Port St. Lucie removes 18 Flock cameras as privacy concerns grow

Our Take

Credit to WPBF 25 News for covering a rare reversal: Port St. Lucie taking down 18 Flock Safety license plate readers after residents pushed back on privacy grounds. Most ALPR stories we track are about expansion — more cameras, more data-sharing agreements, more quiet creep into daily life. A city actually removing hardware is news precisely because it almost never happens.

We don't know every detail of what drove this decision, and the report is still thin on specifics about the city's internal review or what replaces the gap in coverage. But the pattern is familiar: a department adopts Flock with little public debate, residents start asking who sees their travel patterns and for how long, and officials find themselves explaining a system they can't fully account for. That's the core problem with ALPR networks everywhere — they're sold as a narrow tool for stolen cars and AMBER Alerts, then quietly become a dragnet logging everyone's movements, Flock included, often with minimal oversight and vague retention rules.

If you want to see whether cameras like these are watching your own routes, check our map. And if Port St. Lucie's pushback inspires you to raise the same questions in your own town, our take-action guide walks through how to start.