OKC Coverage
A Federal Judge in Oklahoma Called a Flock Search “Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance” and Suppressed Everything That Came After
On October 1, 2026, Judge Sara E. Hill of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma ruled that a warrantless Flock search violated the Fourth Amendment, and threw out every piece of evidence that followed it. The opinion is 38 pages and public. Read it rather than anyone’s summary of it, including this one.
What the deputy did. Tulsa County Deputy Sheriff Freddie Alaniz, a DEA task force officer, was parked beside a highway near Tulsa when a Mazda SUV with a California plate drove past. In the court’s words, Alaniz “pulled his vehicle onto the highway to follow the Mazda for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate.” He ran the plate through Flock and a second system called VehicleManager. The search returned more than 50 records of where that vehicle had been over roughly a month, across several states.
What the court held. Judge Hill found the search “intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements,” that it was done without probable cause and without a warrant, and that everything obtained afterward was fruit of the poisonous tree. The reasoning is worth reading in full, because it describes the system this site has spent a year documenting: “This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance. It is not targeted on a single individual, as in Carpenter. It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the information to law enforcement on demand.” And: “Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts.” The court closed on a question rather than a doctrine: “[W]hy is it the government’s business where everyone goes all the time? ... It is not too much to draw the line at indiscriminate mass surveillance.”
One sentence in the opinion belongs to Oklahoma City specifically. Describing what the government had actually put in front of her, Judge Hill wrote: “It is not clear from the record how long such information is kept, nor is it clear who keeps the information.” A federal judge, holding an evidentiary hearing with testimony and exhibits, could not establish who holds ALPR data or for how long. That is the same question Oklahoma City residents have asked three times and been refused three times, under three different labels: not a law enforcement record, an OCPD system the City cannot access, and a law enforcement record we may withhold. The court could not get the answer either.
What this ruling is not, and the limits matter more here than usual. It is one district judge in one case, and it binds nobody. Flock says the decision “does not set controlling precedent,” and on that narrow point the company is correct. It did not hold that Flock is unconstitutional, and it did not decide whether a single isolated plate scan is a search; the holding is about assembling weeks of history on demand without a warrant. And it is the minority side of a live split, not the federal answer. In September 2026, three weeks before this ruling, a federal court in the Central District of California reached the opposite conclusion in United States v. Riley, holding that querying ALPR databases is not a Fourth Amendment search. That court had four photographs of one vehicle in front of it, and called them “clearly distinguishable from and less extensive than the ‘near perfect surveillance’” available through cell-site records. Schmidt v. City of Norfolk went the same way in January 2026 and is on appeal to the Fourth Circuit, and the Eleventh Circuit heard argument on a related question on July 29, 2026 without ruling. The answer to Riley is not our argument, it is the Supreme Court’s. As the Institute for Justice told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on September 23, 2026, Chatrie found a search in “only two hours” of location history, and the Court “refused to treat the quantity of data as dispositive, and instead focused on what the technology is capable of revealing, not merely what law enforcement happened to find.” Riley counted the photographs the police happened to retrieve. Kyle asked what the system collects on everyone. And the evidence suppressed here was roughly 91 pounds of methamphetamine, per reporting by 404 Media and others. That figure is not in the opinion, and anyone defending this program will lead with it. This is a probable-cause story, not an innocence story. The question the ruling answers is not whether Melisa Kyle is sympathetic. It is whether the government may assemble a month of anyone’s movements, on no suspicion at all, and search it later for a reason it has not yet thought of.
For Oklahoma City, the significance is the venue. Every prior ALPR ruling worth citing happened somewhere else, to someone else’s cameras. This one came out of a federal court in this state, about a search run by an Oklahoma deputy on an Oklahoma highway, and it names the practice this city renewed on August 18, 2026 as indiscriminate mass surveillance. It does not make OKC’s contract illegal. It does mean the next council to vote on it will be doing so after an Oklahoma federal judge put that phrase in a published opinion. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor. (Opinion: United States v. Melisa Susan Kyle, No. 26-CR-00189-SEH, N.D. Okla., Oct. 1, 2026. Coverage: 404 Media; The Washington Post.)
Read the OpinionAnother Oklahoma City Renewed Flock on August 18. Its Residents Put It on the Ballot.
On August 18, 2026 the Ardmore City Commission voted 4 to 1 to renew its Flock contract. The same day, 180 miles north, the Oklahoma City Council voted 5 to 3 to renew ours. Five weeks later Ardmore’s commissioners voted unanimously to hand the question to their voters.
What happened in between was ordinary civic machinery. A local attorney drafted recall petitions against the commissioners who voted yes, citing failure to represent residents, infringement on privacy, and a lack of transparency. On September 9 the Carter County Election Board certified the signatures: each targeted commissioner had well over 100 valid ones, with some thrown out as illegible or signed by people outside the city limits. That certification did not by itself force anything. To actually trigger recall elections, organizers would have to file again and gather more than 1,000 valid signatures per commissioner. The commissioners were given ten days to file a written defense. Before that clock ran out, Mayor David Plesher brought the camera contract back to the table.
On September 21 the commission voted unanimously to send the future of Ardmore’s 23 Flock cameras to a special election in February. Vice Mayor Sheryl Ellis, who had voted to renew in August, explained the reversal in a sentence that describes an Oklahoma City council meeting just as well: “I felt like one side was drowning out the other and there wasn’t any recognition of there were two sides.” Commissioner Buddy Simon, the lone no vote in August, put it plainly: “I think that it is up to the voice of the people to make the big decisions in this city and we’ll find out in February.” In a separate vote the commission declined, 3 to 2, to cover the cameras in the meantime, so all 23 keep running while the city decides whether to keep them. That is worth noting honestly: Ardmore has scheduled a decision, not reversed one.
Read the two August 18 votes next to each other, because the difference is not the technology. Both cities renewed over public objection on the same day. In Ardmore, residents used the mechanisms available to them, the people who voted yes reconsidered rather than wait out the clock, and the contract now has to survive an election. In Oklahoma City, five council members renewed a $270,000 contract for 90 cameras in front of a room where more than two dozen residents signed up to speak and not one spoke in favor, and four of them never explained the vote. The renewal runs to June 30, 2027. This site does not run the Ardmore effort and takes no position on the recall itself; we are recording what the public record shows. What it shows is that an Oklahoma city treated this as a question its residents were entitled to answer. The demand here has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleA Fifth Oklahoma Community Dropped Flock, and Its Police Chief Made the Argument Against It Himself
The Tahlequah city council voted not to renew its police department’s Flock contract. The department is taking the cameras down and revoking officer access to the system.
Tahlequah started with Flock in July 2025, six cameras on the edges of town, and Police Chief Nate King says his officers used the system in nearly 500 criminal cases. He is not claiming it was useless. He is saying it cost more than it returned: “We felt like the benefit we were gaining from Flock in small-town Oklahoma wasn’t worth the problems it was causing us with public trust.” And then the sentence no one on the Oklahoma City dais has said out loud: “It’s hard to protect people that don’t trust you. It’s hard to provide police services to people that don’t trust you.”
That is a chief treating public trust as equipment, and it is the trade Oklahoma City’s council was offered and declined. On August 18 OKCPD made the opposite case: counts of vehicles recovered, people located, and cases aided, figures the department told a records requester in July it keeps nothing to substantiate (OCPD-10088). More than two dozen residents signed up to speak and not one spoke in favor. The council renewed 5 to 3 anyway. Tahlequah is the fifth Oklahoma community to go the other way, after Marietta, Coweta, Guthrie, and Latimer County, where the sheriff refused to adopt Flock at all. Five Oklahoma jurisdictions looked at the same vendor and the same product and reached the same answer. On this question Oklahoma City is the outlier in its own state.
One detail in Tahlequah needs saying plainly, because it cuts against the people who think destroying cameras is a shortcut. Three of the town’s six cameras were cut down before any of this was decided. The vandalism did not end the program. It generated replacement work for the vendor and left the contract exactly where it stood, and the chief did not cite it as a reason for anything. What ended the program was a council vote. That is the argument this site has made from the beginning: the action that actually removes these cameras is the one that costs Flock a customer instead of another sale. Tahlequah is the demonstration. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleTwo Days After OKC Renewed, an Oklahoma Police Chief Killed His Own Flock Contract Mid-Meeting
The Marietta City Council called a special meeting on August 20, 2026 with one item on the agenda: whether to engage Flock Safety. Police Chief Brett Harris opened it asking the council to keep the five trial cameras. Then a Flock representative, joining by Zoom, told the room the company retains camera data indefinitely. Harris stopped the meeting. “Folks, we're not moving forward any further. Marietta Police Department, Marietta city limits won't have Flock cameras,” he announced. The department, he explained, had agreed to a 30-day limit: “They're retaining data indefinitely, and that's exactly what our spectators complained about - that the data doesn't disappear like they say it does.” The council voted the measure down unanimously and the room applauded. Resident Jeanette Perez, who had spoken against it earlier: “We're slowly losing our fundamental rights by agreeing to these search and seizures.” Harris's closing line was “This system is not for Marietta, Oklahoma.” Read it against what happened in Oklahoma City forty-eight hours earlier. Same vendor, same product, same state. One council was told in open session that retention runs forever and voted it down on the spot. The other renewed 5 to 3 and was told it could not see the list of 109 agencies that receive its data. The question this raises for OKC is not whether other towns are ahead of us. It is what our council was told about retention before it voted. In fairness: Harris said afterward he is researching other sensor technology “that is supported by the community,” so Marietta rejected Flock, not every tool.
