In the news
Real reporting on what these systems do. Don't take our word for it. Every link below is to a news outlet, a court filing, or a civil-liberties group.
- Wrongful stops and arrests
- Officer misuse
- Shared with ICE and abortion seekers
- Legal challenges
- Mission creep and breaches
- Flock's credibility
- The movement is winning
- Right here at home
Wrongful stops and arrests
- Institute for Justice: dozens pulled over, held at gunpoint, or jailed over camera errors Includes a gunpoint stop and a police-dog attack after a "7" was misread as a "2."
- ACLU: San Francisco woman pulled from her car at gunpoint over a misread plate
- Denver7: Aurora police detain a Black family after a plate-reader error
- Times of San Diego: a Flock reader linked a San Diego man to a violent crime; he was five miles away He spent nearly a month in jail before the charges were dropped.
- FOX6: Brookfield police stopped the wrong driver at gunpoint after a Flock alert Aug. 6, 2026, on I-94 in Waukesha County. Milwaukee police said staff had failed to remove a wanted-vehicle alert from the system, and called it a personnel issue rather than a Flock issue. The driver told FOX6 the same thing had happened to her earlier that week.
Officer misuse
- KWCH: Kansas police lieutenant arrested, accused of using a Flock database to stalk his estranged wife
- Wisconsin Examiner: Wisconsin communities grapple with police misuse of Flock surveillance A running account of the Wisconsin cases.
- WTMJ: a second Milwaukee detective charged with misusing the Flock system July 8, 2026. Twenty unauthorized searches, plus a GPS tracker; he claimed it was for training.
- FOX 11: Menasha officer accused of using Flock off duty to track a woman's car Charged Jan. 2026 with misconduct in public office; bound over for trial. Charged is not convicted.
- The Marshall Project: how police cameras are open to an officer's abuse
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution: more Georgia officers arrested over Flock camera misuse July 2026. Five Albany officers were arrested and fired, and a Greene County deputy was arrested after an audit flagged her searches. It surfaced through department audits, not complaints. Charged is not convicted.
- Institute for Justice: officers have been accused of using plate readers to track romantic interests at least 28 times Count updated July 25, 2026. IJ says nearly all of those officers were criminally charged and left their departments. Three of the cases it describes are in Wisconsin.
- WTOC: Savannah, Georgia fired six police employees over Flock misuse Aug. 7, 2026. Four sworn officers and two civilian employees were fired. The department says a review found searches run on personal acquaintances and family members, and that one officer gave an outside agency access to Savannah's system. Its own auditing caught it, including Flock's Audit Assist tool. All six cases went to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and that criminal investigation is still open.
- Wisconsin Examiner: the Menasha officer who used Flock to track his ex-girlfriend was sentenced to six months in jail Aug. 18, 2026. Cristian Morales pleaded no contest in Outagamie County court and got six months in jail plus three years of probation. The judge called him an "oathbreaker." The same piece reports that a Milwaukee officer took a plea deal last month and received 12 months of probation with no jail, and that a Kenosha County deputy who used Flock to watch his girlfriend left the sheriff's office and was charged two days after this article ran.
- Spectrum News 1: a former Kenosha County deputy was charged with using Flock to track a coworker Aug. 20, 2026. Frank McGrath faces two counts of misconduct in public office. The sheriff's office found the searches during an internal audit in fall 2025, McGrath resigned, and the Racine County Sheriff's Office ran the criminal investigation. Sheriff David Zoerner says the office has since cut data retention from 30 days to seven, required a documented reason and case number before any search, and expanded auditing to all sworn supervisors. Charged is not convicted.
Shared with ICE and used against abortion seekers
- NPR: cities cancel Flock contracts over immigration-surveillance concerns
- UW Center for Human Rights: Flock exposes Washington data to immigration enforcement
- EFF/ACLU: demand police stop sharing data with ICE and anti-abortion states Documents the Texas search for a woman who ended a pregnancy.
