🦅 Flock Safety in 2026 — Documented Abuses & Legal Fight-Back

What Flock Safety actually is in 2026

Flock is no longer just an ALPR company. In three years it has stacked five product lines into a single connected surveillance stack, and understanding what each does is the prerequisite to understanding the fight over it. Old and new product names, side by side: Flock product names explained.

• Falcon / Sparrow LPR cameras. Solar-powered, LTE-connected pole units that photograph every passing vehicle, run OCR on the plate, and log plate + timestamp + location + a "Vehicle Signature" of visible features such as make and color. Flock says FreeForm and Vehicle Signature “can recognize thousands of unique vehicle characteristics” Flock LPR page (read 16 Oct 2026). A teardown of one unit lists a lithium battery pack, optional solar power and an LTE modem CEHRP teardown (2022).
• Condor PTZ cameras. Pan–tilt–zoom cameras marketed alongside the LPRs. 404 Media reported that, according to marketing material on Flock's website, Condor cameras "can be set to automatically zoom in on people's faces" or be controlled manually 404 Media (22 Dec 2025).
• Raven audio detection (now “Gunshot Detection”). Pole-mounted microphones marketed as gunshot detection with the slogan "Safety you can see and now hear." Flock now calls the product "Gunshot Detection (formerly known as Raven)" Flock blog (10 Jul 2026). In October 2025 Flock added "human distress" detection, initially advertised with a screenshot of a police alert for "screaming" The Record (3 Oct 2025). After EFF criticism, the ad copy was quietly changed from "screaming" to "distress" EFF (2 Oct 2025). Flock then dropped the feature. In July 2026 it wrote: "After careful consideration and community consultation, we decided to remove the feature." It says the feature was only a limited trial for a few customers Flock blog (10 Jul 2026); The Record (20 Jul 2026). EFF called the decision "a win" but still describes acoustic gunshot detection as "a dangerous and often highly inaccurate technology" EFF (17 Jul 2026). How much it hears (vendor claims). Flock says the device checks sound in "short rolling windows of about three seconds." Audio that does not match a target sound "is never recorded, stored, or sent anywhere" Flock blog (10 Jul 2026). TechRadar described the window as five seconds TechRadar (22 Jul 2026). We found no independent test of either figure.
• Alpha drones (Drone as First Responder). Docked drones deployable to the coordinates of a 911 call, an LPR hit, or a Raven alert. Alpha reads license plates from up to 2,000 feet away and streams HD/thermal/night-vision video. It runs on Flock’s Aerodome software.
• Bravo edge-AI compute box. Local compute unit that runs classification and event correlation on-device.

• FlockOS. A real-time crime-center-style hub that unifies LPR, video, drones, gunshot detection, CAD, and RMS into a single searchable interface.
• Nova. The investigative platform. In May 2025, 404 Media reported from leaked material that Nova would "supplement license plate data with a wealth of personal information sourced from other companies and the wider web." Its sources were to include "people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches" 404 Media (14 May 2025). After that reporting, Flock wrote that "Nova will not supply any data purchased from known data breaches or stolen data." Flock said Nova supplies "public records information, Open-Source intelligence, and license plate reader data," and agencies can connect their own records 404 Media (30 May 2025).
• Flock's own scale (vendor figures). Flock lists 5,000+ law-enforcement agencies, 6,000+ communities and 1,000+ businesses as customers Flock customers page (read 16 Oct 2026). It says its network “processes more than 20 billion vehicle reads each month across 49 states” Flock blog (6 Feb 2026). Flock publishes no camera count. In March 2025 it raised $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, taking total funding to over $950 million, per PitchBook data TechCrunch (13 Mar 2025).

Timeline: how the 2025-2026 backlash actually built

Documented abuses (with citations)

These are not hypothetical harms. Each is a specific case documented in court filings, government audits, or reporting corroborated by public records.

