Tonawanda votes to switch from Flock to Axon license plate readers

Our Take

WIVBTV reports that Tonawanda's town board voted to ditch Flock Safety and sign on with Axon for its license plate reader network. Headlines like this tend to frame the story as a procurement decision — which vendor, which price tag, which features — but that misses the point. Whether the cameras say Flock or Axon on the housing, the underlying function is identical: every car that passes gets its plate, location, and timestamp logged and stored in a searchable database, often shared across agencies with little public oversight.

Axon is best known for Tasers and body cameras, and its push into ALPRs signals that this is now a crowded, lucrative market with multiple companies competing to blanket American streets in automated tracking infrastructure. A town swapping suppliers doesn't mean residents suddenly get more privacy, more transparency, or more say in how this data gets used and retained — it just means a different corporate logo on the pole. The real questions are the ones vendor-switch stories rarely answer: what's the retention policy, who can access the data, is it shared with ICE or out-of-state police, and did residents get a real say before the vote.

If you live in or near Tonawanda, check our camera map to see what's already been deployed in your area, and visit our take-action page for tools to push your local council for real answers before these systems get rubber-stamped.