Read ArticleCouncil Renews the Flock Contract Over a Room That Opposed It
On August 18, 2026, the Oklahoma City Council voted 5 to 3 to renew the Flock contract (Ward 8's Mark Stonecipher was absent). The three no votes came from the members who engaged residents all along: James Cooper (Ward 2), JoBeth Hamon (Ward 6), and Camal Pennington (Ward 7). The yes votes came from Mayor David Holt and Council members Bradley Carter (Ward 1), Katrina Avers (Ward 3), Todd Stone (Ward 4), and Matthew Hinkle (Ward 5); aside from Stone, not one of them explained their vote. More than two dozen residents signed up to speak, and not one spoke in favor. The only change written into the contract is a narrow amendment giving the city, not Flock, the sole power to share data with federal agencies. The 30-to-7-day retention cut and the shutoff of Flock's national sharing are steps Chief Ron Bacy said his department is taking, not contract terms, and he told the council the department can “turn it on for significant incidents on a case-by-case basis.” Bacy also credited the technology with recovering 1,280 vehicles, locating 210 missing people, and aiding 60 murder cases, figures the department cannot substantiate on its own written record: it told a records requester in July that it keeps nothing linking Flock searches to case outcomes (OCPD-10088). Councilman James Cooper met the effectiveness pitch with Oklahoma's own history: “Does everyone remember how we caught McVeigh? ... It was good old-fashioned police work when they pulled him over on the interstate ... Because he did not have a license plate. The very thing this technology supposedly helps us capture people with.” Before voting no, Pennington put it plainly: “it does not change my mind about us continuing this contract with Flock, and I think it should end.” The renewal runs one year and is up again in 2027. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleNorman’s Council Rejected Flock Nine to Nothing. The Cameras Arrived Anyway.
Norman, Oklahoma turned Flock down twice in three years, both times at its own police department’s request, and both times every one of the nine council members voted no. There are Flock cameras in Norman right now.
Mayor Stephen Tyler Holman told 404 Media’s Matthew Gault what sank it. The pitch was familiar: “Crime prevention and helping the police more efficiently solve crime. That was their main point.” The retention answer was what stuck. “30 days seemed like a long time to sit on that much data,” Holman said. He also named the line this whole debate turns on: “I guess all crime could be eliminated if you put cameras everywhere... but what life are we living then?”
The cameras came in around the council, through two doors it does not control. In February 2026 the Cleveland County Board of Commissioners approved a $60,000 renewal for 20 Flock cameras operated by the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office, running through December 2026. The vote was 2 to 1, and it took four tries: the item was postponed on January 20, January 27, and February 2 while commissioners waited on a legal opinion from District Attorney Jennifer Austin. District 1 Commissioner Rod Cleveland voted no. The other door is private. As Holman put it: “There are numerous homeowners associations that use them too. But the city of Norman government does not.” A city council governs its police department. It does not govern the county sheriff, the county commissioners, or a neighborhood association that buys its own cameras.
This is the most useful thing any Oklahoma city has learned for Oklahoma City, and it cuts both ways. It is the strongest answer yet to anyone who says a council vote is symbolic: Norman’s council denied its own police department the contract, twice, unanimously, and that decision holds. It is also the clearest warning that ending a contract is not the same as ending the surveillance. Oklahoma City’s 90 contracted cameras sit inside a county with its own sheriff and a metro full of HOAs, and the community map has long counted far more ALPR cameras in the area than the contract covers. That gap is exactly why the coalition has always asked for three things and not one. Ending the contract is the council’s decision. Removing the cameras is a separate act that has to be made to happen. And refusing a replacement vendor is what stops the same system returning under a different name through a different door. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleOKC Will Vote August 18 on Renewing Flock - With Restrictions, Not an End
The deferred renewal is back, and it is not a cancellation. On August 18 the Oklahoma City Council will vote on renewing the Flock contract with an amendment adding new restrictions, reported by Free Press OKC: every search logged and tied to a user with "regular audits" and discipline for "inappropriate access," a required stated reason for each search, keyword blocks on immigration and reproductive-health searches, data sharing limited to 109 named agencies instead of Flock's nationwide network, retention cut from 30 days to 7, and council sign-off before any new cameras. Finalizing that amendment is why the item was pulled from the August 4 agenda; the renewal would be retroactive to July 1, and OKCPD kept using Flock in the gap, publicizing a Flock lead in an August 6 murder arrest days before the vote. The sharpest problem is the audits. The amendment promises regular audits and discipline for misuse, from the same department that, in March, confirmed in writing it had no audit procedure for this system and then formally denied the public the audit log that already exists. A rule you cannot verify is not oversight. Flock's own leaked coaching guide told police to "show the guardrails"; this is that page of the script. The demand has not changed: do not renew, remove the cameras, and do not keep running the network.
Read ArticleNews9 Explainer: "What Are Flock Cameras? Are There Any in OKC?" - and It Points Readers to DeFlockOKC
A major Oklahoma broadcast outlet ran a plain-language explainer on Flock, and cited DeFlockOKC as the source of record for how many cameras are in the city - "A community-run organized group, DeFlock OKC, said nearly 300 cameras are in OKC" - and linked readers directly to this site's camera list. The piece lays the debate out cleanly: the FOP's Mark Nelson says the cameras deter crime and do not photograph drivers; ACLU of Oklahoma executive director Tamya Cox-Touré counters that "all Oklahomans deserve the right to privacy, in some form in public" and that this surveillance interferes with it. Most notable for what comes next: State Senator Mary Boren (D-Norman) is pushing an interim study to set rules on who keeps Flock data, how long it is stored, and who can access it. Her framing: "We want privacy, and we want security. We shouldn't have to sacrifice our privacy to feel safe in Oklahoma." Reported by Destini Pittman.
Read ArticleOklahoma's Own Legislative Record Keeps Saying No to ALPR Expansion
News9's politics desk traced the Oklahoma legislative history of automated license plate readers, and it cuts hard against Flock. When lawmakers repealed the original 2013 plate-seizure statute in 2025 (House Bill 2215), Rep. Tom Gann recounted, committee members "were reassured that the automated license plate readers would only be used to enforce compulsory insurance law." That was the stated purpose. ACLU of Oklahoma executive director Tamya Cox-Touré told the same outlet the cameras are now "being used for much more than determining if someone has expired insurance, which was initially their purpose." The Legislature has also refused to widen ALPR authority: a 2024 bill to expand ALPR use on state right-of-way (SB 1620) was defeated in the Senate by 68%. Cox-Touré confirmed the ACLU petition to end OKC's contracts has passed 1,200 signatures, and that "about 55 localities" nationwide have ended Flock contracts this year. Sen. Mary Boren (D-Norman): "Good people, law-abiding people, should have the security to know that they can go around in private ways." Reported by Haley Hetrick.
Read ArticleOKC Council to Vote on Flock Camera Contract Renewal Next Tuesday
KOCO's pre-vote coverage from the week before OKC's originally scheduled renewal vote, ultimately held August 18. OKCPD Chief Ron Bacy was expected to present the department's case for renewal. The piece features DeFlockOKC's Jarrett Freeman on the aggregation problem - "you're not just doing point-in-place. You're doing point-in-place and time" - alongside the FOP calling the technology "instrumental," Oklahoma City resident Armando Garcia raising ICE-cooperation concerns, and a Southern Preserve HOA treasurer's textbook "if you've got nothing to hide" defense of the cameras. Also notable: Flock's corporate statement to KOCO makes specific claims about data ownership, local oversight, access controls, and effectiveness. Six of those claims are directly contradicted by the signed contract itself, side by side, in The Case, Section 04.
Read ArticleSurveillance or Safety? OKC City Council to Consider ALPR Contract Renewal
KOSU digital producer Abigail Siatkowski documents the coming council decision - and buries a bombshell: OKCPD's Operations Manual said in February that ALPR data "will not be shared" as part of a law enforcement database. In 2026, as the program came under national scrutiny and local records requests, the department quietly rewrote that sentence to permit sharing with System Administrator approval. Their explanation: policies are "periodically reviewed and updated." Also confirmed: Councilman James Cooper (Ward 2) has voted no on the 2023 signing and every renewal since - "I want the maximalist position of ending the contract, but I don't always get what I want, like a Rolling Stones song." Mayor Holt is on record defending Flock as public-space data with "no expectation of privacy."