• Bend, Oregon: federal immigration officials made 279 queries into the city’s Flock data in the first three weeks of a pilot in June 2025. A lookup setting had been left on “National” The Source (6 May 2026).
• Dayton, Ohio: police announced more than 7,000 immigration-related searches by outside entities, which city officials called “egregious violations of policy.” City workers then covered all 72 fixed cameras with black trash bags Fortune (3 Jun 2026).
• The University of Washington Center for Human Rights found at least eight Washington agencies enabled direct sharing of their Flock networks with U.S. Border Patrol in 2025. It also found apparent “back door” Border Patrol access to at least ten more departments UW Center for Human Rights (Oct 2025).
• San Francisco: a lawsuit against Flock alleged that federal agencies accessed data from SFPD’s cameras more than 1.6 million times. The figure comes from a news excerpt quoted by the plaintiffs’ law firm (Gibbs Mura).
• California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the City of El Cajon in October 2025 for systematically sharing Flock ALPR data with out-of-state agencies in violation of state law.

• Sedgwick, KS 2023: police chief Lee Nygaard resigned after allegedly using Flock cameras to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend 200+ times over several months (IJ).
• Jerome County, ID 2025: Sheriff George Oppedyk allegedly used Flock to search for his wife’s vehicle “hundreds of times.” Idaho’s attorney general found no crime had been committed; he retired in April 2026 (IJ).
• Milwaukee, WI 2025: Officer Josue Ayala allegedly tracked a woman he was dating and her ex ~180 times in two months.
• Braselton, GA 2024: Police Chief Michael Steffman was arrested after allegedly using plate readers to stalk and harass several people, including a former romantic partner (IJ).
• Joplin, MO 2025: an officer resigned and was investigated after allegedly searching for a plate number “hundreds of times” (IJ abuse database).
• Prairie Grove / Holiday Hills, IL June 2026: the Holiday Hills police chief, also a part-time Prairie Grove officer, was charged with two counts of official misconduct. Prosecutors alleged he used Flock and a state database to track six people he knew personally, three of them women he had dated (IPVM).
• Cherokee County, GA June 2026: the sheriff’s office arrested three officers within a week after audits found “anomalies involving three authorized users” (IPVM).

• Protests. EFF's analysis of ~12M Flock searches from 3,900+ agencies between December 2024 and October 2025 identified hundreds of searches explicitly tied to the 50501 protests (February), Hands Off (April), and No Kings (June and October). Roughly 20% of all reviewed searches listed only "investigation," "suspect," or "query" — cover language that could conceal protest, abortion, or stalking searches EFF (20 Nov 2025).
• Abortion. The Johnson County TX search of more than 83,000 cameras noted above is the definitive documented case; it hit states where abortion is protected by law.
• Roma targeting. EFF's audit-log analysis found hundreds of searches, by more than 80 agencies, that used a slur or the word “roma” as the search reason EFF (3 Nov 2025).
• Mission creep. Buford City Schools (GA), serving ~6,000 students, ran 375+ Flock searches for school-district residency verification between January 2025 and March 2026 (EFF).

• The ACLU says 1 in 10 plates scanned by Flock readers are read with the wrong state, citing Business Insider. It also says under 1% of cars scanned by ALPRs are connected to any crime or wrongdoing ACLU (read 16 Oct 2026).
• Documented cases include a Denver woman who says a sergeant used Flock reads to accuse her of a $25 package theft (she is now suing; see below). In Sherwood, Arkansas, a couple was ordered out of their car at gunpoint after a misread plate IJ abuse database (read 16 Oct 2026).

The legal landscape is shifting fast

Signed March 30, 2026 by Governor Bob Ferguson, SB 6002 is one of the most detailed state ALPR laws. NYU’s Policing Project scored it six of seven on its model criteria, level with Connecticut, Oregon and Virginia Tech Times (19 Aug 2026). Similar 2026 bills stalled in Colorado and Minnesota. Colorado’s SB 26-070 had its Senate second reading laid over on 29 April to 4 July 2026 and did not pass (Colorado General Assembly). Minnesota’s HF 4205 was referred to committee on 12 March 2026 with no further action (Minnesota Revisor). For every state ALPR law passed in 2025–26, see ALPR and the 2026 midterms. The key provisions:

For forty years the answer was United States v. Knotts (1983): a person travelling public roads has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movement from one place to another. A plate is displayed because the state requires it, and a pole-mounted camera sees only what a bystander could.

