Pflugerville ends partnership with Flock Safety

Our Take

CBS Austin's report on Pflugerville is a textbook example of why "local control" promises from Flock Safety don't hold up. City officials thought they were running a contained camera network for their own police department. Instead, records showed hundreds of outside agencies — departments the city never vetted or approved — had access to that data. The cameras are now covered and the contract is done, but the bigger story is how long this kind of access sharing goes unnoticed until someone bothers to pull the records.

This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: a city council approves ALPRs for a narrow purpose, like finding stolen cars or missing persons, and nobody fully grasps that Flock's network defaults to broad data-sharing across jurisdictions unless someone actively locks it down. Credit to CBS Austin for digging into the access logs instead of just taking the sales pitch at face value. That kind of accountability reporting is exactly what gets cities to actually audit what they signed up for.

Pflugerville pulling out is a win, but it shouldn't have taken a records request to get there. If you want to know whether your own city's cameras are quietly feeding a few hundred strangers' departments, check our camera map and push your local officials for the same kind of transparency Pflugerville only got after the fact.