Read ArticleActivists Sound Alarm Over Flock Cameras; Council Members Prep for Fight
Free Press OKC reports on the May 27 town hall: 100+ residents, three council members, and the ACLU joined to oppose Flock in Oklahoma City. Councilman James Cooper (Ward 2): "My preference is the maximalist position here" - full contract termination. Chad Marlow (ACLU): "Flock is the most problematic ALPR company in the country." Councilman Camal Pennington (Ward 7) expects "more intense conversations in the background" ahead of the July renewal.
Read ArticleOKC Residents Raise Privacy Concerns Over License Plate Reader Cameras
KOCO's coverage of the town hall - bringing the conversation about Flock surveillance to broadcast television audiences across central Oklahoma. The story reaches residents who may not yet realize OKC operates this system at all.
Read ArticleACLU and OKC Community Partners Come Together to Discuss Concerns About ALPRs
Pre-event coverage from The Gayly framing the town hall as a civil liberties moment affecting vulnerable populations - including immigrants, protesters, and others who depend on the ability to move through public space without warrantless tracking.
Read ArticleACLU and Community Partners Come Together to Discuss Concerns About ALPRs
Official press release announcing the May 27th "Get the FLOCK Out" Town Hall. Chad Marlow (ACLU National Senior Policy Counsel): "Oklahomans have a right to know more about Oklahoma City's use of automatic license plate readers. Nearly 50 cities have terminated their relationships with Flock in the past year." Backed by ACLU of Oklahoma, ACLU National, Dream Action OK, Oklahomans for Privacy, DeFlockOKC, and local council members.
Read Press ReleaseOKC's Quiet Flock Camera Rollout Ignites Big Brother Backlash
Hoodline covers the growing backlash against OKC's Flock camera program, highlighting the lack of public input and the community response to FOIA findings that, in early 2026, revealed no oversight framework on the books.
Read ArticlePolice Cameras Watch Every Car in OKC, But No One Tracks Who Uses Them
Carscoops covers FOIA findings showing OKCPD was operating Flock cameras with no published access controls or audit procedures to monitor who used the system or why.
Read ArticleRecords Request Shows Lack of Transparency About Oklahoma City License Plate Reader Use
KOSU reports on FOIA findings that OKCPD lacked specific policies governing transparency and internal use of Flock cameras. The records showed no documented safeguards against unauthorized access, and Oklahoma still has no statewide law regulating ALPR use.
Read ArticleDocs Show Privacy, Oversight Concerns for Camera System Used by OKCPD
Free Press OKC reports on FOIA documents revealing OKCPD had no transparency reporting, no audit procedures, and no internal use policies for its 90-camera Flock system. OKCPD's own internal memo confirmed the gaps.
Read ArticleOklahoma City to Boost Crime Solving by Adding AI-Powered License Plate Reading Cameras
Original 2023 coverage of OKC's decision to add Flock cameras. The framing was all upside, no questions about oversight, data sharing, or accountability. Three years later, the concerns are clear.
Read ArticleMore Coming
Local coverage is growing. Have a tip or a story? Reach out at DeFlockOKC@proton.me.
National Coverage
These national stories provide critical context about Flock Safety and ALPR surveillance across the country.
Flock Spent August Asking the Country for “Compromise.” In September It Started Paying Staff to Leave.
On September 18, 2026 Flock Safety opened a voluntary separation program to a workforce of roughly 1,500 people. Applications closed October 2. Decisions go out around October 9, and most of those approved leave near the end of the month.
WIRED, which broke the story, reports the package is the most generous the company has offered: payouts in the tens of thousands of dollars, several months of continued healthcare, and two years to exercise vested stock options instead of the short window a departing employee normally gets. Flock describes it as giving employees greater agency. People familiar with the company described the alternative: a large share of the workforce was expected to apply, Flock said it would approve most who did, and without the voluntary program, layoffs would “almost certainly” follow. That is a company choosing the shape of a contraction, not deciding whether to have one. CEO Garrett Langley told the All-In podcast that the “biggest damage” from the past year’s backlash has been to “internal morale.”
The customer list is the part a city council should be reading. The Institute for Justice’s cancellation database, which counts only outright cancellations and excludes jurisdictions that merely paused or switched vendors, listed 163 local governments on September 3 and 249 as of October 2. That is 86 governments in four weeks, on the most conservative count anyone publishes. Two states moved in the same stretch: Texas ordered state agencies to stop funding the cameras in late August, and Florida’s transportation department revoked every license plate reader permit on state highway rights-of-way. Flock has not lost an argument about privacy. It has lost customers, in public, faster than it can replace them.
Here is why that is Oklahoma City’s problem and not a business-page curiosity. OKC renewed through June 30, 2027, and under the Master Services Agreement the City owns none of the hardware on its poles. Maintenance is “managed by Flock Safety and executed by Flock Safety trained technicians.” The cameras carry “built-in alarms to alert our Support Team,” and Flock dispatches a technician to “fix or replace the equipment.” When a contract ends, it is “Flock Safety’s local installation technicians” who “come out to remove all of the vendor’s supplied hardware.” Every one of those is a staffed obligation, owed to this city, by a company reducing its staff. Grass Valley, California has already seen what happens when a vendor’s automated systems and its contract administration fall out of step: the city cancelled in August, pulled its cameras down, and watched a crew reinstall them in September. Oklahoma City has a shrinking vendor, ninety cameras only that vendor may lawfully touch, and nine months until this comes back to a vote. Any termination this council passes needs to name a removal deadline, a consequence for missing it, and written confirmation of decommissioning by serial number. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleFlock Knew About the Exposed Key in November 2025. Its Customers Found Out Ten Months Later, From a Map.
On September 22, 2026 Flock published the results of an independent penetration test and called it a commitment to transparency. The next day, a researcher published a public map of roughly 300,000 Flock devices, built from a database the company had known was exposed since November 2025 and had told no customer about.
The sequence is not in dispute, because Flock confirmed it. In the company’s own words to the WFSB I-Team: “in November 2025 an individual reported an exposed map access key to Flock’s Security Team. Flock validated the finding, eliminated the vulnerability, and closed the issue in December 2025. At the time, there was no indication of unauthorized access to data. It was only upon the recent publication of the website that it became apparent the individual had unlawfully accessed and retained data.” Read that as a customer. The flaw was real, Flock confirmed it, Flock fixed it, and Flock decided on its own that nothing had been taken. The agencies whose camera locations were sitting in that database were not told, and so were never given the chance to reach a different conclusion. Connecticut departments got an email in late September 2026, ten months on, once a website made the question impossible to avoid.
Flock’s first answer was lawyers. The researcher, Joshua Michael, says he found an access token on a public Flock page that required no authentication and used it to pull a December 2025 snapshot of the device database. On September 24 he received a trademark complaint, sent on Flock’s behalf, demanding the site come down over confusion about the Flock name. A second letter the following day, from Flock’s own counsel, asserted the data had been obtained unlawfully. A company that spent the week publishing a security report spent the same week trying to take down a map of its own hardware. And the mechanism is not contested: it was described under oath the day before. Testifying to the Senate on September 23, security researcher Benn Jordan told the subcommittee that Michael “independently found a misconfigured Flock development demo via a Google search that included ArcGIS API keys with virtually unlimited limits on usage.”
Flock’s position is that the exposure was narrow, and that deserves to be stated fairly. The company says the data was “limited to device name, location, and device type” and that “no images, video or sensitive law enforcement data was exposed.” Take that as true. It still means anyone can now see where a department’s cameras sit, including ones never made public. In Ledyard, Connecticut, Police Chief Ken Creutz told his Town Council this was one of several concerns and asked to end the contract: “The only prudent situation was to take a time out from the flock situation and move to sever our contract with them.” Ken Barone of the University of Connecticut’s Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy asked the question the timeline raises: “Why the delay in disclosure to their clients? Not necessarily even the public, but their clients are the customers.” The I-Team reports Flock would not say why customers were not notified in 2025, which agency is investigating, or what independent assessments it has had.
This is not an isolated lapse, and the Senate record is now the place to read the rest. Jordan testified that Flock did not require its clients to use multifactor authentication, that he found Flock law enforcement accounts for sale by a Russian vendor on a dark web marketplace, and that researcher Jon Gaines has published 55 security vulnerabilities in Flock systems, some through MITRE. On the most common Flock camera model, Jordan said, “by pushing the button on the camera 3 times, I was able to access all of the data or reprogram the device however I wanted in under a minute.” In December 2025 he found unprotected administrative interfaces on more than 60 newly deployed Flock Condor cameras, letting him “remotely view, delete, and modify 30 days of streaming camera footage from cameras across the country.” On the company’s central security claim he was flat: “Flock has repeatedly claimed that their service utilizes end-to-end encryption,” and he and Gaines “verified the lack of end-to-end encryption.” A week before the hearing, 404 Media reported that people who took a Flock camera off a pole copied its storage, recovered an encryption key the company had left on the device itself, and read roughly three weeks of footage covering some 50,000 vehicles. In fairness, and Jordan said it himself: Flock has recently invited him and other researchers in to review its hardware and platform, and “it does appear that they’re taking security a lot more seriously than they were a year ago.”