That rule was written for a world where following someone cost officers, cars and fuel. Surveillance of public movement did not scale, so nobody needed a doctrine limiting it. Three decisions have been eroding it since:

The gap that may outrun all of it. Every one of those cases involved the government compelling production — a warrant served on Google. That is not the ALPR business model. Flock owns the cameras, holds the images on its own servers and sells access, and HOAs, businesses, schools and hospitals that own Flock cameras can opt to share them with police. Flock publishes no count of how many cameras are private (private Flock cameras explained). Chatrie said nothing about whether police may simply buy what they would otherwise need a warrant to compel. Whether a private camera pulled into a law-enforcement network is state action is barely litigated. The Supreme Court asks whether the state has “so far insinuated itself into a position of interdependence” with a private party Burton (1961), and whether conduct is “fairly attributable to the State” Lugar (1982). Departments that contract for cameras, influence placement, receive the alerts and query the database are a long way from a doorbell camera.

Massachusetts framed the whole problem six years before Norfolk. In Commonwealth v. McCarthy (484 Mass. 493, 2020) the Supreme Judicial Court adopted a mosaic approach and held that four cameras at the ends of the Bourne and Sagamore bridges did not reveal enough — while writing that with enough cameras in enough locations, the data would invade a reasonable expectation of privacy and constitute a search. Two courts, six years apart, both said the system in front of them was fine and that a constitutional line exists somewhere. Neither drew it.

• Norfolk, VA — Schmidt v. City of Norfolk (Institute for Justice). Chief Judge Mark S. Davis granted the city summary judgment on 27 January 2026, holding that Norfolk’s 176 cameras in 75 clusters, on a 21-day rolling retention, cannot track “the whole of a person’s movements.” He also held the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge warrantless querying, because their plates had never been queried. On appeal as Fourth Circuit No. 26-1227, with the ACLU, ACLU-VA and EFF, Cato, EPIC and NCLA filing for the residents in April 2026. The city’s response landed 11 June 2026. Briefing closed with the residents’ reply on 23 July 2026. Justia docket (retrieved 23 Jul 2026) As of 11 October 2026 no argument date had been published; the case is not on the court’s argument calendars posted through the 8–11 December session. Fourth Circuit calendar (read 16 Oct 2026) The Fourth Circuit panel now has to apply Chatrie, the decision in which the Supreme Court vacated a ruling of that same circuit.
• San Jose, CA. Two separate suits. IJ’s federal Fourth Amendment class action, Tan v. City of San Jose (filed 15 April 2026), targets the city’s 470+ Flock cameras and is pending IJ (15 Apr 2026). In the state-constitution case brought by EFF and the ACLU of Northern California, SIREN v. San Jose, a Santa Clara County judge sustained the city’s demurrer without leave to amend on 2 October 2026. EFF says it will appeal Order (2 Oct 2026); EFF (13 Oct 2026).
• Los Angeles. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition sued the city in May 2026 to force release of LAPD’s Flock contracts and MOUs. It says LAPD had produced only one expired 2025 memo despite a relationship of at least seven years FOX 11 (6 May 2026). The suit led to release of the July 2023 contract, and on 11 July 2026 LAPD said it was suspending its Flock contract Knock LA (20 Jul 2026).
• El Cajon, CA. California AG Rob Bonta sued the city in October 2025 over illegal out-of-state ALPR sharing.
• Flock Safety directly. Gibbs Mura's amended class action was filed against Flock on April 3, 2026 for allegedly using its ALPR cameras to track millions of Californians and share data with out-of-state law enforcement in violation of California privacy law.
• Flock and two Colorado towns. Chrisanna Elser sued Flock, Columbine Valley, Bow Mar and two police officers in federal court in Denver on 5 October 2026. A sergeant had used Flock reads of her car to issue a theft summons over a $25 package; she got it voided with dashcam footage. The complaint alleges an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment and seeks Colorado-wide classes against Flock. Flock says its system “accurately identified the location of Ms. Elser’s vehicle” and that it “intends to vigorously defend itself in this litigation.” Complaint, D. Colo. No. 1:26-cv-04977 (5 Oct 2026); Denver7 (6 Oct 2026)
• A nationwide class. Whitson v. Flock Group (N.D. Ga., filed 11 September 2026), brought by a Tennessee law-enforcement officer, seeks a class of everyone whose plate a Flock camera read and retained. Its claims include negligence, intrusion upon seclusion, negligent design and failure to warn, and it cites officer-stalking cases. ClassAction.org (17 Sep 2026); Top Class Actions (23 Sep 2026)
• Alleged retaliation, Georgia. Murkerson v. Flock Group (N.D. Ga., No. 3:26-cv-00223-LMM, filed 8 October 2026) names Flock, Coweta County, Sheriff Lenn Wood and two sheriff’s office employees. Tyler Murkerson alleges deputies searched his car on Flock while he was suing the sheriff. The reasons logged were “info” and “37”. He seeks a class of people whose plates Georgia agencies searched on Flock with no matching case or law-enforcement purpose. The allegations are unproven. Complaint, N.D. Ga. (8 Oct 2026); Gizmodo (13 Oct 2026). See also: other cases of retaliation against critics.
• Berkeley (contemplated). Brian Hofer of Secure Justice was prepared to sue over surveillance-ordinance violations enabled by Flock; the city pulled its expansion, mooting the immediate suit but not the underlying issue.

