Flock Safety: 6 Cities Cancelled

Our Take

Credit to the channel What's Going On for pulling together a list that a lot of us have been tracking city by city: Fort Collins, Eugene, Madison, Knoxville, Syracuse, and one more all walked away from Flock Safety contracts. That's not a coincidence or a fluke in a budget cycle. It's a pattern, and it's the pattern we want to see spread. Councils are starting to ask the obvious questions — who audits these searches, where does the data actually go, and what happens when a camera net built for stolen cars gets used for something else entirely — and they're not liking the answers they get back.

What makes these cancellations worth your attention is that none of them required a court to force the issue. They happened because residents showed up, asked for logs, and made elected officials uncomfortable enough to pull the plug. That's the playbook. Flock's pitch is always about auto theft and Amber Alerts, but the network doesn't stay narrow once it's installed, and six cities deciding the tradeoff isn't worth it should embolden every other city council sitting on a renewal vote right now.

If you want to know whether your own neighborhood is already wired into this network, check our camera map before you assume it isn't. And if your city hasn't had its reckoning yet, there's a concrete path laid out on our take-action page for pushing it there.