Now read what Oklahoma City signed, because nothing in it would have required Flock to call us either. We searched every Flock document on file with the City: the Master Services Agreement, the Addendum, and both Renewal Letters. The word “breach” does not appear once. Neither does “compromise.” There is no security-incident notification clause, no disclosure deadline, no duty to tell the City that a credential was exposed, and no remedy if it is not told. The only security terms in the agreement are two procurement line items: Oklahoma City asked that the platform be “CJIS compliant for auditing purposes” and that it “comply with all departmental IT security requirements.” Flock’s entire written answer to both, as filed, is “Flock Safety complies.” That is the whole of the city’s security diligence: the vendor graded itself, in two words, and the city filed it. Jordan put the gap plainly to the Senate: “I cannot legally open a restaurant or a barber shop without the health inspector and fire marshall making sure it’s safe. Yet there is not a single city or police department in this country that requires this from a 3rd party company tracking their citizens.” Oklahoma City is one of them. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleThe Senate Invited Four Surveillance CEOs to Explain Themselves. None of Them Came.
On September 23, 2026 the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing called “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.” Chairman Josh Hawley invited the chief executives of Flock, Axon, Motorola and Verkada. Not one of them appeared. Five witnesses did: a woman who went to jail over a camera hit, a sheriff who cancelled his own Flock contract, lawyers from the Institute for Justice and the ACLU, and a security researcher whose work this site has carried since he published it. Their written testimony is posted in full, and it is the most complete public record of what this technology does that any government body has assembled.
Start with the sheriff, because he is the hardest witness for Oklahoma City to wave off. Ross Teeple is the elected sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona, a county the size of Connecticut sitting astride two of the busiest trafficking corridors in the country, and he was among the first law enforcement leaders in the nation to end a Flock contract. He is not against the technology. He calls plate reading “common-sense law enforcement” and says it would be irresponsible not to equip his deputies well. His objection is to what the network became. “I will never allow technology to supersede our rights,” he told the subcommittee, and then asked the question Oklahoma City’s council has never been made to answer: “If my deputies need a search warrant to put a physical tracker on a vehicle, where is the line for camera systems that build an identical, AI-driven map of a citizen’s life?” A colleague had emailed him that no court has found a Fourth Amendment violation yet. Teeple’s answer: “that is the wrong mindset. We all swore an oath to defend the constitution. We shouldn’t wait for the Supreme Court to tell us something is a violation before we decide to protect the privacy of our citizens.” On how his county now regards the vendor: “In Pinal County, that’s become a 4-letter word.”
Then read Lindsey Isaacs, and notice how carefully she declines to overstate it. On October 4, 2025 she drove from her apartment in Palm Coast, Florida to a store and came home. A Flock camera caught her Dodge Durango two to three miles from the scene of a crash that killed three people. Investigators were looking for a black Durango. Witnesses had described a maroon one, and 911 callers had given a partial plate. The investigation focused on her anyway. Troopers told her there was collision damage on her vehicle; she could not see any. On April 17, 2026 she was arrested on three counts of vehicular homicide, held in solitary confinement in a suicide-prevention garment for roughly 86 hours, then moved to a maximum-security block. On April 28 her attorney produced photographs of the Durango sitting in the impound lot without the damage investigators had claimed was there. She was released the next day, after 13 days in jail, and in May the State declined to prosecute. Her own summary is the entire argument: “a Flock camera captured my vehicle a few miles from the scene of a terrible crash. That piece of information became part of an investigation that ultimately led to my arrest.” The camera was not wrong about the car. It was right about a car, near a place, at a time, and that was enough.
The Institute for Justice brought the numbers, and one set of them should end the argument in Oklahoma City. Legislative Counsel Alasdair Whitney testified that agencies rarely set their own rules: “many agencies never make an independent decision about how long to keep plate data and instead simply adopt whatever their vendor’s software is set to do,” which leaves the limits on police access to location data as “whatever one company decides they should be this quarter.” Then he showed what happens when a government does write the rule and trusts agencies to follow it. Virginia passed the kind of law Oklahoma City’s renewal amendment is built on: a retention cap, a bar on sharing with federal and out-of-state agencies, no warrant requirement, and self-compliance. Months later the Virginia State Crime Commission surveyed all 361 law enforcement agencies in the Commonwealth. Nearly a third never answered. Of the 159 that did and reported using ALPRs, 21 percent had kept data past the limit, 30 agencies had given access to federal or out-of-state agencies anyway, 16 percent had no ALPR policy at all though the statute required one, and 35 percent had never notified the public they were using the cameras. Oklahoma City’s council was sold a retention cut, a federal-sharing restriction, and a promise of regular audits. Virginia ran that experiment statewide first, and it leaked at every seam.
Whitney also put on the record what “a required stated reason” looks like once somebody checks. Norfolk’s system was searched more than 230,000 times between May 2023 and mid-2025. The three most common reasons officers typed were “cj,” “stolen,” and “inv,” accounting for nearly 75,000 searches between them. One officer repeatedly logged “protestor identification.” Another repeatedly typed “la la la la.” A Lake County, Indiana deputy searched more than 19,000 cameras across 1,558 cities and towns and gave his reason as “LMAO.” None of it was audited until a lawsuit forced Norfolk to look in February 2025, and once reporters started reading the logs, officers were told to be “as vague as permissible.” Oklahoma City’s amendment requires a stated reason and does not require a case number. The log that would show what gets typed into that box has been denied to residents three times, most recently on July 28 (OCPD-10716).
A week later Hawley released a bill, and it deserves a harder read than it has gotten. The Stop Flock Abuse Act would bar local governments from selling or sharing vehicle location data with non-governmental third parties, require written approval and logging for every search, require agencies to preserve an audit log of who searched and why and who approved it, require encryption and domestic storage, ban hardware from foreign adversaries, ban facial recognition on ALPR networks, and require deletion of driver data after ten days. There is no warrant requirement, which is the first thing the Institute for Justice asked for. And the retention number is the tell: Flock’s own default is seven days. A bill named after the company would let agencies hold plate data three days longer than the company’s own setting does. That is the altitude of the federal floor right now. The part Oklahoma City should sit with is the audit log. A Republican senator has proposed, as a national minimum, the exact record OKCPD generates and will not release. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleFlock’s Own Search Menu Lists “Vagrancy,” and Police Picked It 1,200 Times Through One Town’s Cameras
Flock’s search menu has a category for being poor in public. Police picked it more than 1,200 times through the cameras of one small Illinois town.
Records from Plano, Illinois, obtained by Sam Biddle for The Intercept, show agencies across Illinois, neighboring states, and a Georgia town 600 miles away querying Flock under the heading “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.” On January 31, Norcross, Georgia police ran a search from a smartphone that reached 6,098 separate Flock camera networks. The Tennessee Fusion Center searched more than 17,000 cameras under that same category, appending its own reason: “Suspicious person at planned protest site.” LaGrange, Georgia searched over 6,000 networks about someone leaving a house “with a significant amount of traffic,” and more than 15,000 about someone “lingering at a stop sign around midnight last night.” West Palm Beach logged a query about an “outside agency dropping vagrant off.” Most of these searches carried no case number at all, which means they were not attached to any investigation. Flock did not respond to a request for comment.
Flock did not invent this category, and that is the worse fact. “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” is a federal offense class, FBI NIBRS Group B, defined as the violation of a law prohibiting persons from “remaining in an area or place in an idle or aimless manner” or “going from place to place without visible means of support.” Flock’s search-reason menu is the federal crime list, so nobody at the company had to decide that vagrancy was worth a national camera query. It was on the menu the day the product shipped. In 1972 the Supreme Court struck down exactly this. Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville voided a vagrancy ordinance for vagueness because it criminalized ordinary conduct and placed “almost unfettered discretion in the hands of the police.” The statute is gone. The discretion is back, attached to more than 120,000 cameras, exercised from a phone, with no judge in the loop.
Oklahoma City signed up for this category without ever naming it. The Master Services Agreement defines the system’s Permitted Purpose as “crime awareness, prevention, and prosecution,” a phrase that appears nowhere in Oklahoma statute, and one that covers a loitering query without any stretch at all. The August renewal added keyword blocks on immigration and reproductive-health searches. It added nothing about Group B, because a blocklist naming two topics leaves the rest of the menu alone. And the safeguard the council was actually sold was a required stated reason for each search. The Intercept has now published what stated reasons look like in cities that hand over the log: lingering at a stop sign around midnight. A free-text box is not a limit on anything. It is a place to type.
