Flock Safety
Is Watching
Your Children

Flock Safety was founded in 2017 in Atlanta. Its pitch to cities is simple: let us put automated license plate reader cameras on your streets, and we'll help your police department solve crime. It works. The cameras do catch car thieves. Flock claims their technology has helped address over 700,000 crimes nationally. Nobody is disputing that.

What the sales pitch leaves out is everything else. Flock's cameras don't just scan license plates. They generate a "vehicle fingerprint" — make, model, color, body style, visible damage, roof racks, decals — creating a searchable profile of every vehicle even when the exact plate is unknown. Their Condor PTZ cameras automatically zoom in on people's faces as they walk by. Their Raven devices record ambient audio and listen for "human distress" — including screaming. Their Nova product, revealed in 2025, combines camera data with commercially available information and data from breaches to track specific individuals without a warrant. Every scan, every audio clip, every facial zoom feeds into a centralized database accessible — depending on how the settings are configured — to thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country, including federal ones.

As of 2025, Flock operates in over 5,000 communities across 49 states. It scans 20 billion vehicles a month. It had $300 million in annual recurring revenue — up 70% from the year before. It raised $275 million in March 2025 at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. This is not a scrappy public safety startup. It is one of the most aggressive surveillance infrastructure buildouts in American history, paid for largely by local governments with public money, with almost no federal oversight and inconsistent local oversight.

In early April 2026, Dunwoody, Georgia resident Jason Hunyar obtained internal Flock event logs through an open records request and published what they showed. The logs documented Flock employees — not police officers, not investigators, not anyone with a law enforcement mandate — accessing live camera feeds inside the Marcus Jewish Community Center (MJCC), a private community facility.

The feeds accessed included cameras in the gymnasium, the main pool, a daycare center, and fitness studios. Among those accessing the feeds: Bob Carter, Flock Safety's Vice President of Strategic Relations and Business Development. On September 30, 2025, Carter accessed a single camera at the MJCC. That camera was labeled "Gymnastics." His only activity that day. His next recorded activity was 7.3 days later, on a skate park camera.

Flock's explanation, per Dunwoody Mayor Lynn Deutsch after she requested more information: Flock employees had been using Dunwoody's system "for a potential sales call with another law enforcement agency." A sales demo. A sales VP was accessing a live feed of a children's gymnastics room for a sales call.

Carter was not the only Flock employee in the logs. On July 23, 2025, Randy Gluck, Flock's business development manager, had viewed three MJCC cameras labeled "Gym Mendel – 1" and "Main Pool Right." According to Hunyar's analysis, Carter alone had accessed Dunwoody's Flock system 185 times in the period reviewed.

The investigative site Have I Been Flocked? and researcher H.C. van Pelt published a detailed analysis of Carter's full 2025 search record. It shows Carter searching Dunwoody's production law enforcement network — which he had no law enforcement basis to access — for "chicken truck," "cattle truck," "lawnmower," "ice cream truck," "unicycle," "rocket car," and eventually, as the months progressed, "person on skateboard" and "person wearing orange vest." By August he was running 892-network lookups — taking a locally spotted vehicle and sweeping it against the entire Flock national network. He also ran live views of pools, gyms, and eventually, the gymnastics room.

In December 2025, while Carter was conducting his searches, Flock SVP Chris Colwell sent an email to all Flock customers announcing that officer names, license plates searched, and open-text search reasons would be removed from audit logs going forward. The audit trail that caught Carter was, effectively, being stripped.

In February 2026, Mountain View, California became the latest city to shut down its Flock cameras entirely. The reason: an internal audit found that federal agencies had been accessing the city's surveillance data — and the city had never authorized it.

The agencies that accessed Mountain View's cameras: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives offices in Kentucky and Tennessee. The inspector general's office of the US General Services Administration — which manages federal buildings and procurement. Air Force bases in Langley, Virginia and Ohio. The Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada. None of these agencies had any relationship with Mountain View. None had been authorized by the city. None had any evident nexus to Mountain View crime.

The cause: a "nationwide search" setting had been enabled on Mountain View's account — activated by Flock Safety without the city's knowledge or permission. "This setting was enabled without MVPD's permission or knowledge," the city stated. "This is a system failure on Flock Safety's part." Mountain View Police Chief Mike Canfield turned off all Flock cameras effective immediately, citing a loss of confidence.

Mountain View was not an isolated case.

In January 2026, YouTuber and security researcher Benn Jordan discovered that dozens of Flock Condor cameras were streaming live to the open internet with no password or authentication required. Jordan shared his findings with 404 Media journalist Jason Koebler, who confirmed it by walking up to a Flock camera mounted on a California traffic signal and watching himself on his phone in real time — while colleagues watched the same feed hundreds of miles away.

The exposure wasn't limited to live feeds. Anyone who found an exposed camera could access 30 days of archived footage and change settings. The cameras — which can automatically zoom in on people's faces — were deployed at intersections, parks, and community centers. At least 67 cameras were confirmed exposed. The footage included playgrounds, emergency responses, and residential intersections in locations including Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Douglas County, Colorado.

