‘work Boots And Subarus’: Local Officials Say The Backlash Against Flock Cameras Is Becoming Bipartisan

Communities across the U.S. are cutting ties with Flock Safety, one of the country’s leading producers of license plate readers and other surveillance systems, over concerns around mass surveillance and data privacy — and fears over how data could be used in immigration crackdowns.

Residents have swarmed city council meetings in states where Flock cameras have cropped up to urge elected officials to cancel contracts or deactivate Flock cameras — arguing that the technology could be used to track people traveling to places of worship, medical care centers, political protests and other sensitive locations.

“It was a bipartisan issue within our community. We had work boots and Subarus in our parking lot and they were united in their position against the Flock cameras,” Josh Young, a Republican commissioner of Macon County, North Carolina, said in an interview.

Over 20 local jurisdictions either stopped using Flock cameras or began the process of doing so in July, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, an activist group that has been mapping the company. It’s the highest amount in a single month since they began tracking in 2021.

The pushback against the surveillance technology — which caught fire in some liberal towns last year amid fears of data collection related to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown — runs parallel to sprawling fights over the future of technology in American life, including the rise of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence tools and the construction of massive data centers needed to power them.

Flock cameras typically serve cities as automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), marketed as a tool for local police departments to help catch criminals and enforce traffic laws.

Founded in 2017, Flock is now one of the largest networks of ALPRs, with over 80,000 cameras installed across the country. The company says it has partnered with more than 7,000 law enforcement agencies and more than 6,000 private sector customers.

Privacy activists have been debating the safety of ALPRs for years, with the ACLU raising concerns as early as 2013 about how the data collected by these readers is stored. But local officials and electoral candidates from both sides of the aisle said collective action against these cameras has recently surged.

“We’ve been advocating for people to push back at a local level, and it’s working,” Will Freeman, the founder of DeFlock, said in a statement. “Until this month, few people had heard of Flock cameras. Now that people know that they were installed in their community, they’re rightfully upset.”

In Macon County, the Board of Commissioners on July 14 unanimously voted to stop funding Flock cameras and terminate their contract with Flock as soon as possible.

“They feel it’s an invasion of their privacy,” Young said of his constituents.

Flock has consistently defended its network as a valuable tool for public safety, arguing it’s only a small portion of cities and towns that are turning away from the technology and that their decisions to do so will only make residents less safe.

“When a tool that is actively helping solve violent crimes is removed, public safety moves backward,” Courtney Terlecki, a spokesperson for Flock, said in a statement. “So far in 2026, for every city that has chosen not to renew its agreement, approximately seven new cities have partnered with Flock.”

But some local officials said the public safety promises weren’t worth the cost.

The cameras “didn’t help us with anything. From a utility aspect, they were just kind of not useful,” said Eric Couture, a Democratic first selectman in Killingworth, Connecticut, another city that recently canceled its contract with Flock. “I’d say it was a net negative.”

Elected officials and candidates who oppose the cameras say the quiet proliferation of the technology has eroded trust among constituents.

“They have concerns about the rapidly expanding technology, that the tech involved in domestic surveillance is kind of expanding faster than the law can deal with it,” said Mike Williamson, a Democratic hopeful for Virginia’s state Senate in 2027. “So it's not just Flock with a camera on a pole looking at a fixed place.
We now know that they're developing use of drone surveillance … so now people have serious concerns about 'when am I being watched? When am I being surveilled?'”

Williamson said some Virginians also worry that ALPR data could be used to identify people traveling to the state for abortions, where the procedure remains legal, or shared with other government agencies enforcing abortion restrictions in other states.

In a blog post last summer, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said reports that the network was used to search for a Texas woman because she had a self-administered abortion were a “falsehood,” writing that a sheriff’s office conducted a search because her family was worried for her “safety as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”

The cameras might also deter undocumented individuals from working or seeking medical care if ALPR data is shared with federal agencies participating in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, other officials said.

Flock said last summer it briefly worked with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations on “combatting human trafficking and fentanyl distribution,” but that federal pilot programs had been paused amid the backlash.

Terlecki, the Flock spokesperson, said the company no longer conducts pilot projects with federal agencies as of August last year, and does not have any active contracts with ICE or DHS agencies.

“There are concerns that that information is being shared with other agencies or other organizations that might not hold the same standards for that sort of police work,” said Couture, the local official in Connecticut.

Terlecki argued that local jurisdictions had the power to control their data, and a recent blog post from the company said customers own their data and can decide who else has access to it.

“Flock offers a nationwide lookup and statewide sharing network that is only accessible to our local and state law enforcement partners,” said the Flock spokesperson, adding that local and state agencies can choose to opt in or out of the nationwide lookup tool.