How to stop Flock cameras in your city
62 US cities, counties and police departments have been reported cancelling, pausing or declining to renew their Flock Safety contracts. The reporting on those decisions follows a consistent enough pattern to be worth writing down.
Short version: the leverage is the contract, the moment is the renewal vote, and the thing that changes minds is the audit log.
- 62
- Cities reported cancelling or pausing
- 59
- Organised opposition stories tracked
- 17
- Legislation stories tracked
What this page does not cover
This is about lawful civic process — public records, council votes, legislation. It is not a guide to jamming, obscuring, blocking or damaging cameras. Those are property and, in some states, obstruction offences, and because ALPR units are expensive the charges are frequently felony-level; the cameras also routinely record the person damaging them. See penalties for damaging a Flock camera. None of this page is legal advice.
Step 1: Find out what your city actually signed
You cannot argue about a contract you haven't read, and most residents discover their city has one only after the cameras are up. Start here:
- Search council agendas and minutes for "Flock", "ALPR" or "license plate reader". Purchases are often approved on a consent calendar, which is precisely why nobody noticed.
- Check for a transparency portal. A growing number of departments publish one with camera counts, search volumes and sharing settings — see the oversight coverage.
- Look at the map. Search your ZIP to see what volunteers have already documented near you.
Step 2: Request the records that matter
A public-records request costs a stamp and does more work than any amount of argument. Four documents, each answering a different question:
| Request | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| The contract | Cost, term, renewal date, who owns the hardware |
| The ALPR policy | Retention period, permitted uses, who may search |
| Audit logs | Who searched, when, and for what stated reason |
| Sharing settings | Which outside agencies can query your residents' data |
The last two are where the reported cancellations came from. Audit logs are how misuse surfaced in every tracked misconduct case. Sharing settings are how councils discovered federal and out-of-state access they had never authorised — see the data-sharing coverage.
Some states exempt ALPR data from disclosure, and a refusal is itself informative — several of the tracked lawsuits are public-records suits over exactly that.
Step 3: Time it to the renewal vote
This is the part most campaigns get wrong. Cancelling mid-term is hard: notice periods, remaining lease obligations, and hardware-ownership questions all slow it down, and reporting on cancellations repeatedly notes cameras staying up for months after a council voted to end the programme.
Declining to renew is just a budget decision. Find the renewal date in the contract, work backwards, and be at the meeting before it — with the audit logs, not with adjectives.
Step 4: Build the coalition the vote needs
59 tracked opposition stories involve an unusually broad range of actors: the ACLU and EFF, public-interest law firms including the Institute for Justice and the Kansas Justice Institute, state legislators from both parties, and residents with no organisational affiliation at all. That breadth is the point — this has not divided along the usual lines, and campaigns that assume it will tend to lose votes they could have won.
Beyond your own city
17 tracked stories cover state-level bills: retention caps, restrictions on federal and out-of-state sharing, warrant requirements, and moratoriums on new installations. A state law reaches every jurisdiction at once, which is slower but does not have to be re-won at every council. Some cities have also adopted surveillance-technology ordinances requiring public notice and council approval before any such system is acquired — which stops the next one arriving unannounced.
Related
Common questions
How do I stop Flock cameras in my city?
The route that has actually worked in reported cases is the contract, not the camera. Find out whether your city has a Flock agreement and when it renews (city council agendas and minutes, or a public-records request). Request the ALPR policy and the audit logs showing who has searched your residents' data. Bring what you find to public comment before the renewal vote. FlockScanner tracks 62 US cities, counties and departments reported to have cancelled, paused or declined to renew — most after exactly this sequence.
Can a city ban Flock cameras?
A city can decline to renew or can cancel its own contract, which is the practical form a "ban" usually takes and is far easier than mid-term termination. Some councils have gone further and adopted surveillance-technology ordinances requiring council approval and public notice before any such system is acquired, which prevents the next one arriving through a routine consent agenda. Cities generally cannot prohibit private parties or other agencies from operating their own cameras.
When is the best time to challenge a Flock contract?
Before the renewal vote. This is the single most consistent finding in the cancellation reporting: declining to renew is a straightforward budget decision, while cancelling mid-term runs into notice periods, remaining lease obligations and questions about who owns the hardware. Contracts are typically annual or multi-year, and the renewal appears on a council agenda — often on the consent calendar, which is where they pass unnoticed.
What records should I request about my city's Flock cameras?
Four things, and they do different jobs. The contract itself, which shows cost, term, renewal date and who owns the hardware. The ALPR policy, which shows retention period and permitted uses. The audit logs, which show who has searched the data and why — this is where reported misuse has surfaced. And the data-sharing settings, showing which outside agencies can query your residents' plate reads, which is what has most often changed council minds.
Does opposing Flock cameras mean being soft on crime?
That framing appears in most of these debates, and the reported cancellations suggest councils have not generally accepted it. Several cancelled while explicitly affirming support for their police departments, on grounds of governance rather than policing: they had not authorised federal or out-of-state access, or an audit had found officer misuse, or the programme had never been publicly debated. Opposition in the tracked reporting spans the political spectrum, from the ACLU and EFF to the Institute for Justice and state legislators of both parties.
As of September 4, 2026, FlockScanner maps 138,636 documented ALPR (automated license plate reader) cameras across 50 US states, including Flock Safety cameras, sourced from OpenStreetMap and refreshed nightly. That figure is a lower bound on the number actually installed — it counts what volunteers have mapped, not what exists.
Camera location data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL).