Tempe shuts down Flock camera system over privacy concerns

Our Take

Credit to Arizona's Family (3TV/CBS 5) and reporter Mickaela Castillo for covering this one, because it's a rare win worth highlighting. Tempe didn't just quietly let a contract lapse — city officials flipped the cameras off and announced they're walking away from Flock Safety entirely. That's a direct response to residents who finally connected the dots between "public safety tool" and "every car in town gets logged, time-stamped, and stored in a database nobody voted on."

This matters because the Flock sales pitch always sounds reasonable in a city council chamber: find stolen cars, help detectives, deter crime. What doesn't get mentioned until later is the scale of the dragnet — plate, location, and timestamp data on every driver, retained and searchable, with vague rules about who else can access it and for how long. Tempe residents apparently did the math and decided they didn't sign up for that kind of tracking just to drive to the grocery store. More cities should be asking the same questions before they ever sign the check, not after the backlash.

If you want to see whether your own neighborhood has these cameras watching your daily commute, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for your city council to catch up, our take-action guide has concrete steps for pushing back before the contract gets signed, not after.