The document that produced this story is the document Oklahoma City has refused three times. Plano gave a reporter its Flock audit log, and the log answered every question in this article: who searched, what reason they typed, whether a case number existed, and how far past the town’s own cameras the query reached. Oklahoma City has denied that same file three times under three different labels: not a law enforcement record (OCPD-10080), an OCPD system the City cannot access (ORR-4292), and a law enforcement record we may withhold (OCPD-10716, denied July 28). The department’s own denial confirms the log exists. So the question is no longer whether OKCPD can produce what Plano produced. It is why a town of twelve thousand in Illinois can show residents what its cameras were used for, and Oklahoma City will not.
The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleA City Canceled Flock, Took Its Own Cameras Down, and Flock’s System Sent a Crew to Put Them Back
On August 11, 2026, Grass Valley, California canceled its Flock contract. City staff took every camera down the next morning. Twenty-five days later, residents watched a utility crew put them back.
Police Chief Alexander Gammelgard’s cancellation letter cited “novel Fourth Amendment issues,” California’s Senate Bill 54, and a system that had “evolved to include much more powerful computer-intelligence tools” with expanding cross-jurisdiction networks. The city sent termination notice by email and by certified mail, and says Flock never acknowledged it. Over the weekend of September 5, residents spotted a crew replacing cameras around town and called the police on their own vendor. In the department’s words: “Some of the cameras which were no longer showing connection - because we took them down - have been serviced and replaced. We’ve learned and dealt with at least two.”
Flock’s explanation is not a denial, and it is worse than one. Because the cameras suddenly went offline, the company says, its automated maintenance system read them as equipment failures and generated replacement work orders. “Those work orders have now been canceled, and we are expediting the remaining steps to process the termination and ensure no additional maintenance or replacement activity occurs.” Take that at face value: a city voted to end mass surveillance, and the surveillance re-installed itself because a server could not tell a cancellation from a hardware fault.
Oklahoma City signed a contract that describes this exact behavior. The Master Services Agreement on file with the City Clerk states that Flock cameras carry “built-in alarms to alert our Support Team if a camera is not performing at optimal standards,” and that when one stops performing, Flock will “create a Work Order to send a local installation technician to either fix or replace the equipment at NO charge to the Oklahoma City PD.” Maintenance is “managed by Flock Safety and executed by Flock Safety trained technicians.” When a customer leaves, it is “Flock Safety’s local installation technicians” who “come out to remove all of the vendor’s supplied hardware.” The cameras on OKC poles are not the city’s to take down. They are Flock’s equipment, watched by Flock’s alarms, serviced on Flock’s schedule. Honest caveat: OKC negotiated one exception during procurement, and Flock agreed to train bucket-truck-certified city employees to move fixed cameras without voiding the warranty. Moving a camera is not ending a program.
Grass Valley is not the first city to find that out. Eugene, Oregon terminated on December 5, 2025 and asked Flock to remove the cameras by December 12. Flock replied that it would not begin until January 26. Eugene stopped waiting and pulled them down itself on December 18, with Police Chief Chris Skinner naming the problem: “Those cameras don’t belong to us by contract.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin the readers were still standing four months after the council revoked the agreement, so the city sent its own personnel to cover them with garbage bags. Verona did the same. So did Evanston, Illinois and Dayton, Ohio. A company that could staff municipal committee meetings to defend the product, one Oshkosh resident observed, could not send a staff member to come collect it.
This is why the second demand is not a formality. Ending the contract is a council vote. Removing the cameras is a thing Oklahoma City would then have to make a vendor do, on a timeline the vendor sets, with hardware the city does not own and cannot lawfully keep. Any OKC termination should name a removal deadline, a consequence for missing it, and written confirmation of decommissioning by serial number. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor. (CBS Sacramento; The Union; The Guardian.)
Read ArticleFlock Offered to Sell a City Five Years of Data From Cameras the City Did Not Know Were Collecting It
Sheboygan, Wisconsin learned what its Flock cameras had been collecting when a Flock salesman offered to sell it back to them. Earlier this summer a company representative emailed the city's Engineering Department, not its police department, offering five years of traffic speed and movement data captured by Sheboygan's own fifteen cameras. City officials say Flock never told them the cameras produced that data at all. Sheboygan covered the cameras in late August, and its Common Council votes September 8 on terminating the contract. Police Chief Kurt Zempel, who credits the cameras with removing violent offenders and recovering stolen property, said Flock's conduct was “inconsistent with the terms and expectations of the City's contract” and that it undermined trust. Mayor Ryan Sorenson named the cause directly: “an erosion of trust from Flock itself and how they were using our data.” Kenosha put Flock on its own September 8 agenda the same week. (TMJ4; WHBL.)
Read that against Oklahoma City's contract, because this was not a rogue salesman. Section 4.3 of the Master Services Agreement OKC signed in 2023 grants Flock a “non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right” to anonymized versions of customer data, both to train machine-learning algorithms and to build “other Flock offerings.” A traffic-analytics product assembled out of municipal camera feeds is an other Flock offering. Sheboygan is that clause arriving in an inbox with a price on it, and Oklahoma City signed the same clause.
Flock's own marketing settles what the derived layer is for. The company's transportation page sells “24/7 count, class, and speed data” together with public safety alerts, “all from one device.” A Flock blog post markets Traffic Analytics to “commercial property owners, asset managers, and multi-location retailers,” built on “anonymized data on vehicle volume, speed, and dwell time, alongside license plate reader (LPR) technology.” On its public trust page, the same company states that “Flock does not sell customer data” and that it gives customers “full data ownership, auto-deleting data after 30 days.” Both of those things are on Flock's website right now.
The same day, a sheriff put the mechanism on the record by name. On September 4 Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling ordered every Flock camera in the county taken down, and his stated reason was not the plate reads. It was that Flock “generates a separate data set from information collected by its cameras and markets that dataset to other government and private customers through its ‘Traffic Analytics’ product.” His office believed retention was thirty days. Schmaling says Flock holds the aggregated layer “for up to five years, separate from and in addition to the 30-day retention period.” That is an elected law enforcement official naming the product, naming private customers, and stating the five-year figure independently of Sheboygan. His conclusion: “This is not what we agreed to, and it is not what the public was led to believe,” and his office would not “participate in a system that appears to use public safety as a justification for mass surveillance.” In fairness, and it matters here as much as it did in Marietta: Schmaling said “Flock failed the public” but that “the technology did not fail the public,” and Racine intends to keep using ALPR through a different vendor. Racine rejected Flock, not the category. (TMJ4; CBS 58.)
The word doing the work is anonymized. Strip the plates off, and the speed, volume, and dwell-time layer stops being customer data in Flock's taxonomy. That is how a company can sell a commercial traffic-analytics line built on city cameras and still say it does not sell customer data. Section 4.3 is what makes that layer Flock's to keep and license in perpetuity, long after the deletion clock has run on the footage. The retention promise was never the whole promise: it covered the plate reads and left everything derived from them outside the frame. That distinction is the entire product, and no council has been told about it from the podium. Honest caveat: Sheboygan's sales email itself has still not been published, so the terms of that specific offer rest on the city's account of it, and the email is worth a records request on its own. The five-year figure no longer rests there, because Schmaling states it as his own agency's finding. What is not in question is the contract language, on file with the OKC City Clerk, or Flock's marketing copy, published by Flock. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleEleven Wisconsin Agencies Shut Flock Off in One Day, After Another State's Records Law Made Their Investigations Public
Wisconsin protects active investigation records from disclosure. That protection did not survive the network. On September 4, 2026, Fond du Lac County Sheriff Ryan Waldschmidt and the police chiefs of Fond du Lac, North Fond du Lac, Ripon, and Waupun suspended all Flock products immediately, and the Winnebago County Sheriff's Office did the same alongside the Neenah, Menasha, Fox Crossing, Winneconne, and UW Oshkosh departments. Eleven agencies, one day. Crews put covers over the camera lenses in Fond du Lac County that afternoon. The reason was not a hack and not a rogue officer: search records from their own Flock systems, including records tied to active investigations, had been released to the public by law enforcement agencies in other states answering open records requests. Fond du Lac learned about it afterward. In the sheriff's office's words, those decisions “were made without our knowledge or consent.” Winnebago County opened an internal review to work out which of its investigations were exposed. (WBAY; FOX 11.)
Follow the mechanism, because it is the whole story. Flock's search logs move across the network to every participating agency. A record generated in Fond du Lac therefore also sits inside agencies in other states, and what happens to it there is governed by those states' disclosure laws, not Wisconsin's. When a broader law compelled release, Wisconsin's active-investigation exemption was simply not the rule that applied. The Fond du Lac agencies' joint statement: “The loss of control over our own investigative data, combined with concerns over how quickly Flock's technology has expanded beyond traditional plate-reading systems, has led Fond du Lac County law enforcement agencies to conclude that continuing the program at this time is not appropriate.” Winnebago County: “Protecting the integrity of investigative data and maintaining public trust are paramount.”