Cited direct from Flock's LPR Policy, Flock Evidence Policy, and Privacy & Ethics pages, read 16 October 2026 (LPR Policy updated 30 June 2026; Evidence Policy updated 12 August 2026):

• Default retention was 30 days; on Aug 13 2026 Flock cut its recommended default to 7 days (existing contracts keep their prior period unless the agency opts in), hard-deleted after that unless local law or Evidence Mode preserves it. Under Flock’s Evidence Policy, extended retention of up to one year needs approval from an elected official or governing body.
• Flock says customers own and control the data, and calls itself a “third-party service provider” acting on their behalf.
• Every search is logged with user identity — but audits were optional until the 13 August 2026 announcement made Audit Assistance mandatory by the end of 2026 (see below), and even flagged anomalies only surface abuse when an administrator actually reviews them. IPVM: in Cherokee County GA, a week of auditing tripled the number of officers arrested, from one to three.

What Flock's August 2026 safeguards do and do not change

On 13 August 2026 Flock's CEO published a list of privacy, accountability, security and transparency changes. Each one is real, and each has a limit that matters if you are reading a contract, filing a records request or speaking at a council meeting. Everything in the “what it means” column below is Flock's own description of its product; the “limit” column is ours.

Takeaway: the August package moves audit and case-code discipline from optional to mandatory, which is a genuine change, but the retention cut is a default for new customers and none of it alters what is collected, how long your own city keeps it, or who can query it. Source: Flock Safety blog (13 Aug 2026)

Can a gunshot alert trigger a search of nearby plate readers?

Yes, by design, and no court has yet ruled on whether that is a Fourth Amendment search. Flock's audio detection post says "A confirmed event can surface the vehicles seen entering or leaving the area around the time of the sound", using nearby Flock plate readers; Flock calls this a starting point for investigators, not an automatic enforcement action (Flock blog, read 16 Oct 2026). Flock sells the microphones, plate readers and live video together in its Safe City subscription.

