Flock Safety’s license-plate cameras have spread rapidly across the United States, giving police departments a powerful tool for tracking vehicles. But a growing number of cities are deciding that the benefits aren’t worth the privacy concerns, accuracy problems and questions about how all that data can be used.
At least 54 cities have voted to cancel, decline to renew, deactivate or reject Flock automatic license plate reader systems since the beginning of 2026, according to data compiled by the Washington Examiner.
The resistance isn’t confined to one particularly privacy-conscious corner of the country, either.
The Examiner found municipal actions against Flock contracts across 23 states this year. California and Wisconsin lead the list with seven cancellations, rejections or deactivations apiece. New York, Washington and Massachusetts have recorded four each, while Virginia has three.
Those numbers follow earlier reporting that approximately 30 cities had taken similar action since 2025.
That’s still a relatively small portion of Flock’s enormous footprint. As of July, the company’s cameras were reportedly operating in more than 5,000 American cities.
But the number of communities reconsidering the technology is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss.
Flock’s system uses automatic license plate readers, commonly known as ALPRs, to capture vehicle information. Police can use that data to search for vehicles connected to crimes, stolen cars or missing-person investigations.
The attraction for law enforcement isn’t difficult to understand. Instead of hoping an officer happens to spot a particular vehicle, departments can search a network of cameras that has been continuously recording license plates.
The same capability creates the obvious privacy problem.
A system capable of helping police determine where a suspect’s vehicle traveled can potentially create records of where enormous numbers of people who aren’t suspected of any crime have traveled as well. As camera networks expand and information can be shared between jurisdictions, critics worry that a crime-fighting tool can become a broad vehicle-surveillance network.
In some communities, opposition has moved beyond city council meetings.
There have been incidents involving people damaging, blocking or stealing Flock cameras. Those actions shouldn’t be confused with the lawful political process of persuading local governments to terminate contracts, but they demonstrate just how contentious the technology has become in some places.
One of the biggest setbacks for Flock came in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Police Department decided not to renew its contract following an internal audit that raised serious questions about the system’s accuracy.
According to that audit, Flock’s license plate readers generated or contributed to 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts during a two-month period. The report calculated a false-positive rate of 32.3 percent.
That’s not a trivial problem.
An incorrect advertisement recommendation is annoying. An incorrect police database alert identifying someone’s vehicle as stolen can result in an armed traffic stop involving a driver who has done nothing wrong.
Accuracy therefore isn’t merely a technical performance statistic when surveillance systems are incorporated into law enforcement decisions. Errors can have immediate consequences for the people mistakenly identified.
Privacy concerns add another layer.
Critics have questioned how long vehicle information is retained, who can search it, which agencies can obtain access and whether databases created for local crime fighting can ultimately be used for purposes residents never contemplated when their city first installed the cameras.
Supporters of ALPR technology point to cases in which license-plate readers have helped investigators locate stolen vehicles or identify suspects. The argument over Flock isn’t therefore simply about whether the cameras can ever help police. They plainly can.
The harder questions concern the price communities are willing to pay for that capability and what safeguards they demand in return.
Fifty-four municipal actions don’t establish that Americans as a whole oppose Flock cameras. With systems operating in thousands of cities, the technology continues to have substantial law-enforcement support.
What the numbers do establish is that rejection is no longer limited to an isolated city here or there.
From California to Wisconsin, New York to Virginia, local governments are increasingly being forced to answer questions that were easier to ignore when these systems were first being installed.