- The Source (Bend, OR): federal immigration officials made 279 queries into Bend's Flock data in three weeks
- Dayton Daily News: Dayton suspends Flock after finding 7,000-plus immigration-related searches
Data sharing under legal challenge (lawsuits and AG actions)
- Class action: Flock shared California plate data with federal agencies 1.6 million times
- FOX 11 LA: LAPD sued over Flock cameras
- EFF: the Supreme Court says the Constitution protects your location data June 29, 2026, in Chatrie v. United States. The case is about geofence warrants for phone data, not cameras, and EFF does not say it covers plate readers. Our read is that its logic, that bulk location tracking is a search, could reach them as future cases test it.
- Atlanta News First: a federal class action accuses Flock of building a surveillance network open to police stalking Filed Aug. 25, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia by Grace Schulte of Dahlonega. The complaint seeks to cover everyone in the country whose plate data Flock has collected since Jan. 1, 2024, and alleges invasion of privacy, negligence, negligent design, failure to warn and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It points to Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrests of police personnel over unauthorized tracking, and to a Roseville, California report that Flock cameras misread plates in 71 percent of the automated alerts sent to officers. These are allegations, not findings. Flock had not filed a response when the story ran.
Mission creep and breaches
- EFF: readers used for school-residency checks, background checks, and noise complaints
- Central Current: Syracuse exposed driver data, searched 4.4 million times in a year
- EFF: new vulnerabilities prove mass surveillance is itself a public-safety threat
- WRAL: North Carolina's new budget opens every state road to license-plate cameras July 17, 2026. WRAL reviewed the 32 agencies in the state's pilot and found 30 had no policy on surveilling protests or protected classes. Only Asheville and Raleigh did.
- Mission Local: a police audit found federal and out-of-state agencies improperly searched San Francisco's Flock data June 17, 2026. The department reported 299 improper inquiries over about a year, routed through a regional intelligence center. SFPD says the agencies identified did not include ICE or Homeland Security.
The camera company's own credibility
- ACLU: Flock has repeatedly misled city councils and the public
- Institute for Justice: Flock paused federal access, and IJ says that changes little Aug. 28, 2025. IJ notes Flock had insisted it had no federal contracts, then acknowledged a pilot program with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations. IJ attorney Michael Soyfer says federal agents can still ask other Flock customers to run searches for them.
- InvestigateTV: Flock announced changes to its system after months of reporting and public backlash Aug. 13, 2026. The company says default retention drops from 30 days to seven, its audit tool becomes mandatory for police customers, searches will require a case number, and jurisdictions get to pick which offenses other agencies can search their cameras for. Agencies can still set their own retention periods. The ACLU's response, quoted in the piece, is that several of the changes are "merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures."
- Capitol News Illinois: the Illinois secretary of state says an audit found Flock broke state law Aug. 27, 2025. Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias says his office's audit found Flock gave U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to Illinois camera data, which a 2023 Illinois law bars, and that Flock had no safeguards stopping out-of-state police from doing the same. His office told the outlet it is investigating. Flock disagreed with his legal conclusions, but CEO Garrett Langley wrote in a company blog post that Flock "clearly communicated poorly" and "didn't create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users." The audit was prompted by an out-of-state search for a woman who had ended a pregnancy. Evanston shut its cameras off.
The movement is winning
- State of Surveillance: dozens of cities have canceled contracts, and the list keeps growing
- Truthout: the nationwide resistance is gaining steam
- Bolts: Verona, Wisconsin ended its Flock contract
- Wisconsin Watch: Flock loses another Wisconsin contract as the backlash spreads
- Cap Times: UW-Madison police let their Flock contract expire and are removing the cameras July 2026. The contract expired June 26 and the equipment is being pulled. In fairness, the department says it is looking for a different plate-reader vendor rather than dropping the technology, and will seek campus input first.
- WDIV Detroit: Westland, Michigan is removing its 10 Flock cameras July 2026. The police chief did not bring a renewal to the city council after residents raised privacy concerns and questions about who else can search the data. The contract expires at the end of July.
- WBAY: Appleton City Council votes unanimously to end its Flock contract July 15, 2026. The city stopped using the cameras on June 30 and covered them up.
- TechCrunch: the LAPD let its Flock contract expire over civil-liberties and privacy concerns July 13, 2026. One of Flock's largest government customers let a three-year contract lapse. The department's chief information officer cited "serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues." Flock told TechCrunch the expiry caught it by surprise, and the department is reported to be seeking new contract language on privacy and data storage.
