Fort Collins City Council votes to cancel Flock camera use, remove cameras in city limits

Our Take

Credit to CBS Colorado for covering this one, because wins like Fort Collins don't happen often enough to take for granted. A city council looked at Flock Safety's network of automated license plate readers and decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze — not the vague promises about solving crime, not the vendor's sales pitch, none of it. They voted to cancel the contract and physically remove the cameras. That's a rare reversal in a surveillance landscape that usually only grows.

What makes this matter beyond Fort Collins city limits is the precedent. Flock's whole business model depends on cities treating camera contracts as a one-way ratchet: sign up, expand coverage, renew without much scrutiny, repeat. Every time a council actually revisits the data — the lack of transparency around who accesses the footage, the absence of real oversight, the mission creep from "stolen cars" to general-purpose tracking of everyone's movements — it chips away at that assumption. Local elected officials have more leverage here than most residents realize, and this vote shows what happens when they use it.

If you want to know whether your own city or county has Flock cameras watching your commute, check our camera map. And if Fort Collins has you wondering how to push your own council toward a similar vote, our take-action page has the tools to get started.