Denver looking for license plate reader company contracts amid privacy controversy over Flock Safety

Our Take

Credit to CBS Colorado for tracking this one closely: Denver's response to mounting public anger over Flock Safety isn't to reconsider whether it needs a citywide network of plate-reading cameras — it's to go find a different vendor to build one. That's the tell. City officials aren't questioning the premise that every car entering and leaving Denver should be logged, time-stamped, and stored in a searchable database. They're just worried about the optics of one particular company's name being attached to it.

That distinction matters because the privacy problems people are raising about Flock — who gets access to the data, how long it's kept, whether local police can informally share it with ICE or out-of-state agencies, whether there's any real audit trail — are not unique to Flock's software. They're baked into the business model of automated license plate reading itself. Swap in a different company's cameras and you still have a system that tracks the daily movements of every driver, protester, churchgoer, and domestic violence survivor in the city, with a paper trail that's only as good as whatever policy the city council feels like enforcing this year.

If Denver residents want a real fix, the conversation needs to be about whether blanket ALPR surveillance belongs in the city at all — not which contractor gets the check. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and visit our take-action page for tools to push back before the next vendor signs on the dotted line.