85 Flock Camera Contracts Cancelled
The short version: OrbitReports reports 85 Flock contracts cancelled nationwide, with LAPD walking away from ALPR surveillance over civil liberties concerns rather than budget woes.
Our Take
When a department the size of LAPD backs out of a Flock contract and says the quiet part out loud — civil liberties, not cost — that's a signal worth paying attention to. As OrbitReports lays out in this roundup, 85 cancelled contracts isn't a fluke or a budget trend. It's a pattern of communities and agencies realizing that a network of always-on plate readers feeding a national database is a different animal than a few cameras bolted to a pole.
Cost arguments get headlines, but the LAPD reversal cuts to the real issue: once this data exists, it moves. It gets queried by other agencies, shared across jurisdictions, and used for purposes voters never approved. Cancelling a contract doesn't delete the normalization that already happened — but it does prove these systems aren't inevitable, and that public pressure and internal scrutiny can actually roll them back.
Credit to OrbitReports for tracking the numbers here instead of letting Flock's PR set the narrative. If you want to see whether your own city is wired in, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has the tools to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of OrbitReports, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.