Local governments roll back Flock's AI surveillance cameras as privacy backlash grows

A steady wave of cancellations

At least ten US local governments and police departments have taken steps since this summer to limit, restrict or abandon Flock Safety's surveillance technology, according to TechCrunch. The list has grown quickly: in the past three months alone, Monroe in Ohio, Newburgh in New York, Richmond in Virginia, Hopkinton and New Bedford in Massachusetts, and Lansing in Michigan have all moved to end their Flock contracts. Police in East Bridgewater and Grafton, Massachusetts, have announced plans to stop using the cameras, and most recently voters in League City, Texas, rejected their police department's continued use of Flock's license plate readers, which are now slated for removal.

Elsewhere, Asheville, North Carolina cut off its police department's access to Flock after the city council voted in August to terminate the contract, and the El Paso County Sheriff's Office in Colorado said in September it would discontinue the cameras. Sheriff Joseph Roybal said in a press release that his office has the tools and experience to apprehend criminals without them.

How Flock became a target

Flock, founded in 2017, sells license plate readers, drones and acoustic sensors that detect gunshots, and more than 100,000 of its cameras are deployed across the United States, TechCrunch reports. The technology is credited with helping find missing people and stolen cars, but the rollback reflects unease about mass surveillance, data sharing practices and how the systems were procured in the first place.

The resistance reaches the state level. Florida barred license plate readers from state highways this summer, while Texas paused state funding for Flock, according to TechCrunch.

Tatiana Rice of the Future of Privacy Forum told TechCrunch the backlash is not surprising and points to widening public doubt about new technology. Unlike invisible online data collection, a surveillance camera on a local road is something residents physically see every day, which makes it a focal point for frustration — much as data centers have become a visible symbol of the AI buildout.

Misuse cases and federal access

Documented misuse has intensified the scrutiny. An officer in Brentwood, Missouri was accused in August of using Flock cameras to stalk his ex-wife during a divorce, and in September an officer in East Texas was sentenced to prison for using the system to stalk a former girlfriend and her family, TechCrunch reports.

Access by federal immigration authorities has become another flashpoint. In March, Ithaca, New York passed a resolution ending its contract, citing what it described as confirmed cases of Flock infrastructure being used by federal agents without authorization from the contracting locality. The city pointed to reports that ICE and the ATF had been able to run queries against a database built from state and local license plate reader data.

Flock pushed back in a statement to TechCrunch, arguing that departments nationwide use its tools daily to solve violent crimes and locate suspects. The company said every customer owns its data and controls how it is shared, that it does not sell data, and that it has no contract with ICE. In August, Flock said it would cut the default data retention window for new customers from 30 days to seven, and it now requires agencies to enter a case code before searching the database.

Pressure from city halls to Congress

Adam Schwartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told TechCrunch that police departments frequently adopted Flock on their own, with little oversight from elected councils. In South Windsor, Connecticut, cameras went live last year without a public vote or advance notice, and in October the town decided to remove them. Schwartz said activists have spent years urging councils to use their purchasing power to refuse the technology, and that many are finally listening.

Other cities are keeping the cameras while tightening the rules. Cleveland, Ohio extended its Flock contract this summer but restricted searches tied to immigration and limited database access to its own police force, cutting off a regional fusion center that previously had access, TechCrunch reports.

The debate has also reached Washington. In September, President Donald Trump said he favored the technology for law enforcement purposes, even as a Reuters poll that month found more Americans view it negatively than positively. Representative Thomas Massie introduced the Flock-Off Act to bar federal funds from paying for comparable surveillance systems, and in October Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Jeff Merkley introduced the Ban Flock Act targeting AI-powered surveillance cameras.

Why it matters

The Flock rollback is one of the clearest signs yet that AI-driven surveillance is not being adopted passively. Council votes, ballot measures and federal bills show communities actively renegotiating the trade-off between public safety and civil liberties, and vendors are being forced to respond with shorter retention periods and stricter search controls. For police departments and municipalities, the lesson is that procurement, data governance and community consent now matter as much as the technology itself — and for the broader AI industry, the backlash suggests that physically visible infrastructure, from roadside cameras to data centers, will face sharper scrutiny than software that operates out of sight.