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TechTimes — Flock Crosses 100,000 Cameras as 53 Cities Cancel
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Flock Safety Crosses 100,000 Cameras as 53 Cities Cancel Over Unauthorized Federal Data Access
A national lookup setting in Flock contracts silently routed plate data to federal agencies.
By
Mireya Ramsey
Published: Jun 29 2026, 3:20 PM EDT
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A surveillance camera is seen next to Commerzbank's logo on the Commerzbank building in the banking district in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany, on June 16, 2026. Tuesday, June 16, marks the final day for UniCredit's hostile and highly political takeover offer for Commerzbank, as Italy's second-largest bank has its sights on an ambitious pan-European banking merger. (
Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV/Getty images
In Dayton, Ohio, city workers spent weeks pulling black garbage bags over 72 surveillance cameras bolted to utility poles across town — a low-tech, almost accidental symbol for a very modern failure of accountability. Dayton wanted to stop Flock Safety's license plate readers from collecting data, but couldn't immediately exit its own contract, so it covered the lenses instead.
The image stuck. As of today, Flock Safety's network of artificial intelligence-powered cameras has crossed 100,000 units deployed across the United States — more than at any point in the company's history — even as more than 53 municipalities across 20 states have terminated or rejected contracts with the Atlanta-based company, citing data-sharing violations, unauthorized federal access, and a pattern of surveillance settings that operated well beyond what cities were told they had signed up for.
What the growing legal record now shows — and what the draft contracts, city audits, class action filings, and court opinions of the past 18 months have forced into public view — is that the fundamental problem is not a rogue employee or a misconfigured camera. It is the network architecture itself. Flock's cameras connect via cellular to a cloud database accessible through configurable "national lookup" and "statewide lookup" permission toggles. When those toggles are on — as they frequently were, sometimes without cities knowing — any law enforcement agency anywhere in the country could query data a local city had paid to collect. Courts are now being asked whether that architecture, used exactly as designed, is constitutionally permissible.
How Flock's Network Actually Works: The Architecture Cities Didn't Fully Understand
Flock Safety's pitch was straightforward: mount solar-powered cameras at intersections, use AI-powered optical character recognition to scan every passing license plate, and give local police a searchable cloud database to track stolen vehicles and investigate crimes. Each camera runs a modified version of Android, connects wirelessly to Flock's servers via LTE, and processes captured images using computer vision to extract not just plate numbers but a full "vehicle fingerprint" — make, model, color, body style, bumper stickers, roof racks, and visible damage — at capture speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. Officers can search the resulting database using natural language through Flock's FreeForm system, typing queries like "blue pickup truck with a kayak in the bed" and receiving matching footage from across the network.
What many cities didn't fully grasp when they signed up — sometimes after a free trial, sometimes after a pitch about solving car thefts — is that the system was never purely local. By default, many contracts enabled the national lookup feature, which allows law enforcement agencies anywhere in the country to query the data a specific city collected. The more cities joined, the more useful and the more expansive the shared network became.
Flock's own terms and conditions state that the company may access, use, preserve, or disclose plate data if it has "a good faith belief that such access...is reasonably necessary to comply with a legal process." It was that language — noted publicly by officials in Hillsborough, North Carolina, who terminated their contract — that clarified what many cities had not absorbed when signing: data "owned" by a municipality was never fully within its control.
What City Audits Found: Six Cases That Defined the Scandal
Dayton, Ohio. In May 2026, an audit revealed that data from Dayton's cameras had been searched more than 7,100 times for immigration enforcement purposes — searches explicitly prohibited under the city's own policy, which barred using Flock data for immigration enforcement or sharing with agencies whose primary purpose was enforcing immigration law. City officials called the violations "egregious." Unable to immediately remove the cameras due to contract complications, they covered all 72 with trash bags.