More Than 80 Communities Have Walked Away From Flock Safety — And the Privacy Questions Are Getting Harder to Ignore

July 26, 2026

Across the United States, a growing number of cities, counties and law enforcement agencies are suspending, terminating or declining to renew contracts with Flock Safety, the company behind a nationwide network of automated license plate reader cameras.

Recent national reporting indicates that more than 80 municipalities have ended Flock contracts.

The reasons vary, but the same concerns continue to surface: privacy, cybersecurity, data sharing, outside-agency access, accountability and how much information government should be able to collect about people who are not suspected of committing a crime.

Those concerns also raise a much larger constitutional question:

At what point does observing someone in public become government surveillance under the Fourth Amendment?

A license plate isn’t the entire issue

A common defense of automated license plate readers is simple: license plates are displayed publicly, vehicles travel on public roads and people generally have a reduced expectation of privacy in what they knowingly expose to public view.

That argument has legal support.

But it doesn’t completely answer the question presented by modern surveillance networks.

There is an enormous practical difference between a police officer seeing your vehicle drive down Highway 190 once and a network of automated cameras repeatedly recording your vehicle’s location, date, time and identifying characteristics and making those records searchable afterward.

Flock itself says its ALPR system collects license-plate images, vehicle characteristics, timestamps and camera-location identifiers. Its standard retention period is generally 30 days, although different retention periods may apply depending on local law or policy.

The constitutional concern isn’t necessarily one photograph.

It’s what can potentially be learned when thousands or millions of observations are combined.

“You don’t have privacy in public” doesn’t end the debate

The U.S. Supreme Court has already recognized that modern technology can change the Fourth Amendment analysis.

In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court dealt with historical cellphone-location information. The government argued, among other things, that a person traveling in public could have been observed by law enforcement.

The Court nevertheless held that obtaining the extensive historical location information at issue constituted a Fourth Amendment search.

The principle is important: technology can allow the government to reconstruct a person’s movements on a scale fundamentally different from ordinary human observation.

A federal appeals court reached a similar conclusion when reviewing Baltimore’s aerial surveillance program. The Fourth Circuit held that accessing a system capable of revealing the whole of people’s movements constituted a search and that its warrantless operation violated the Fourth Amendment.

Neither decision automatically means every ALPR camera violates the Constitution. Courts are still determining where that constitutional line should be drawn.

In fact, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found that the limited ALPR deployment before it did not amount to a search. But the court also recognized something important: widespread ALPR use could potentially create a sufficiently detailed picture of someone’s public movements to implicate constitutional protections.

That distinction matters.

One observation is not necessarily the same thing as creating a searchable history of observations.

“But your cellphone tracks you.”

It does.

So can Facebook, apps, modern vehicles, websites and numerous other private services.

But that argument actually misses the constitutional issue.

The Fourth Amendment restricts government action.

Whether someone voluntarily gives location information to a private company under a user agreement is a different legal question from whether government agencies should be able to systematically collect, search or obtain information documenting someone’s movements without individualized suspicion or a warrant.

And Carpenter itself involved information held by a private cellphone company. The fact that a private business possessed the records did not give government unlimited warrantless access to them.

So saying “your phone already tracks you” does not resolve whether government surveillance complies with the Fourth Amendment.

“If you aren’t doing anything wrong, why care?”

Because the Fourth Amendment does not apply only to people suspected of crimes.

Its entire purpose is to place boundaries on government searches and seizures.

A person driving to church, a doctor’s office, a political meeting, a gun store, an attorney’s office, a journalist’s home or anywhere else may be doing absolutely nothing illegal.

The constitutional question isn’t whether that person has something to hide.

It’s how much information government should be permitted to collect about ordinary people’s movements without first having a reason to investigate them.

Communities are beginning to draw their own lines

Dane County, Wisconsin, voted to end its Flock contract. When the company’s 26 cameras had not been removed after the contract expired, the Sheriff’s Office covered them so they could no longer operate.

Kaukauna, Wisconsin, declined to renew its contract, citing concerns that included the inability to audit data sharing and account security.

Los Angeles suspended its relationship with Flock while seeking stronger protections involving data ownership, privacy, security and sharing.

Tompkins County, New York, voted to terminate its agreement.

Other cities, towns, counties and law enforcement agencies across the country have taken similar steps.

That does not mean automated license plate readers provide no benefit to law enforcement. They can assist investigators in locating stolen vehicles, identifying suspect vehicles and developing leads in serious criminal investigations.

The question is whether those benefits require communities to accept an increasingly interconnected system capable of recording the movements of thousands of innocent motorists alongside the comparatively small number actually being sought by police.

The constitutional line is still being drawn

It would be inaccurate to state that Flock Safety cameras have been universally declared unconstitutional. They have not.

But it would be equally inaccurate to dismiss the issue by simply saying, “You’re driving in public, so you have no privacy.”

Courts have already recognized that technology can transform individually public observations into something constitutionally different when government gains the ability to reconstruct a person’s movements over time.

As automated surveillance networks become larger, more interconnected and more searchable, that distinction becomes increasingly important.

The debate is no longer simply about whether police can see a license plate on a public road.

The question is whether government should be able to build a searchable record of where ordinary citizens travel — without a warrant, without individualized suspicion and often without those citizens ever knowing the record exists.