At least 10 local governments have ended contracts with Flock Safety, citing mass surveillance concerns and data privacy issues as AI surveillance technology faces growing backlash.
By Adam Makins·
More than a dozen cities and police departments have quietly turned their backs on Flock Safety this year, marking a turning point in how Americans view surveillance tech. Since summer, Monroe Ohio, Newburgh New York, Richmond Virginia, and several Massachusetts municipalities have terminated their contracts with the surveillance software company. Just this week, League City Texas voted to remove Flock’s license plate readers entirely.
The backlash reveals something deeper than typical government budget cuts. Residents and officials are actively rejecting the surveillance infrastructure that quietly expanded over the past few years, often without public knowledge or approval.
Flock, founded in 2017, has built an impressive surveillance arsenal. Over 100,000 of their cameras operate nationwide, capturing license plates, audio recordings of gunshots, and drone footage. The company markets these tools as crime-fighting essentials, and they do work. Missing persons have been found. Stolen vehicles recovered. Criminals caught.
But the company’s own data practices have become impossible to ignore. In March, Ithaca New York discovered that federal immigration agents accessed Flock’s database without authorization. The city’s resolution revealed that ICE and the ATF had mined Flock data to track and prosecute immigrants, transforming a local public safety tool into a deportation instrument.
Misuse has been documented repeatedly. An officer in Brentwood Missouri used Flock cameras to stalk his ex-wife during divorce proceedings. An East Texas officer landed in prison for using the same technology to track his ex-girlfriend.
Adam Schwartz from the Electronic Frontier Foundation points to something crucial: people can see Flock cameras. A lens at the end of your street feels different than the abstract data brokers harvesting information from your phone. That visibility matters psychologically. It transforms surveillance from invisible to concrete, triggering real civic pushback.
Many departments installed Flock with minimal community input. South Windsor Connecticut saw cameras go live without public warning or a city council vote. When residents finally noticed, they voted to remove them within months.
Tatiana Rice, a senior director at The Future of Privacy Forum, describes this as part of a broader “growing public skepticism toward technology.” Data centers, facial recognition, AI infrastructure, mass surveillance cameras, they’re all manifestations of the same concern. We’re building a society where every movement gets tracked and analyzed, often by companies we never agreed to let do so.
Not every city is abandoning the technology entirely. Cleveland Ohio renewed its Flock contract but added restrictions. Searches related to immigration are now prohibited. Access to the database has been limited to Cleveland Police alone, cutting off the federal intelligence agency that previously had access.
This represents the compromise many communities are settling on: keep the tools if they help solve actual crimes, but build guardrails around them. Limit data retention. Require case codes before searching. Prevent federal immigration access. Control who sees what.
Flock responded to the controversy by shortening default data storage from 30 days to 7 days for new customers. The company insists it doesn’t sell data and has no ICE contract. They argue that removing these tools “moves public safety backward.”
Congress is paying attention. Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Senator Jeff Merkley introduced the Ban Flock Act to end AI-powered surveillance cameras. Meanwhile, Republican Thomas Massie proposed the Flock-Off Act to bar federal funding for this surveillance. Remarkably, the issue has transcended typical partisan divides.
President Trump expressed support for Flock in September, citing law enforcement benefits. Yet that same month, a Reuters poll showed more Americans dislike the technology than like it.
This disconnect between political leadership and public opinion will likely intensify as more communities demand real power over what surveillance tools operate in their neighborhoods. The question isn’t whether technology can help catch criminals. It’s whether we’re willing to build a permanent surveillance state to do so.
Source: TechCrunch
