Public comment on Flock policies during Amarillo City Council meeting | Sept. 8, 2026

Our Take

Credit to KFDA NewsChannel 10 for getting cameras inside a city council meeting where Amarillo Police Chief Thomas Hover had to answer for how his department uses Flock Safety's license plate readers and what databases that data touches. This is exactly the kind of local accountability moment that rarely makes it past a city government's own minutes — a police chief on record, in public, fielding questions from residents about a surveillance network most of them never voted to install.

We don't have the full transcript, and we're not going to pretend we do. But the pattern is familiar: a department rolls out ALPR cameras promising narrow use cases like stolen vehicles or Amber Alerts, and then residents start asking who else can query the system, how long the data sits in storage, and whether outside agencies — including federal ones — get a look. Those questions matter because Flock's value to law enforcement is precisely that it's a searchable, networked database of everyone's movements, not just flagged plates. Once that pipeline exists, mission creep is the rule, not the exception.

Amarillo residents pushing their council for clarity are doing what every community with a Flock contract should be doing. If you want to see whether your own neighborhood already has these cameras watching, check our camera map, and if you want to push back at your own city council, our take-action page has the tools to get started.