1.6 MILLION Outside Searches in a City of 68,000?! 😳
The short version: Pflugerville, Texas ditched Flock after learning 459 outside agencies ran nearly 1.6 million searches on its ALPR data in just six months — a stark lesson in data-sharing creep.
Our Take
Credit to Derrick Evans for surfacing a number that should stop every city council member cold: 1.6 million outside searches against one mid-sized Texas city's Flock data in half a year. That's not a typo, and it's not local law enforcement doing local policing. It's hundreds of agencies, many with zero connection to Pflugerville, reaching into a database built on the movements of 68,000 residents and whoever happened to drive through town.
This is the part of the Flock pitch that never makes it into the city council presentation. The cameras aren't a closed system watching your intersection — they're nodes in a nationwide network where "interoperability" means any participating agency can query your plates, your patterns, your life, with little transparency about why. Pflugerville deserves credit for actually pulling the data and ending the contract once residents saw the scale. Most cities never ask the question, let alone get an answer like this one.
If your town has Flock cameras, you have every right to demand the same audit: how many agencies, how many searches, what justification. Check our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you, and use our take-action resources to push your council for the kind of accountability Pflugerville only found after the fact.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Derrick Evans, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.