Why it matters. The trigger is a sound, not an officer's decision. Reason's Del Schlangen argues that pairing alerts with plate data can turn lawful gun owners near a legal discharge into suspects by proximity alone (Reason, 22 Sep 2026). The cases point in different directions:

• Commonwealth v. Foster (Pa. Supreme Court, 19 May 2026): two ShotSpotter alerts, an arrival within about 10 to 15 seconds, and evasive behaviour added up to reasonable suspicion. The court also warned that "merely intoning buzzwords is never sufficient to prove an area is high in crime" (Justia). Two justices dissented.
• State v. Carrillo (N.J. App. Div., 12 Mar 2026, unpublished): a ShotSpotter alert plus a plate-reader hit put a minivan only "in the general area with no specific connection to the shooting", so the gun found later was suppressed. The State conceded a video it described as showing muzzle flashes showed none (Justia).
• United States v. Daniels (10th Cir., 2024): courts "cannot look with suspicion on citizens presumably exercising their Second Amendment rights in a lawful way" (as quoted by Reason).
• Reason argues an alert-triggered plate query looks closer to Chatrie, where the Supreme Court held a geofence pull of Google location data is a search, than to the Fifth Circuit's Porter, which found tracking one known car on a 10-camera network was not.

What councils can ask for. Reason proposes four rules short of a ban: a warrant with time and distance limits for alert-triggered plate queries (except emergencies), a public vote before linking the two systems, a logged audit trail with deletion of uninvolved vehicles, and no stops on "alert plus proximity" alone. On audio, Flock says clips are kept only for qualifying events, may include "a few incidental words spoken in a public space", and that it does not "identify voices" or "understand speech" (Flock blog). Ask your city how long those clips are kept: Flock's post does not say. The EFF's Atlas of Surveillance lists known gunshot-detection deployments.

OS Investigate: searching by movement pattern

Five days after the safeguards post, WIRED reported on “OS Investigate” (earlier internal name “Nightshift”), an AI tool Flock is developing with a small group of law-enforcement partners. WIRED reconstructed it from files exposed through Flock login pages. The difference from a plate search is the starting point: of the prompts examined, 19 focus on patterns and 14 need no plate, name or description at all. Examples in the files: the vehicles most often seen in a neighbourhood over 14 days (as likely witnesses); vehicles that visited three or more shops in three days; and a prompt that starts from people arrested more than twice in two years, maps their homes and generates a “workup” on three of them. The tool links plate scans with case files, arrest records, 911 dispatch logs, ballistics results and commercial identity databases, and can attach names, addresses, relatives, phone numbers and online accounts to a plate. Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel did not dispute the features but said the tool is separate from the LPR product and may change; the ACLU's Chad Marlow warned officers could “lead the AI.” TNW summary (19 Aug 2026)

Why the August controls do not cover it. Audit Assistance, case codes and lockouts all attach to a search made by a user. A system that generates leads from movement patterns has no plate to log a case code against and no abnormal user to lock out; the retention default is also beside the point if the output is a profile rather than a stored read. What to request under your state's public-records law (our FOIA guide for surveillance tech has templates and citations): the agency's case-code logs once codes become mandatory, including every search flagged as an emergency bypass; its Audit Assistance flag history and what the administrator did with each flag; and any OS Investigate / Nightshift pilot agreement, MOU, evaluation or training material, which is how you learn whether your agency is one of the partners.

Takeaway: OS Investigate is in development and may change, but it shows that the controls Flock announced in August regulate searches by officers, not analysis by the platform, and only records requests will tell you whether your agency is piloting it.

What you can legally, ethically do

Find mapped Flock and other ALPR cameras near you on DeFlock’s ALPR map. For state laws, federal bills and what candidates have said before 3 November, see License-Plate Readers and the 2026 Midterms.

The cameras track vehicles on public roads, which under prevailing case law and the third-party doctrine limits the personal countermeasures available. Community and legal action have ended contracts in 277 local governments (IJ, as of 15 Oct 2026); personal countermeasures have canceled zero. The list below is ordered from highest to lowest actual leverage.

MapQuest layer: MapQuest on Bluesky (15 Oct 2026) Engadget (16 Oct 2026) The Next Web (16 Oct 2026) This Week in Security (16 Oct 2026).