Flock called it "a limited misconfiguration." The company has claimed it has "never had a data breach." Senator Ron Wyden called for an FTC investigation after Flock login credentials appeared on Russian cybercrime forums.

Separately, security researcher Jon Gaines found that anyone with physical access to a Flock camera could press a button sequence on the back of the device to create a wireless access point, then connect to it and gain full access. Passwords were stored on the device in plain text. The cameras lack multi-factor authentication — a violation of federal CJIS security standards that Flock is contractually required to meet. "The longest part," Gaines noted, "is waiting for the hotspot to turn on."

Flock doesn't cold-call cities with a $2.5 million pitch. It offers free hardware. Cities accept because free is easy to justify politically. The police department gets cameras. The city gets a crime-reduction narrative. Nobody has to vote on a surveillance budget.

By the time the free trial ends, the police department has built workflows around Flock's platform. Officers use it daily. The dispatch system integrates with it. Stopping feels like losing a tool. Flock then presents the contract. Oakland County, Michigan accepted a nine-month free drone trial in April 2026 — the contract that follows is $2.5 million annually.

The lock-in is the database. Flock doesn't make money on hardware. It makes money on subscriptions and on the network. Drop the contract and your department loses access to 20 billion monthly scans from tens of thousands of cameras across the country. The data was built with your city's cameras — but Flock owns the network.

Flock also markets directly to homeowner associations and private property owners, who can share their camera feeds with police departments voluntarily. The Ring partnership announced in October 2025 extends this further — Ring camera owners can opt into sharing with public safety agencies. The result is a hybrid public-private surveillance network where the private portion operates with even less oversight than the government portion.

The cancellations span the country — from California (Mountain View, Santa Cruz, Oxnard, Los Altos Hills, San Jose under lawsuit) to Colorado (Denver, Boulder), Oregon (Eugene, Springfield, Bend), Wisconsin (Oshkosh, Verona), Ohio (Dayton), Illinois (Evanston), Massachusetts (Cambridge), Arizona (Flagstaff), Virginia (Staunton, Norfolk), New York (Syracuse), Texas (Austin), and Washington state, where the 2026 Driver Privacy Act now requires warrants for most federal ALPR data sharing.

Flock's revenue comes from government contracts — which means taxpayers. The company hit $300 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025. Its $7.5 billion valuation was funded by Andreessen Horowitz and other venture capital firms. The product they're building their valuation on is a nationwide surveillance database built with public money, on public roads, with cameras installed on public infrastructure.

Mountain View spent $154,650 on a pilot program before shutting it down. That's one mid-size California city. Multiply that by 5,000+ communities. Add subscription fees, software licenses, and integration costs. The nationwide spend on Flock infrastructure runs into the hundreds of millions annually — and that's before the drone contracts now being sold to municipalities at $2.5 million per city per year.

Meanwhile, Flock's own CEO, Garrett Langley, has referred to DeFlock.me — a website that maps the locations of Flock cameras using public records — as "terroristic." The only thing DeFlock.me does is show people where the cameras are. The cameras are on public property. The company that put them there called a map of them an act of terror.

The cancellations that began as a trickle in 2025 became a flood through 2026. By mid-2026, at least 80 US cities and agencies had canceled, suspended, or refused to renew their Flock contracts — a list that added names almost weekly. Three incidents in particular defined the backlash.

The strongest argument against a surveillance network is rarely the theory. It's the personnel file. Across 2024–2026, reporters and legal groups have compiled a steadily lengthening list of officers who used license-plate reader systems not to solve crimes but to track the people in their own lives. The Institute for Justice has counted at least 26 cases of officers misusing ALPR data to pursue romantic interests, most of them since 2024. 404 Media has documented more than a dozen officers accused of or arrested for using Flock specifically to harass and stalk. The trade outlet AutoWire catalogued 18 examples spanning hundreds of individual searches.

Similar misuse has surfaced in Orange City, Florida; Shelby County, Tennessee; Jerome County, Idaho; and Braselton, Georgia. The pattern is not regional and not partisan — it follows the tool. Flock's CEO has said the company recently deployed an automated audit process that flags questionable activity for administrators. Every case above was discovered after the searches ran.

The institutional revolt — councils voting contracts down — now has a street-level counterpart. Over the first half of 2026, CNN documented Flock cameras cut down with an electric saw in upstate New York, doused in paint in Oakland, and rammed with a truck in Idaho. In Houston, a camera was vandalized on July 7. In La Mesa, California, cameras were smashed weeks after the city council voted to keep them despite a clear majority of speakers at the meeting asking for removal.

In Park Ridge, Illinois, four of the town's eight cameras were knocked down over two nights in early June. The police chief suggested a social-media trend might be driving it. In Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, three camera poles were cut down in late 2025; both cities canceled their Flock contracts within two months.

What is genuinely unusual is not the vandalism. It is the reaction to it. When a West Virginia man was arrested in June for destroying several cameras, the local NBC affiliate posted the news to Facebook — and the comment section filled with people volunteering to be his alibi. One wrote that the accused had been out fishing with him that day, so police had the wrong guy. Another observed that the cameras were the one thing bringing everyone together — which, she noted, is precisely what the company would not want.