Flock's answer is three true statements that do not address the complaint. The company said the public databases carrying the search data “are in no way affiliated with Flock,” that Flock “did not release any data,” and that “Customers own and control their data and Flock does not sell it.” Every one of those can be accurate and none of them is responsive. Nobody accused Flock of pressing send. The objection is that Flock built the architecture that copied Wisconsin's investigative records into agencies in states where the law required handing them over, and then told each customer it was in control. This is the exact failure Eric R. Atstupenas, general counsel of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, described weeks earlier: “data in a wide network is governed by the weakest policy in it and accountability diffuses.” A lawyer for police chiefs named the mechanism in August. Eleven Wisconsin agencies lived it in September.
Oklahoma City is in that network, with 109 partners and no public list. Chief Bacy would not name the 109 agencies for Councilwoman Hamon on August 18, which means nobody here knows which states OKC's search records currently sit in. On the Wisconsin mechanism, the rule that governs an OKC search record is not Oklahoma's open records law. It is whichever partner state's law is broadest. And there is a sharper edge for this city specifically: OKCPD has denied residents its Flock audit log three times, while records of that same kind are what other states' laws compelled agencies to hand over. The question that raises is not rhetorical and it is answerable: if OKC's searches are already public somewhere else, the department is withholding from Oklahomans a record another state gives away. The renewal runs to 2027. The demand has not changed: end the contract, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleFlock's New Safeguards Only Work If Departments Enforce Them. Four Days Later, OKC Renewed.
This is not a civil liberties group. ASIS International has been the principal professional association for security practitioners since 1955. Its magazine, Security Management, examined the accountability package Flock announced on August 13 and put the catch in its own headline: the new features are "Dependent on Customer Enforcement." Reporter Megan Gates writes that the changes "will depend on actual customer enforcement to be effective at addressing misuse and abuse." Flock declined to make an executive available for the story and referred the magazine to the CEO's blog post.
Read the announced features against what Oklahoma City heard four days later. Flock says it will require customers to use its Audit Assistance tool to flag abnormal activity for administrator review by the end of 2026, and will require case codes for database searches "except for in emergencies." At the August 18 council meeting, Chief Bacy described a continuous AI audit as something the department has, and confirmed that officers are not required to enter a case number, pointing to fast-moving situations. The vendor's emergency carve-out and the department's justification are the same sentence. The retention cut from 30 days to seven that OKC heard about is also on Flock's list: a company-wide default, not a local concession.
The sharpest criticism comes from a lawyer for police chiefs. Eric R. Atstupenas, general counsel of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association and immediate past chair of the IACP Legal Officers Section, describes exactly the arrangement OKC just renewed: "data in a wide network is governed by the weakest policy in it and accountability diffuses." Oklahoma City shares with 109 agencies the chief would not name for the council. Atstupenas says searches should "be anchored to a case or incident number, and technically enforced where the platform allows." OKC does not require one. And on audits he draws the distinction this city's entire records fight turns on: "An officer who knows the logs are read behaves differently from one who knows they exist." Oklahoma City has an audit log. Residents have been denied it three times.
The magazine also could not confirm Flock's accuracy math. The company states on its website that of every million vehicle alerts, nine are flagged inaccurate, a claim Security Management "was unable to independently verify." Jon Polly, PSP, of ProTecht Solutions Partners and immediate past chair of the ASIS Emerging Technologies Community Steering Committee, is skeptical on engineering grounds: true license plate recognition uses specialty cameras accurate up to 200 miles per hour, while Flock uses conventional surveillance cameras that are "highly dependent on lighting and weather conditions." As Polly puts it, "You'll typically see a true license plate recognition camera on those interstates or in areas where they need absolute accuracy." Los Angeles's Inspector General, the only party to actually measure, found 161 of 498 stolen-vehicle alerts were wrong. When the security industry's own association and a police association's general counsel are the ones raising these questions, the objection is no longer about privacy. It is about whether the thing works and whether anyone is checking.
Read ArticleFlock's CEO Is Now Asking for "Compromise." That Is What a Company Says When It Is Losing.
Garrett Langley has spent August on a media tour asking the country to split the difference. “When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they're prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise,” he told Fox News. On the 46 cases the Washington Post documented of officers accused of using Flock to stalk wives, girlfriends, and exes, he told CBS News “I apologize. It kills me that she went through that,” and then, in the same breath: “I don't think that Flock created police abuse. I think we're the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.” Read that twice. The company that built a searchable record of everywhere everyone drives is claiming credit for discovering that police misuse it.
Two details in this story matter directly to Oklahoma City. First, Flock cut its default retention from 30 days to seven and began requiring a case code before access. Those are company-wide product changes made in response to national criticism, not concessions any one city negotiated. Second, and this is the part to sit with: TechCrunch reports both changes can be overridden, with longer retention available through a setting called Evidence Mode. The ACLU's response names the problem exactly: “Whether this is a real change or just another Flock PR move, however, will depend on how its 'Evidence Mode' operates.” Oklahoma City's council was told about a retention cut and new access controls when it voted to renew on August 18. None of it is in the contract. It lives in a vendor's product settings, and the vendor has already built the switch that turns it off.
The political ground is also moving in both directions at once. Bernie Sanders posted “STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. STOP FLOCK.” Three House Republicans introduced a bill barring the federal government from buying automated surveillance systems using facial recognition, biometric IDs, or license plate recognition, “including a Flock Safety camera.” That is the coalition this issue keeps building, and it is why the answer here has never been a better-supervised dragnet. Compromise is what you are offered when the other side has started losing votes. The demand has not changed: do not renew, remove the cameras, and sign no replacement vendor.
Read ArticleFusion Centers Are Monitoring Anti-Flock Activists, Treating Protest Like a Threat
Public records obtained by 404 Media reveal four "law enforcement sensitive" bulletins in which state fusion centers - in Colorado, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Florida, with a summary reaching FBI headquarters - monitored anti-Flock activity on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram and flagged the "DeFlock movement" as a threat. The bulletins conflate a small number of accounts posting camera-destruction videos with the far larger movement that maps cameras from public roads, signs petitions, and organizes lawful protests. DeFlock's founder: the project "has never called for disabling cameras... contrary to what recent law enforcement bulletins claim." To be clear, Flock is not behind the monitoring and has condemned vandalism while affirming the right to protest. But the picture is its own argument: a mass-surveillance system whose backers are now cataloging the people who oppose it, and official intelligence treating protected dissent as a security concern. Reported by Jason Koebler, building on records reporting by Dan Boguslaw.
Read Article"Do Not Mention ALPR Usage": Police Told to Hide Flock From the People They Stop
A Wapello County, Iowa sheriff's standard operating procedure for its Flock cameras, obtained through a public records request, instructs deputies in capital letters: "DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE. DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY." When a report cannot avoid it, deputies are told to write "using county resources" instead of naming Flock, and to treat the camera hit like intelligence - a lead they "verified and acted on." That is parallel construction: hiding the surveillance from the person stopped and from the court unless a defense attorney asks the exact right question. 404 Media reports the FBI and DOJ have told departments in multiple states to be "as vague as permissible" about Flock searches. Sold as accountability; operated as concealment. Reported by Jason Koebler.
Read ArticlePolice Used Flock to Turn "Drives to Michigan" Into Probable Cause
A Wisconsin sheriff's deputy used Flock to track a man's car across state lines on Interstate 41, then justified searching it with the Flock data itself: the vehicle "travels to Michigan frequently which is a known source state for marijuana as it is legal there." To be precise, police did find marijuana and he was convicted of possession - this is not a wrongful-arrest story, it is a probable-cause story. The stated reason to search was not a crime, a tip, or a witness. It was a travel pattern pulled from a database of one man's movements. The same logic - "frequently travels to X, associated with Y" - reaches anyone who drives to a dispensary, a gun range, a protest, or a clinic. Reported by Jason Koebler from Wisconsin court records.
Read ArticleLeaked Flock Guide Teaches Police How to "Own the Narrative" Before City Councils
One day before Oklahoma City's renewal vote, 404 Media published a leaked Flock coaching guide that trains police to sell the cameras to city councils and manage opposition. Its most telling advice is about the words "mass surveillance": Flock strategist Jamie Hudson tells departments not to deny it - "Don't avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you're not going to convince opponents that it's not" - and to pivot instead to "governance." The guide instructs agencies to "own the narrative before someone else does," briefing city managers and council members privately "before public comment periods become the first introduction to the program," and its closing checklist includes "show the guardrails." Watch the script run in OKC: a quietly rewritten policy, a chief ready with local stats, and the renewal placed on the consent docket where it passes without debate. The one promise the playbook cannot keep here is oversight the public can check - OKCPD admitted in writing it had no audit procedure, then denied the public the system's logs. Reported by Jason Koebler; leaked by a local activist fearing retaliation.
