Sterling Police end Flock camera contract citing privacy and trust concerns

Our Take

Credit to KWQC News for catching something we don't see often enough: a police department actually walking away from a Flock Safety contract. Most of the coverage we track involves cities adding more cameras, expanding networks, or quietly renewing deals nobody asked about publicly. Sterling PD citing "nationwide privacy concerns" as a reason to pull out, rather than budget cuts or a vendor dispute, is a meaningful shift in the conversation.

This matters because the standard pitch from Flock and its boosters is that ALPR networks are a neutral, inevitable tool — just infrastructure, like streetlights. Sterling's decision undercuts that framing. It suggests local officials are capable of weighing the tradeoffs between a marginal investigative convenience and the much bigger question of building a searchable, networked record of where every car in town goes, every day, indefinitely. That's not a small thing to reverse once it's running, and the fact that a department did it "immediately" signals the concerns were serious enough to not wait out the contract term.

We'd like to see more departments asked to explain, in public, exactly what trust and privacy problems they're worried about — and more city councils willing to act on the answer instead of rubber-stamping renewals. If you want to see whether your own community is running this kind of surveillance net, check our camera map, and if you want to push your local government toward the same kind of reconsideration Sterling just made, our take-action resources are a good place to start.