The surveillance technology has also, however, sparked a backlash among residents, civil liberty advocates and politicians who consider Flock’s main product invasive and prone to misuses, including unauthorized data sharing and stalking.
That backlash has led to new state laws designed to protect citizens against alleged abuses of Flock’s automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs.
It has also put the company on the defensive and raised questions about the future of public safety technology, which is embracing AI and drones as sensors, software and other tools that make data collection quicker and data analysis more efficient.
Such improvements might be cheered by law enforcement. But they leave many critics distrustful and ready to lobby elected officials against approving future contracts with Flock.
Flock has become the “poster boy” for growing worries about potential invasions of privacy via cutting-edge police technology, says Robert Frommer, senior attorney for the Institute for Justice, a public interest nonprofit law firm that has filed at least two lawsuits for Flock critics.
“What Americans are starting to realize is there’s been an entire surveillance industry erected around them,” Frommer says.
FLOCK’S GROWTH
In some ways, Flock is a government technology success story.
Founded in 2017, Atlanta-based Flock Safety’s backers include investment and political heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz, along with such firms as Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global and Matrix Partners.
Flock’s total funding stands at $1.2 billion, according to Crunchbase, including a recent $275 million investment round. That round valued Flock at $7.5 billion, up from $4.8 billion the previous year. Few gov tech companies can claim such a high profile.
The company says it has more than 12,000 clients across the U.S., which includes more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, 1,000 business and numerous HOAs.
Flock has also moved into drones, another growing area for public safety tech.
Yet a backlash against the company has mounted, and for now that backlash focuses on its most famous offering, ALPRs. They use pole-mounted cameras, software, optical character recognition, machine learning and analysis of vehicle details such as roof racks and bumper stickers to produce alerts for law enforcement.
Well-publicized accusations of misuse of that tech — including for recent federal immigration raids, which are increasingly unpopular among the public — have cost the company business.
Between August 2021 and May 2026, 82 Flock contracts were terminated in 28 states, according to reporting by the San Francisco Standard. That includes 39 between January and May of this year.
An anti-Flock online operation called DeFlock estimates that 68 cities specifically have rejected the company’s tech since August 2021 via canceled contracts, deactivated cameras or ALPR bans. Still, DeFlock has mapped more than 99,000 ALPRs across the U.S.
Flock, and some of its largest investors, did not provide comment for this story.
But through blog posts and previous comments to Government Technology, Flock has insisted that its employees follow the law and do nothing wrong, and that the company does not support unauthorized use of its products.
In reference to concerns that critics have raised over the company sharing data with federal immigration authorities, Flock has denied having a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and has said the agency does not have direct access to its camera-generated data — though it acknowledges that local and state law enforcement can share such data with federal authorities.
Flock has touted its development of auditing and monitoring tools and policies designed to protect against clients and others who would misuse the company’s products in ways that tend to annoy some residents, politicians and civil libertarians. The company says it follows applicable laws.
THE BACKLASH
Much of the backlash to Flock’s technology comes from concerns about privacy.
In modern life, many common products and services transfer tremendous amounts of personal data to faceless third parties, including Ring cameras, e-commerce and social media. The difference, however, is that Flock’s critics say those are voluntary activities, while Flock is often inescapable.
“As surveillance grows, privacy protections are not keeping pace,” said M. Lorena González, legislative director for the ACLU of Washington state. “Location data is deeply personal. It tells a story about your life.”
Such distrust is reflected in a new Washington state law which limits use of Flock readers and their data to felony investigations and other immediate needs. The law bans sharing Flock data outside of court and requires most data to be deleted within three weeks.
More anti-Flock laws loom, including a proposed federal bill that would keep federal highway funding from any state that allows ALPRs except for tolling. The bill’s sponsors were a progressive Democrat and a hard-right Republican.
Flock also attracts ire from citizens.
Jason Hunyar lives in Dunwoody, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, and he said he began opposing the technology after Flock used data from its cameras in a playground, school, Jewish center and children’s activity space for product demonstrations for outside agencies.
Hunyar told Government Technology he made more than 100 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about Flock. He also published a blog and took his case to local media, all in the hopes of persuading Dunwoody officials to reject Flock’s technology.
Hunyar isn’t against all emerging police tech. He supports upgraded 911 call center platforms to speed up emergency response. But he doesn’t trust Flock’s data-sharing practices and doesn’t want his data used for AI training.
The Dunwoody City Council ended up unanimously approving a new agreement with Flock. The agreement, however, prohibits Flock from using data from the town for product demonstrations. For its part, Flock has said its workers did no wrong, the town was a willing demo partner and future demos will involve public areas such as parking lots, not sensitive spaces. Dunwoody officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, Will Freeman, who runs DeFlock, says there is a lack of independent studies that confirm the crime-fighting successes claimed by Flock. Freeman doesn’t buy the pitch that ALPRs prevent, solve or deter meaningful amounts of crime.
