Why Towns Are Pulling the Plug on Flock Cameras

The video above digs into a records request out of Pflugerville, Texas that pulled back the curtain on something a lot of city councils never fully grasped when they signed up for Flock Safety’s license plate readers: once your local data goes into a shared network, you lose control over who else can see it.

It’s not just your local police department anymore

When a town installs ALPR cameras, officials usually frame it as a local tool for local problems: catching a stolen car, finding a hit-and-run driver, helping with an amber alert. What often gets left out of the public pitch is that Flock’s system is built around data sharing by default. Agencies can opt into networks that let hundreds of other police departments, sometimes far outside the state, query plate reads captured on a hometown street corner.

That is reportedly the kind of discovery that came out of the Pflugerville records request: a look at just how many outside agencies had access to data generated by one city’s cameras. Even without knowing every detail of that specific case, the underlying pattern is well documented and consistent with how Flock’s network is designed to work.

Why this matters even if you have nothing to hide

License plate readers do not just catch people breaking the law. They log everyone who drives past, creating a time-stamped record of ordinary movement: where you worship, which clinic you visit, who you spend time with. When that record is shared across a sprawling, loosely governed network of agencies, the risk is not hypothetical. It becomes nearly impossible for any single city council, let alone an individual resident, to know who has looked at the data or why.

This is the gap that is pushing towns to reconsider their contracts. Officials who approved a camera system for local crime fighting are finding out their constituents’ travel patterns are visible to agencies they never heard of and never agreed to share with.

What you can do

If your town has Flock cameras or is considering them, ask who else can query the data, how long it is retained, and whether there is an audit log the public can review. Check our map to see what is already deployed near you, read the basics at Learn, and find concrete steps for raising this at a city council meeting on our Take Action page.