including Flagstaff, Arizona; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Eugene, Oregon; and Santa Cruz, California raised alarms about whether local camera data could be accessed by federal agencies as part of deportation operations. Grassroots campaigns took root, and in many of those communities, the pressure produced results. Flock has stated that each customer retains “sole authority over if, when, and with whom information is shared,” but that assurance has not been sufficient to quiet community concerns in dozens of municipalities.
Police Abuse: A Pattern That Proves Critics Right
Beyond the abstract fears of mass surveillance, concrete incidents of police misconduct have lent credibility to civil liberties arguments against the technology. In Bibb County, Georgia, three former sheriff’s deputies were arrested and accused of using Flock’s system to track individuals with whom they had personal relationships. The county’s chief deputy acknowledged the misuse but characterized the department’s response as swift. Similar incidents have unfolded at police departments across the country, with dozens of arrests tied to alleged misuse of license plate reader systems nationally.
In Florida, two police officers were arrested for misusing Flock, prompting Republican Governor Ron DeSantis to publicly declare that Flock cameras were “out of control” in his state. Florida’s state transportation office subsequently revoked local law enforcement’s ability to place license plate readers on state highways. The same week, Senator Josh Hawley announced an investigation into Flock Safety’s collection, retention, and dissemination of data generated by its AI surveillance cameras.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, offered a sweeping assessment of the moment: “This is the biggest, most grassroots privacy backlash that I’ve ever seen in more than 20 years working on these issues. It just shows people don’t like mass surveillance.”
Citizens Take Matters Into Their Own Hands
Where civic institutions have been slow to respond, some residents have acted unilaterally. Flock cameras have been vandalized in at least 36 states, with incidents including individuals sawing down the devices and others shooting at them with firearms, according to NPR. Other acts of resistance have included obscuring or stealing the cameras. While such actions carry legal consequences — including one Air Force engineer who faced charges and launched a legal defense crowdfunding campaign — they reflect the depth of public opposition to the technology in communities where official channels have stalled.
Flock’s Response: Changes That Haven’t Quieted Critics
Flock Safety has not remained passive in the face of this criticism. CEO Garrett Langley published a blog post announcing that the company would reduce its default data retention period from 30 days to seven, among other privacy-oriented changes. The company’s top lawyer followed with a blog post announcing updated terms of use that expressly prohibit customers from using Flock services to “mislead, harass, stalk, or otherwise impose upon or violate the legal rights of another person.” An audit assistance feature was also made mandatory to flag abnormal searches by officers.
Langley, in comments to Spectrum News, framed the company’s position in terms of balance: “The question is, how do we build a world where safety and our privacy can coexist? And I think the mistake is to prioritize one of them over the other.” He also claimed the company had “solved over a million crimes in the last 12 months.”
Despite these reforms, the political pressure has continued to intensify. Flock spokesperson Courtney Terlecki told Ars Technica that “new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by approximately 10 to one” so far in 2026, and the company declined to specify how many new customers it had acquired, citing only that its products are “trusted by over 5,000 communities.” That framing, however, does little to address the accelerating pace of departures.
The Broader Surveillance Architecture
Flock’s cameras represent only a portion of a vast and largely unregulated surveillance infrastructure. More than 135,000 automated license plate recognition cameras have been identified nationwide, with four out of every five attributed to Flock Safety, according to crowdsourced data from DeFlock.org. The company operates in 49 states. Will Freeman, a Colorado-based activist who runs the DeFlock.me website — which has mapped the locations of more than 76,000 license plate readers through crowdsourcing — told NPR that momentum against the cameras is growing and he expects more cities to follow.
Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, articulated what many critics see as the central issue: “Maybe in the past it didn’t feel like every red light cam really meant a pair of eyes was watching you, but with AI, that’s increasingly becoming the reality. And we’re already seeing how AI can morph ALPRs into a mass surveillance dragnet.”
What Comes Next
With at least two bills introduced in Congress to restrict automated license plate reader use, and cancellations accelerating at the municipal level, Flock Safety faces a crossroads. The company continues to sign new contracts even as old ones expire, but the terms of public debate have shifted considerably. Communities that once adopted the technology with minimal scrutiny are now subjecting it to public hearings, citizen campaigns, and independent audits.
Whether the wave of cancellations represents a temporary political moment or a durable recalibration of how Americans think about roadside surveillance remains to be seen. What is clear is that the backlash has moved beyond advocacy circles and into city councils, state legislatures, and the halls of the U.S. Senate — and it shows no signs of retreating.
This article draws on reporting from Activist Post, Ars Technica, NPR, Spectrum News, and ABC News.