“These are very dangerous tools,” Freeman says. “And the problem is bigger than Flock. We move very quickly into adopting tech before understanding the consequences.”
PROCUREMENT PRACTICES
Part of that speed perhaps comes from mastery of gov tech procurement, which critics and supports agree it does well enough to start tech deployments before opponents can organize and present cases to decision-makers.
Agencies such as the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois — home of Chicago — have a cooperative, or piggyback, contract with Flock. That means the deal was essentially pre-vetted by others, a move that makes it easier for the company to sign standardized contracts with new agencies instead of starting fresh with each customer.
Such contracts are mainstream in gov tech. Also in Cook County, money to pay for Flock has come out of the Sheriff’s Office’s operating fund and didn’t require special approval from the county board, at least initially — another common funding story for Flock.
That funding has sparked controversy, however, as the Sheriff’s Office, which already has 125 Flock ALPRs, seeks more money for that tech, a deal meant to include a separate AI-backed camera surveillance system for the county jail.
DANE COUNTY, WIS.
One area that reflects the ongoing debate over Flock is Dane County, Wis., which includes Madison, a city that is home to both the state Capitol and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
County supervisors in April voted 32-1 to stop the sheriff’s office from spending $80,000 on Flock ALPRs; the office had received 24 cameras for free in 2022 via the National Policing Institute in a deal designed to test the capabilities of the tech.
The sheriff’s office tells Government Technology the cameras assisted in 18 arrests, the recovery of 12 stolen vehicles and three homicide investigations. The sheriff’s office also reports sharing access to camera data with 140 agencies across the country.
But concerns about privacy and data sharing sank the new deal, with county officials criticizing sharing ALPR data with federal agencies.
“Nothing about this action suggests that our deputies have misused this system,” said Supervisor Chad Kemp in a statement. “But the sheriff’s office has not been able to affirmatively confirm that the agencies it shares data with, or Flock itself, are not misusing the information collected by cameras in Dane County.”
By June, county officials moved to reinstate that $80,000 in ALPR funding, though that money would probably go to a Flock competitor such as Axon and Motorola. A spokesperson for the latter tells Government Technology the company is committed to transparency, a sign of how the Flock controversy is already influencing the sale pitches of other tech suppliers.
And the renewed spending comes with conditions: Data must remain under the “full control” of the sheriff’s office and “transparent documentation” is produced when outside access is granted.
Dane County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Ira Simpson tells Government Technology that ALPR tech is important, but acknowledged that the office is looking past Flock.
“Our focus is not on revisiting Flock specifically,” Simpson says, but “identifying” other suppliers that can both meet the crime-fighting needs of the sheriff’s department and the civil liberty requirements of the county board.
MORE ACCOUNTABILITY
Similar concerns about sharing data with feds led to the removal of 16 Flock cameras in Cambridge, Mass., last year — a decision affirmed when Flock installed two cameras without “city awareness,” says Jeremy Warnick, a city spokesperson.
The city plans to evaluate other ALPR tech, but with a more skeptical view.
The Chicago suburb of Oak Park offers a similar lesson: Officials and residents aren’t swearing off ALPRs as they kick Flock to the curb, as the Village Board did with a 5-2 vote in 2025, soon after Illinois announced its data-sharing investigation into Flock.
Village Trustee Derek Eder voted “no.” And he now says he has a “high bar” for any new deal for surveillance technology. He favors an independent audit of those tools and for local officials to store and manage the resulting data, similar to the Dane County conditions.
Supporters of Flock — reportedly in contention for an FBI contract to access ALPR data — are fighting back, sometimes in dramatic ways.
For instance, after Bandera, a small town in Texas, voted in May to fire Flock, a councilmember threatened to introduce a bill banning use of the Internet, cellphones and other modern technology for the town’s approximately 900 residents.
Around the same time, Rahul Sidhu, Flock’s chief strategy officer, posted a hard-worded message on his LinkedIn in response to Austin, Texas, turning off its Flock cameras after community backlash. The message caught the eye of the wider public safety tech world and could signal how arguments about ALPR deployments will progress.
He described how suspects in stolen vehicles conducted a shooting spree in Austin but were only caught in nearby Manor, Texas, which uses Flock cameras.
“After the suspects drove into Manor to continue their shooting spree, Manor PD located them almost immediately. The residents of Manor stayed safe. This is a tale of two cities,” Sidhu wrote.
But Frommer, the attorney who has filed suits against them, argues that Flock can only blame itself and its style of fast growth for its problems.
“The lack of guardrails are what hurt the company,” Frommer says. “We are not trying to ban those cameras. We are just saying go through a judge and get permission first.”