- WHSV: Harrisonburg, Virginia city council voted 4-0 to end its Flock contract July 2026. The city manager told the meeting the system would go dark that Friday, and said the city would remove the cameras if that took too long. The residents who pushed for it say they are not done, because the council did not pass an ordinance covering future surveillance contracts.
- Stateline: more than 50 communities have canceled contracts or deactivated cameras this year Aug. 14, 2026. Stateline attributes the count to DeFlock, a group that tracks plate-reader deployments. The same piece reports a bipartisan group of Pennsylvania lawmakers planning statewide rules, and Republicans in Congress with at least two proposals to restrict the technology.
- CBS Boston: Hopkinton, Massachusetts canceled its Flock contract, saying a legal review found the agreement violated state law Aug. 21, 2026. The town asked Flock to shut the cameras off as soon as possible and remove them by Sept. 30. The story ran hours after Lynn police put two officers on paid leave over searches an audit had flagged.
- WRVO: Auburn, New York voted unanimously to terminate its Flock contract Aug. 21, 2026. Residents spoke against the cameras at the council meeting. The resolution stops city use as soon as the 30-day termination notice goes to Flock, and the council said it will write a plate-reader policy with staff and the police department before signing any new contract. One councilor who voted yes said he wished the city had let Flock speak.
- Carolina Public Press: Asheville, North Carolina voted 5-2 to terminate its Flock contract two years early Aug. 25, 2026. The city was running 11 Flock cameras under a contract signed in 2025 and set to run through 2027, and the city manager now reviews it for termination. A separate motion for a broader moratorium on plate readers failed the same night, and 86 cameras run by other entities in Buncombe County are unaffected. The police department will bring in an ACLU policy reviewer.
- Wisconsin Watch: Milwaukee's new plate-reader limits will cover every system the police department runs, not just Flock Sept. 2, 2026. As of June the department had 35 Flock cameras, 39 Genetec cameras, and Axon readers in 80 squad cars. Under the rules Mayor Cavalier Johnson announced, only MPD supervisors get access, outside agencies can no longer search Milwaukee's data, and searches are limited to Part I crimes plus critical missing persons, drug trafficking and abductions. The city will publish a dashboard and the Fire and Police Commission will audit use twice a year. The ACLU of Wisconsin called it a step in the right direction and said Flock is still an invasive technology with the power to surveil communities on a mass scale.
- WTMJ: more southeast Wisconsin law-enforcement agencies are ending their Flock camera use Sept. 4, 2026. The Fond du Lac County and Racine County sheriff's offices both announced they are dropping the cameras, and the Fond du Lac release carried commitments from the police chiefs in Fond du Lac, North Fond du Lac, Ripon and Waupun. Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said he pulled his cameras immediately after learning the company builds a separate data set out of what the cameras collect and markets it to other government and private customers through a product called Traffic Analytics. "This is not what we agreed to, and it is not what the public was led to believe," Schmaling said in the release. Kenosha said the same week that it is moving from Flock to a competitor.
- WBAY: the Sheboygan Common Council voted unanimously to end the city's Flock contract Sept. 9, 2026. Mayor Ryan Sorenson said the city found violations of its contract involving how data was being managed and shared, and the agreement ends at the end of the year. Sheboygan had already covered all 15 of its cameras in August. Sorenson told WISN 12 that when a vendor "violates that trust," the city has to do its due diligence on whether the community can trust the product.
- KBTX: Bastrop, Texas terminated its Flock contract and barred any future plate-reader contract Sept. 8, 2026. Council member Cynthia Meyer moved to end the Flock agreement and to stop all future automatic license plate reader contracts in the city, and the council passed it. The city had covered its cameras the week before. One resident quoted by KBTX says he would like a city charter amendment next, so the bar outlasts this council. College Station is set to vote on its own contract Sept. 24.
Right here at home
- Fox21: Ashland Police Department to remove Flock cameras from the city Our local proof it can be beaten.
Sources include the ACLU, EFF, the Institute for Justice, and local and national news outlets. Dates vary; follow each link for the full story.