‘Time to de-Flock Manvel’: City votes to stop using Flock cameras

Our Take

Give the Manvel City Council credit: when they couldn't get straight answers about who can pull up residents' movements through Flock's ALPR network, they didn't just shrug and renew the contract anyway. They killed it, unanimously. That's rare. Most councils get a slick sales pitch about "solving crime" and never ask the follow-up question that actually matters — not "does it work," but "who's watching the watchers, and who else can log in."

That question is the whole ballgame with Flock. These cameras don't just serve the town that pays for them. Flock's network is built for cross-agency sharing, meaning your local PD can hand your travel history to departments, task forces, and federal agencies you've never heard of, often with no public accounting of it. When a city council can't answer a basic access question about a system already deployed on its own streets, that's not a minor bureaucratic gap — it's the entire product working as designed: opaque by default.

Credit to KHOU 11 for putting this vote on the record. Manvel is a small city, but this is exactly how the pushback against mass ALPR surveillance is happening nationwide: one council meeting, one uncomfortable question, one unanimous vote at a time. If you want to see whether Flock or similar cameras are already watching your own commute, check our camera map, and if your city is still writing the check, our take-action page has what you need to ask the same questions Manvel finally did.