Read Article"Never Been Hacked" Meets Fifteen Published Vulnerabilities
Flock still tells cities its cameras have "never been hacked." As recently as July 24, 2026, the company's own security page reads: "No, Flock has never been hacked, and there has not been a leak of Flock information." Meanwhile the federal government's National Vulnerability Database lists fifteen separate CVEs against Flock hardware and software - two of them rated 9.8 of 10, the maximum critical severity: an administrative interface exposed with no authentication, and a password (flockhibiki17) hard-coded into the app that runs the cameras. Others include developer Wi-Fi credentials and API secrets stored in cleartext, Secure Boot switched off, and an unlocked bootloader. The vulnerabilities were surfaced by independent researcher Jon "GainSec" Gaines and by technologist Benn Jordan, whose team accessed live and recorded camera feeds over the open internet. Flock is correct that no breach has been proven - but a documented way in is not the same as a locked door, and Oklahoma City has produced no proof its own cameras are patched - and much of this cannot be patched at all: the cameras run Android 8, unsupported since 2021, and flaws like disabled Secure Boot and exposed debug interfaces are built into the hardware, not fixable by any update. "Never been hacked" is not "secure."
Search the NVDGeorgia Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Illegal Flock Camera Use
In Flock's home state, the arrests will not stop. Jalopnik rounds up the Georgia wave: three Cherokee County sheriff's deputies - a lieutenant, a sergeant, and a deputy who ran the tag of a fellow sheriff's-office employee - fired and arrested in June after the agency's self-initiated audit, each facing a felony oath-of-office charge; a DeKalb County sergeant with the agency since 2009 fired, arrested, and held without bond in July; three Fayetteville officers fired in mid-July after the department activated a new internal audit feature and immediately found them searching their own plates and those of family and friends, with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation called in; plus the five Albany officers arrested earlier in July. Atlanta media count at least 10 Georgia officers arrested in recent weeks and roughly 20 accused within the past year, with further cases reported in Richmond, Greene, and Henry counties. Every one was caught by an audit. Flock Safety is headquartered in Atlanta - the state that hosts the company keeps proving the misuse is not hypothetical. Oklahoma City's police department admitted in writing it had no such audit, and has refused to let residents see the one it now claims to run. Reported by Collin Woodard.
Read ArticleOklahoma Sheriff Refuses Flock Cameras, Citing Privacy and Constitutional Rights
An elected Oklahoma law enforcement official reviewed Flock and said no - the same day Oklahoma City's own renewal vote was scheduled. Latimer County Sheriff Adam Woodruff announced on July 21, 2026 that his office will not use Flock cameras, after weighing "legitimate concerns across the country regarding privacy, data sharing, transparency, and the potential for misuse." His answer to whether the cameras are necessary for public safety: "I believe we can continue protecting our communities through proactive policing, strong partnerships with our citizens, and sound investigative work without creating a system that many residents feel could infringe on their privacy." Woodruff said the people of Latimer County "deserve both security and freedom" and pledged not to implement Flock while he serves. Reviewing the same technology OKC is being asked to renew, an Oklahoma sheriff decided his county is safer without it. Reported by Cassidy Mudd.
Read ArticleInvestigating Flock: America's Mass Surveillance Company
Benn Jordan, whose research anchors much of this site, teams up with Tommy G for a boots-on-the-ground investigation reaching an audience far beyond the usual privacy circles. What they found: Flock quietly relocated its headquarters behind a realty trust, operates its drone facility under front-company names, and a Flock supply chain manager on camera denied working for Flock before calling the police on the journalists - who were then detained. When Benn filed a Georgia records request for the police reports, the request was rejected as "cancelled due to no response" - the same silent-closure move OKC ran on OCPD-9710-2026. The video also resurfaced Flock CEO Garrett Langley's recorded remarks calling the DeFlock mapping project "terroristic organizations... closer to Antifa than they are anything else" - remarks Langley has now apologized for via Forbes. The company that says you have no expectation of privacy in public structures its own existence to avoid being found.
Watch VideoLAPD Halts Flock Safety Contract Amid Data Ownership Dispute
The Los Angeles Police Department, one of Flock's largest government customers, is not renewing its contract. LAPD Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas: "The sticking point is around having very clear terms about who owns the data, what happens with the data once they collect it." The department will not use Flock "until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out." The decision followed an LAPD Inspector General audit finding that over a two-month period, LAPD investigated 161 car owners whose vehicles Flock had wrongly identified as stolen - nearly one in three of the system's stolen-vehicle alerts in that two-month audit (161 of 498, 32.3%) were false, and the Inspector General noted every false alert sent officers to stop an innocent driver. Flock's response to the departure: called it a "surprise." Landed weeks before Oklahoma City renewed its own Flock contract on August 18, over sustained opposition. Reported by Suzanne Smalley at The Record.
Read ArticleOfficers Fired After Alleged Misuse of Controversial Surveillance Tool
Newsweek reporter Mandy Taheri documents the June 26 and June 29 terminations of Greer, South Carolina Police Department Corporal Kareem Lynch and Officer Sebastian Echeverry after the department's own internal audit surfaced violations of Greer PD's ALPR policy. City Administrator Andrew Merriman: "The City of Greer takes seriously the responsibility to protect the life, safety, and privacy of our citizens." The audit was conducted using Flock Safety's own built-in "Audit Assistant" tool. Published ahead of Oklahoma City's renewal, which the Council ultimately passed on August 18. OKCPD confirmed in writing (OCPD-2885-2026, March 10, 2026) that no equivalent audit process existed in Oklahoma City. Greer caught its own officers with a log it could act on. The review OKC now claims to run, it has refused to let the public see.
Read Article5 Albany, Georgia Officers Fired and Arrested After Flock's Own Audit Tool Surfaced ALPR Misuse
From Flock Safety's own July 8 press release: "Following an internal audit conducted by the Albany Police Department, five officers were terminated and subsequently arrested after investigators alleged they used license plate reader technology for purposes unrelated to legitimate law enforcement investigations." Discovery method: Flock's own built-in Audit Assistance tool. Flock Co-Founder Paige Todd, in the same press release: "Technology doesn't create misconduct. People do." A private surveillance vendor is confirming, in its own press release, that only an audit process can catch officer misuse after the fact. OKCPD confirmed in writing (OCPD-2885-2026, March 10, 2026) that no audit procedure for Flock existed in Oklahoma City. Five criminal arrests in Albany, every one caught by an audit. The review OKCPD now claims to run, it has refused to let the public see.
Read Press ReleasePasadena, Texas Sergeant Resigns Amid Flock-Stalking Investigation
Pasadena Police Sergeant Michael Palitz resigned while under an active internal investigation, the department confirmed. Pasadena City Council Member Emmanuel Guerrero, describing the alleged conduct: "Based on what we gathered, [he] was using our camera system, our Flock system, to track and stalk a female officer." Pasadena PD statement: "Yes, he resigned while under investigation. Regardless of his employment status, our investigation will continue in accordance with legal requirements until it reaches its conclusion." Discovery method: the Flock system itself flagged repeated account usage. Another jurisdiction that had a mechanism to catch stalking-by-cop. Oklahoma City does not.
Read ArticleBinghamton, NY City Council Proposes Legislation to End Flock Contract
During the Binghamton City Council meeting on July 13, 2026, legislation was formally proposed to end the City of Binghamton's contract with Flock Safety. Another city considering leaving. Every week, another one.
Read ArticleSafety Advocates Say Flock Camera Poles Are Being Installed in Violation of Federal Roadside Standards
Roadside safety advocate Steve Eimers, whose 17-year-old daughter was killed when a non-crashworthy guardrail speared her vehicle, has said he is "finding near 100% improper installation" of Flock camera poles - a statement he first made about installations in his home state of Tennessee, and one WGME's Maine I-Team cited when it examined poles on Route 100 in Falmouth. Reporting from WGME (Maine), KDVR and Yahoo (Colorado), Footnote4a (Iowa DOT permit records), and Maryville Residents for Privacy (Tennessee) documents poles set in the clear zone with no breakaway base, in direct tension with the federal MUTCD standard that requires supports within the clear zone to be breakaway, yielding, or shielded. Flock's own stated policy is that "advanced breakaway poles are used on Department of Transportation managed roadways, highways and other higher-speed corridors, or when required by the jurisdiction overseeing the roadway." Flock has defended specific installations or pointed to jurisdiction confusion. OKC's roadside inventory has never been publicly audited against the same standard - Round 2 Request #11 asks the city to produce the paper trail.
Read WGME Maine I-TeamOshkosh Council Rescinds Flock Camera Contract After False Statements
Police Chief Dean Smith reversed the contract less than 24 hours after approval - because Flock lied to city council, claiming their systems "did not create heat maps to track vehicles." The chief: "I will not betray that trust." Flock's response? The statements were "misinterpreted and weaponized by activists" - the same language their CEO used when Benn Jordan exposed security vulnerabilities. The pattern is consistent: when caught, blame the people asking questions.
Read ArticleFederal Lawsuit: San Jose's 474-Camera Flock Network Is Unconstitutional Mass Surveillance
IJ filed a federal class action arguing San Jose's Flock system violates the Fourth Amendment. 474 cameras recorded over 360 million images in 2024. More than 1,000 officers and 300 outside agencies can search the data. Only 0.25% of images matched any hotlist. Lead plaintiff: "I know what an authoritarian surveillance state looks like."