That cross-partisan quality is the part Flock's government-affairs operation should find most alarming. The opposition now runs from privacy-focused progressives to Second Amendment and anti-federal-overreach conservatives, and the cities switching the cameras off include Fort Collins, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; Knoxville, Tennessee; Syracuse, New York; and Walla Walla, Washington. Per NBC News, at least 80 communities across 28 states have now pared back or ended their work with Flock — while the company still counts more than 6,000 customers in every state but Alaska.

On July 29, 2026, a photograph began circulating widely on X: a Flock camera aimed at the parking lot of a JARS Cannabis dispensary in Michigan. The post drew well over 400,000 views within days. The replies did the analysis the caption didn't have to — a camera trained on the entrance of a legal cannabis retailer does not log traffic. It logs a customer list.

Michigan legalized recreational cannabis in 2018. Buying it is lawful. But a plate captured in that lot creates a durable, searchable federal-accessible record that a specific vehicle visited a cannabis business on a specific date — and that record can be queried later, by agencies with entirely different agendas, for entirely different purposes. Federal law still classifies cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance, and federal firearms forms still ask purchasers whether they are unlawful users of a controlled substance. A parking-lot plate scan is not evidence of a crime in Michigan. It is a data point that becomes one the moment it crosses a jurisdictional line.

Businesses have started responding directly. Reporting and social documentation show operators and customers pushing back on cameras sited near dispensaries — including calls for petitions to have them removed, and physical sight-line blocking of the kind the Florida lawn-chair protester made famous. We are still working to independently confirm the specific reports that a Michigan dispensary erected signage to obstruct a camera's view; if you have documentation, send it and we will publish it with credit.

The underlying question is simpler than the legal analysis. A dispensary is a lawful business. Its customers are engaged in lawful conduct under state law. A camera pointed at that lot is not preventing a crime — it is building a list of people who did something legal, and storing it where someone else can search it later.

Have police been caught misusing Flock cameras? Repeatedly. The Institute for Justice counts at least 26 cases of officers misusing ALPR data to track romantic interests, most since 2024; 404 Media has documented more than a dozen officers accused or arrested for using Flock to harass or stalk. Named: Kansas chief Lee Nygaard (resigned after 160+ searches for his ex), Pennsylvania officer Michael McSherry (pleaded guilty to stalking his estranged wife), California deputy Alexander Vanny (convicted on multiple charges).

Why are people destroying Flock cameras? Anger over mass surveillance, federal and ICE access, and the misuse record. CNN has documented cameras cut down with a saw in upstate New York, painted in Oakland, rammed with a truck in Idaho, vandalized in Houston and La Mesa, and four of eight knocked down in two nights in Park Ridge, Illinois. One Florida man blocks a camera legally with cardboard on a pole from a lawn chair.

Why is there a Flock camera outside a Michigan dispensary? A July 2026 photo of a camera aimed at a JARS Cannabis parking lot went viral. Cannabis is legal in Michigan — but a plate scan there builds a searchable record that a vehicle visited a dispensary, accessible to agencies in states where it isn't legal, and relevant to federal law that still lists cannabis as Schedule I.

Is Flock Safety legal? Flock's automated license plate readers are legal in most jurisdictions, but their data-sharing is under active legal challenge. A class action filed in San Francisco Superior Court in February 2026 alleges Flock violated California's ALPR Privacy Act by sharing plate data with out-of-state and federal agencies — including ICE, CBP, FBI, and ATF — more than 1.6 million times in seven months. The EFF and ACLU separately sued San Jose over warrantless searches.

How can I find Flock cameras near me? DeFlock, a crowdsourced project at deflock.org, has mapped roughly 90,000 ALPR cameras nationwide. You can search by address to see cameras near your home, workplace, school, or place of worship, and report unmapped ones. Flock's CEO has called the map "terroristic" — though the cameras are mounted on public infrastructure.

Does Flock share data with ICE? Flock says it does not give ICE direct access and that local agencies control their own data. But audits keep finding federal immigration access: Denver police logs showed over 1,400 immigration-related searches; Dayton, Ohio found more than 7,000 and bagged its cameras in June 2026; and reporting documented more than 4,000 searches run by local police on ICE's behalf.

How many cities have canceled Flock contracts? By mid-2026, at least 80 US cities and agencies had canceled, suspended, or declined to renew — including Mountain View, Denver, Santa Cruz, Cambridge, Eugene, Flagstaff, Austin, Evanston, and Oshkosh. The most common reasons are unauthorized federal access, ICE data sharing, and security failures. In the same period, nearly 800 cities approved new contracts.

What was the Flock camera security breach? In January 2026, researchers found 67 Flock cameras streaming live to the open internet with no password — exposing live feeds and 30 days of archived footage anyone could view or delete. Senator Ron Wyden called for an FTC investigation after Flock logins appeared on Russian cybercrime forums. Flock called it a "limited misconfiguration."