Lynnwood votes to end Flock license plate cameras after immigration enforcement concerns

Our Take

Credit to KOMO News and reporter Jackie Kent for putting a spotlight on what happens when a local surveillance vendor's sales pitch collides with reality. Flock Safety sells these cameras to city councils as a tool for recovering stolen vehicles and locating missing people. What Lynnwood residents discovered is that once that data exists in a searchable, shareable network, it doesn't stay in its lane. Immigration enforcement doesn't need its own camera network when local police departments have already built one and plugged it into a national lookup system.

This is exactly the pattern we've tracked at DeFlock USA: a city adopts ALPRs for narrow, sympathetic use cases, then the data ends up serving purposes voters were never told about and never consented to. A unanimous council vote to end the contract is rare and worth celebrating, but it only happened because a grassroots group, De-Flock Lynnwood, did the unglamorous work of showing up, asking hard questions, and refusing to accept vague reassurances from a vendor with a financial interest in expanding its footprint.

Every city with a Flock contract is one records request away from its own Lynnwood moment. If you want to see whether these cameras are already watching your commute, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a scandal to force your council's hand, our take-action page has what you need to start asking questions now.