On the physical side, a Flock camera is a small pole-mounted unit, often with a small solar panel on top and no visible cabling because the units run on LTE. They are commonly placed at town entrances, main intersections, school zones, and increasingly on private property (Home Depot and Lowe's parking-lot entrances, HOAs, business districts).

Public-records requests are the single most productive lever in the entire fight. In Newburgh NY, audit logs the city posted showed its data had been searched thousands of times by agencies nationwide. The council then voted to end routine use WAMC (29 Sep 2026). Here is the standard request pattern, sourced from the Rural Privacy Coalition's cleaned-up version of a working request:

1. Ask for the Organization Audit from Flock's Insights tab — every search made by your agency inside its own network.
2. Ask for the Network Audit — every search made of your agency's cameras by any other agency in the Flock system, including all search terms and the searching-agency name.
3. Ask for the network share settings: with whom is your city sharing? Is National Lookup enabled? Which NCIC hot-lists are turned on — specifically Immigration Violator?
4. Ask for the contract, any MOUs, and the written use policy governing Flock (if one exists — many agencies operate without one).
5. Ask for images of your own vehicle and any searches performed against your plate. This has the strongest legal footing because it is your own data.
6. Request expedited processing — Flock hard-deletes at the end of the agency's retention period (30 days under the old default; 7 days for deployments on the new August 2026 default), so late responses moot the request. Audit logs and case-code logs are kept separately from the plate reads and are the part most worth asking for.

The ACLU (Get the Flock Out), ACLU of Massachusetts, Rural Privacy Coalition, and Fight for the Future all publish full letter templates and model ordinances.

Flock’s policies say its customers own the data and describe Flock as a “third-party service provider” Flock Evidence Policy (12 Aug 2026). So the agency, not Flock, is the place to send a request. There are two practical follow-ups:

• Direct the request to your local law-enforcement agency — the ACLU-WA and Have I Been Flocked argue this is the data controller in most jurisdictions and therefore the correct target under CCPA/CPRA (California), CPA (Colorado), CTDPA (Connecticut), VCDPA (Virginia), UCPA (Utah), MCDPA (Minnesota), and similar state laws.
• The government-entity exemption is real. Most CDPAs exempt state and local government bodies from their scope, which is a real legal wall. Where that wall applies, the remedy is legislative (SB 6002-style statute) or constitutional (San Jose, Norfolk-type litigation), not a data-subject request.

Most cancelled Flock contracts in 2025-2026 came out of local decisions, though state funding orders in Texas and Florida added more in August 2026. If your city has Flock, the contract has a renewal date — that is your window. Basic tactics that have worked:

• Get on the public-comment list before contract-renewal or oversight-committee agenda items.
• Bring the actual audit logs from your records request; abstract concern loses, "here is what your officers searched" wins.
• Ask specifically whether National Lookup and the NCIC "Immigration Violator" hot-list are enabled. EFF documents this as the single simplest policy fix — "uncheck the box" — while noting it does not dismantle the underlying infrastructure.
• Point to peer cities: Mountain View, Santa Cruz, El Cerrito and Los Altos Hills (SF Standard), Bend, and the 2026 exits in the tracker section. For a current count, cite the Institute for Justice database: 277 local governments (IJ, as of 15 Oct 2026).
• Push for a surveillance-oversight ordinance if the city does not already have one — Berkeley has one. Secure Justice was prepared to sue under it had the city’s expansion gone ahead SF Standard (11 May 2026).

