Fort Collins cancels its Flock Safety contract

Our Take

Credit to the Coloradoan for reporting on something we don't get to cover often: a city actually walking away from Flock Safety before its contract even ran out. Most of these deals just quietly auto-renew year after year while city councils rubber-stamp the invoices. Fort Collins cutting bait a year early, and saying it wants to build its own surveillance policy from scratch, is the kind of accountability moment that should be happening in hundreds of other towns right now.

What's notable here isn't just the cancellation, it's the signal it sends. Flock's whole business model depends on cities treating these contracts as permanent infrastructure rather than a recurring purchase decision that elected officials have to justify every single cycle. When a city says "actually, we're going to slow down and figure out what we actually want our surveillance posture to be," that's a crack in the assumption that network growth is inevitable. Other councils watching this should be asking the same questions about cost, mission creep, and who actually has access to the plate-read data being collected on every driver who passes through town.

If you want to see whether your own neighborhood has quietly signed up for this kind of always-on tracking, check our camera map. And if Fort Collins has you wondering what it takes to actually get a contract reconsidered where you live, our take-action page has a starting point.