San Marcos becomes latest Central Texas city to cut ties with Flock cameras
The short version: San Marcos joins a growing list of Central Texas cities walking away from Flock Safety contracts, showing local pushback on ALPR surveillance is gaining real momentum.
Our Take
Credit to KXAN for tracking this one closely — San Marcos isn't an isolated blip. It's part of a pattern forming across Central Texas where city councils are actually reading the fine print on Flock Safety contracts and deciding the tradeoff isn't worth it. That matters because Flock's whole business model depends on momentum: every city that signs on makes the network bigger, the data-sharing pool wider, and the sales pitch to the next town easier. When a council says no, it breaks that chain.
What's notable here isn't just the vote itself but what it signals to neighboring jurisdictions still weighing their own contracts. Elected officials watching San Marcos, Austin, and other holdouts get real-world cover to ask harder questions — about retention periods, about who else can query the data, about whether a private company should be the one holding a searchable record of everyone's movements. Those questions don't go away just because a vendor promises the cameras only catch "bad guys."
If you're in a city currently debating a Flock deal, or wondering whether cameras are already up in your area, check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and head to our take-action page for tools to push back before your council signs on the dotted line.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KXAN, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.