Hopkinton cancels Flock contract, asks for cameras to be removed

Our Take

Credit to CBS Boston for getting this one on tape: a town actually said "no more" after signing on the dotted line with Flock Safety. That's rarer than it should be. Most of these contracts get rubber-stamped by a council in a ten-minute agenda item, and once the poles go up, getting them taken back down usually takes a lawsuit, a scandal, or years of grinding advocacy. Hopkinton skipped straight to cancellation, which tells you something about how quickly public opinion can sour once residents realize what they actually agreed to.

We don't have the full backstory on what pushed Hopkinton's officials to reverse course, and we're not going to guess. But the pattern is familiar: a department sells ALPRs as a narrow tool for recovering stolen cars, then the network quietly expands into a searchable log of everywhere every driver in town has been, shared with who knows how many outside agencies through Flock's national data-sharing system. When people find out how that actually works, "cancel the contract" starts sounding pretty reasonable.

This is exactly the kind of local win we want to see replicated — a town deciding surveillance infrastructure isn't worth the trade-off and demanding the hardware come down, not just sit dormant. If you want to see whether Flock cameras are watching your own streets, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push your local council the way Hopkinton did, our take-action page has the tools to get started.