The Resistance Against Flock Surveillance Cameras

By Michael Hernandez

You probably know there are programs out there intercepting electronic data to harvest global emails, chats, and browsing histories. And there are governments and agencies collecting our metadata for information including the durations of our calls, communication time stamps, and precise geolocation records. There are facial recognition networks scanning anyone and everyone in public spaces, transit hubs, and protests to match faces against immense biometric databases.

In our world — one that is increasingly resembling the totalitarian superstate of Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984 — these are just a few of the tools being used in the modern day to spy on everyday Americans. Among them in the mass-surveillance toolbox are Automatic License Plate Readers, or ALPRs. ALPRs are cameras set up along roadways, traffic lights, or mounted on police cars that capture images of license plates in real-time, convert them into text and run the images against vehicle databases to find a match.

One of the major providers of ALPR technology is Flock Safety, an American public safety tech and private-police surveillance company.

Founded in 2017 by three alumni from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a stated mission of “shaping the future of safety”, Flock began as a side-project which saw the three co-founders build their first video surveillance cameras by hand around one of the trio’s dining room tables. The trio allegedly began to focus on the project after a Dekalb County detective told one of them their product had assisted police in solving a home break-in. Then that member supposedly called the other two co-founders and told them it was time to quit their jobs.

As of 2026 Flock Safety ALPRs are reportedly being used by over 5,000 law enforcement agencies in 6,000 communities across the U.S. It is estimated flock safety cameras scan more than 20 billion cars nationwide every month. According to Flock itself, roughly 10 percent of reported crimes in the country are solved using their technology, amounting to more than  a purported 700,000 crimes a year.

Flock Safety’s network is made up of cameras, image recognition, and AI machine learning which then shares information with police departments. While advocates tout the technology as an important tool for law enforcement, ALPRs have drawn a heavy amount of backlash from the public, elected officials, and civil liberty groups citing privacy concerns.

Unlike normal traffic cameras, Automatic License Plate Readers indiscriminately record and track every single car that drives into frame. Then, using an AI algorithm it catalogs information like the car’s make, model, color, license plate, and even bumper stickers and scratches that can be used to identify a vehicle.

One organization leading the fight against ALPRs, like Flock, at the national level is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — a non-profit founded over 100 years ago dedicated to preserving and defending our individual rights and liberties under the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the campaign and initiatives section of their website titled Get the Flock Out, the ACLU accuses ALPR companies including Flock Safety of trying to build a “nationwide mass-surveillance system” adding if there are Flock cameras currently in your area they are already warrantlessly tracking, logging, and sharing your movements. They add one should not lose hope however, as a growing number of communities are rejecting and fighting back against the use of such cameras and yours still has the opportunity to become of them.

The ACLU notes there are roughly 120,000 Flock cameras currently installed in areas both rural and urban, on highways, in neighborhoods, on reservations and on local businesses. They also note less than one percent of cars being scanned all of the time by ALPRs are ever linked to any crime or wrongdoing. Additionally, one in every 10 license plates scanned by Flock license plate readers are misread by the technology, leading to wrongful arrests–  such as the 2024 case of Brandon Upchurch, an innocent man from Ohio who was falsely accused of driving a stolen vehicle when an officer sicced a K-9 unit on him. It was later revealed a camera made by Flock Safety misread the number “7” on Upchurch’s license plate as a number “2” leading to the mishap.

The ACLU goes on to say while Flock is the provider of the most widely used ALPR systems they are not even close to being the only company trying to make a profit off of spying on us, naming other companies including, but not limited to Axon, Vigilant Solutions, Genetec, and Innova Systems as other leading players selling ALPRs to private companies, the police, and more. No matter whose camera is installed in your neighborhood however, they all share the same problems, a lack of transparency, accountability, and oversight.

The implications of what might happen should this kind of technology be allowed to operate unchecked are disturbing. ALPRs are constantly tracking where we drive, our places of worship, and more likely than not the political protests and meetings we are attending. ICE and the border patrol especially have demonstrated the weaponization and abuse of Flock’s technology by using it to go after immigrants without a warrant. Luckily, cities and police departments throughout the country are cancelling their contracts with the company in response to pressure from the public, says the ACLU. The organization lauds that their affiliates are supporting and, in fact, passing legislation to regulate how ALPRs are being used. They also urge the public to demand their congressional representatives reject the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA), a bipartisan federal bill targeting large-scale multi-jurisdictional retail theft and cargo crime rings. Critics warn by merging corporate retail data with federal law enforcement, CORCA is creating a vast public-private surveillance network.

In addition to opposing the use of ALPRs through policy, there is a rising wave of civil disobedience and vandalism against these cameras throughout the United States. A CNN article titled Flock Cameras Are Getting Mobbed, posted at the end of July, details incidents in the last few months of people cutting down Flock cameras with an electric saw in upstate New York, throwing paint on them in Oakland, California, and in Idaho, someone even deliberately rammed their truck into two ALPRs.

Another article by The Guardian, titled Inside the Growing Vigilante Movement to Knock Out Flock Surveillance Cameras, identifies “at least 33 instances of people damaging, vandalizing and destroying Flock cameras, across 23 states, that appear to have the explicit message of protesting surveillance”. That article also detailed instances in which police misused these cameras for their own personal ends as well, noting several officers have been terminated for misusing the devices for the purpose of stalking. As if that wasn’t scary enough, it has been reported that police use Flock’s search feature to identify people through not just vehicles, but distinct markers like clothing and tattoos.

More locally, in late 2023 the San Diego City Council approved a 5-year, $12 million contract for a police surveillance network spanning over 500 smart streetlights and Flock ALPRs.This move was met with immediate pushback from groups like the leading non-profit organization defending digital privacy, free speech, and user innovation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF is currently fighting the use of Flock Safety through investigations of public records, covering the legal fees in defense of grassroots activists, and by exposing instances of surveillance overreach.

In one local reaction to the surveillance cameras, back in February, at least two Flock Automatic License Plate Readers were destroyed along Fletcher Parkway in La Mesa, with their pieces scattered along the road and in the center median.

San Diego City Council members Vivian Moreno, Sean Elo-Rivera and Henry Foster III voted “No” when the city first approved the smart streetlights and Flock camera network. Both have joined community advocates in urging the city to cease the use of Flock ALPRs. In June of this year, these three council members along with president pro tempore of the San Diego City Council Kent Lee, proposed cutting funds for ALPR cameras, in order to restore financial cuts made to arts and culture programs, rec centers and libraries. They were unsuccessful.

As the debate over the use of these devices across the city and the nation at large continues, the words written in 1755 by founding father Benjamin Franklin come to mind. Though he was most likely writing about a tax dispute at the time and as innovative as he was, he could never have envisioned a future society with 24-hour surveillance when he said “those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”.