Read ArticleFlock Safety Hits $8.4 Billion Valuation as Nationwide Protests Grow
Flock has raised nearly $1 billion in total funding, backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Now valued at $8.4B - up from $7.5B just a year ago - while operating across 5,000+ law enforcement agencies. The surveillance business is booming even as cities cancel contracts and protests target their Atlanta headquarters. The cancellation count stood above 50 when this was published in April 2026; by August 27 the Institute for Justice put it at 128.
Read ArticleFlock Safety's Free Trial Playbook: How a $7.5 Billion Surveillance Company Gets Into Your City
Investigation into how Flock uses free trials to get cameras installed before cities have policies, oversight, or public input in place - then locks them into contracts. A pattern documented across dozens of municipalities nationwide.
Read ArticleTompkins County, NY Terminates Flock Safety Contract
County legislature voted 12-1 to end the Flock contract, citing community opposition and a vendor they described as "untrustworthy and not aligned with the county's values." Neighboring Ithaca made a similar decision earlier in 2026.
Read ArticleVirginia Police Search Flock Surveillance Data 24/7. It Isn't Always Clear Why.
Deep investigation found Virginia police agencies querying Flock data around the clock, often without clear legal justification. Documents reveal a pattern of constant, unchecked access to the surveillance network.
Read ArticleWhy More Cities Are Suddenly Pulling The Plug On Flock Safety Cameras
Austin, Cambridge, Flagstaff, Mountain View, Lynnwood, Coralville, Staunton, and more - a growing wave of cities are terminating Flock contracts over privacy and unauthorized data sharing concerns.
Read ArticleEFF's Investigations Expose Flock Safety's Surveillance Abuses: 2025 in Review
EFF obtained 12M+ search logs from 3,900+ agencies, revealing protest surveillance, racist profiling of Romani people, and an abortion investigation in Texas.
Read ArticleHow Cops Are Using Flock Safety's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists
Tulsa PD was one of the most consistent users of Flock for investigating protests, logging at least 38 searches. Officers probed the nationwide network with terms like "protest" without specifying a crime.
Read ArticleFlock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation.
Texas deputies queried Flock data in an abortion investigation, searching 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks with the note "had an abortion, search for female."
Read ArticleOklahoma Interim Study Focuses on License Plate Readers, Privacy Concerns
Rep. Tom Gann's second annual ALPR study before the House Public Safety Committee. More than 50 Oklahoma agencies use Flock, and the data is being used well beyond what state law allows.
Read ArticleState Lawmakers Study Privacy Concerns with Flock Cameras, Possible Legislative Solutions
Oklahoma lawmakers address Flock cameras under scrutiny for public safety and personal data protection. Criminal defense attorney Shena Burgess testified on violations of Oklahoma law.
Read ArticleOklahoma Lawmakers Examine Privacy Issues with Flock Cameras
News9 covers Rep. Tom Gann's interim study examining the balance between public safety and citizen privacy. Lawmakers questioned whether Flock's data collection exceeds what Oklahoma law permits.
Read ArticleFlock Traffic Cameras Track Everything, Except the Cops Misusing Them
A Wisconsin police officer faces felony charges for using Flock cameras to improperly search for a victim's vehicles. The case highlights exactly why audit logging and oversight policies matter.
Read ArticleLynnwood Becomes First WA City to Cancel Active Flock Safety Contract
Council voted 7-0 to terminate after a UW report revealed out-of-state agencies made 100,000+ searches into Lynnwood's network, including 16 related to immigration enforcement.
Read ArticleVirginia Police Used Flock Cameras to Track Driver 526 Times in 4 Months, Lawsuit Says
Norfolk's 176 cameras logged a retired veteran's location 526 times - about four times per day. The Institute for Justice filed a federal Fourth Amendment challenge.
Read ArticleAI Surveillance: Unmasking Flock Safety's Insecurities
Independent researcher Jon "GainSec" Gaines documented 51 security findings including 22 CVEs. "If a lone researcher can gain root access to Flock cameras, nation state actors can also."
Read ArticleEFFecting Change: Get the Flock Out of Our City
EFF profiles the growing national movement of cities canceling Flock contracts and citizens organizing against ALPR mass surveillance.
Read ArticleInterim Study Held Over Misuse of ALPR Cameras
Oklahoma coverage of Rep. Gann's ALPR study. Marven Goodman testified about successfully removing Flock cameras from SH-33 and getting Guthrie to terminate its contract.
Read ArticleStatement on the Flock Safety ALPR Contract Termination
Cambridge deactivated and removed 16 Flock ALPRs. Flock then installed two cameras without the city's awareness, further confirming trust concerns.
Read ArticleCities and States Are Cutting Ties with Flock Safety License Plate Readers
NPR's February 2026 report on the growing wave of cities and states ending Flock contracts, and on Amazon killing its Ring-Flock partnership that same month. The count NPR cited has since been overtaken several times over; as of October 2, 2026 the Institute for Justice documents 249 local governments that cancelled.
Read ArticleMountain View Police Chief Recommends Ending Flock Safety Contract
Police chief herself recommended termination after discovering Flock had enabled nationwide search without police knowledge, allowing ATF and federal agencies to access local data for 17 months.
Read ArticleFlock Safety Cameras Exposed Live Video Feeds
Investigation found 60+ Flock cameras streaming live video without authentication. A system marketed as a "license plate reader" was actually capturing continuous video accessible to anyone who knew where to look.
Read ArticleWyden, Krishnamoorthi Urge FTC Investigation of Flock Safety
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi formally requested an FTC investigation into Flock Safety's cybersecurity practices and data handling claims.
Read ArticleResearch & Analysis
In-depth resources documenting Flock Safety's capabilities, contracts, security vulnerabilities, and the peer-reviewed research on whether ALPRs actually reduce crime.
Peer-Reviewed: A City Put ALPRs on Every Entrance and Exit. Violent Crime Did Not Drop.
The most rigorous test of the "cameras reduce crime" claim. Researchers led by Eric Piza evaluated a major ALPR expansion in Atlantic City, where police installed fixed readers on every entrance and exit to scan every vehicle moving in or out of the city. The peer-reviewed evaluation found the expansion was not associated with a reduction in violent crime. A December 2025 review in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing reached the same posture: on whether ALPRs actually achieve public-safety goals, "the jury is still out." When a department is asked to prove these cameras work, this is the research it has to answer.
Read StudyIPVM: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Caught Stalking Women
The surveillance-industry research outlet IPVM documents a recurring pattern - law enforcement officials using Flock to track romantic partners and other private citizens - and argues the only real fix is warrants and audits, which most agencies, OKCPD included, do not have. IPVM has separately reported on Flock labeling its own critics "terrorists" while dismissing documented abuses. Independent, technical, and skeptical of both the vendor and the hype.
Read ReportFlock's Terms and Conditions
The ACLU's national analysis of Flock's contract terms - how they've evolved to strip cities of control over their own data, grant Flock perpetual licensing rights, and force arbitration in Georgia courts. Essential reading before any renewal vote.
Read AnalysisFlock ALPR Community Toolkit
CC BY-SA 4.0 toolkit with council handouts, legal analysis, 3-minute talk tracks, mayor briefings, and deep research reports. Battle-tested materials for community advocacy. 10 documents in multiple formats.
View ToolkitWe Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in Under 30 Seconds
Independent researcher and musician Benn Jordan demonstrates security vulnerabilities in Flock hardware, builds an alternative ALPR system for $250 that outperforms Flock's, and develops adversarial noise techniques to confuse license plate readers. Essential viewing.
Watch VideoThis Flock Camera Leak Is Like Netflix for Stalkers
Jordan and 404 Media find at least 60 Flock cameras streaming live without authentication - including one at a children's playground. Demonstrates that anyone with a search engine could watch live or browse 30 days of archived footage. Flock's CEO responded by claiming deployed cameras were secure - Jordan then read Flock's own security claims aloud from an unsecured, publicly deployed camera.
Watch VideoFlock Employees Are Watching Your Children
Public records reveal Flock's VP of Business Development searched a city's database 63 times. Multiple Flock employees accessed cameras inside a community gym - including the pool, fitness studio, and a children's gymnastics room. When Jordan presented these findings to Dunwoody city council, the contract vote was delayed twice.
Watch on YouTubeCheck If Your License Plate Is in Flock's Audit Logs
Built by researcher Jason Hunyar using publicly available Flock audit data. Search your plate to see if it appears in published network audit logs from law enforcement agencies. This is how Milwaukee's stalking case was discovered - by a victim checking their own plate.
Check Your PlateFlock Patent US11416545B1: Person Classification
Flock's own patent describes classifying people by race, gender, height, weight, and clothing in searchable databases. Directly contradicts their public claims about system capabilities.
View Patent