ALPRs collect one channel — where and when your vehicle was seen. That data is only powerful in combination with other feeds. The rest of the picture is where individual OPSEC actually returns leverage. See our OPSEC guide for the full treatment; specifically for the vehicle case:

• Phone location. Locate X, Google Location History, ad-ID data, and other tracker feeds can produce trip data even when the car itself is not on a road with cameras. If the concern is aggregate movement tracking, the phone is often the bigger channel.
• Toll and telematics. E-ZPass, SunPass, connected-car telematics, and dealer black-box data are the other place your vehicle's movements are logged.
• Ring/Nest/private cameras. These do not always feed ALPR, but Flock's brief partnership with Ring, its "Neighbor" and business-camera products, and Amazon's request-for-assistance system through Axon mean private-camera footage can enter the same pipeline. See our Ring & Sidewalk OPSEC guide.
• Data brokers. A plate is only useful if it can be tied to you. Removing your address, phone, and vehicle information from people-search sites reduces the joinability of any ALPR hit against your identity. Automated removal services can save the 15–20 hours a full manual opt-out costs.

• Suspected officer stalking through Flock. File with the agency's internal affairs and your state attorney general. In some states (WI, GA, IL, ID) this has produced criminal charges. Contemporaneous records help — screenshots of what you noticed and when.
• Illegal out-of-state or federal sharing (California). California AG Rob Bonta's office is the operative venue; Bonta's El Cajon suit is the template.
• National-scope patterns / systemic misuse. EFF's [email protected] is actively collecting records people receive back from these requests.

What is not a legal option

A steady drumbeat of ads pushes IR-absorbing plate coatings, reflective covers, tilted mounts, and "ALPR jammers." These are not a workable answer for two reasons:

• Every U.S. state requires plates to be clearly visible and legible. Products designed to defeat ALPR reads violate those display laws and, in many states, an additional plate-tampering offense on top. A jammer that broadcasts also implicates FCC rules.
• They are ineffective against modern IR-flash-plus-vehicle-signature systems anyway. Flock uses vehicle fingerprint (make/model/color/rack/sticker/scratch) to track a car even when the plate itself is unreadable.

What about the ‘De-Flock’ Halloween campaign on October 31?

Since early August 2026, posts on Instagram, X, Threads and Facebook have promoted Halloween, 31 October 2026, as “De-Flock America” night and call for Flock cameras to be “disabled, covered or destroyed” Dexerto (18 Aug 2026). Cybernews traced the earliest post to 7 August in a Facebook group called DeFlock America — “Halloween, we all wear masks and bring them down” — and found relatively few posts explicitly promoting action next to a much larger volume reporting on the idea Cybernews (18 Aug 2026). Dexerto describes the movement as “uncoordinated, with no clear organizer,” and FOX 5 Atlanta found no national organisation coordinating participants or locations. That Facebook group is not the open-source DeFlock mapping project, which promotes legal opposition such as public meetings and records requests FOX 5 Atlanta (31 Aug 2026). This guide does not endorse the campaign, or Flock; what follows is what the law says and what has actually changed outcomes.

• Damaging, covering or marking someone else’s camera is a crime. Texas Penal Code §28.03 is a typical criminal-mischief statute: an offence is committed if, without the owner’s effective consent, a person intentionally or knowingly damages or destroys the property, tampers with it and causes pecuniary loss or “substantial inconvenience,” or makes markings on it. The grade rises with the loss, from a Class C misdemeanour under $100 to a state jail felony from $2,500 and higher felony grades above $30,000 Texas Penal Code §28.03. Every state has its own vandalism or criminal-mischief law; grades and penalties differ, so we do not list them here.
• “Non-destructive” is not a defence. Cybernews notes that even non-destructive tampering can carry legal risk and that a costume provides no legal exemption Cybernews (18 Aug 2026). FOX 5 Atlanta reports that law-enforcement intelligence bulletins this summer told agencies to watch for vandalism and interference with cameras FOX 5 Atlanta (31 Aug 2026).
• The cases already in court. In Kentucky, Jim Thacker and Jovanna Grobe face first-degree criminal mischief charges, among others, after four Flock cameras were shot in Anderson, Woodford and Franklin counties; on 8 October 2026 a judge found probable cause and sent the case to a grand jury WKYT (8 Oct 2026). A separate defendant, Robert West, is charged with criminal mischief and obstructing governmental operations over cameras in Mount Sterling and Winchester WKYT (25 Sep 2026). None of these cases has been linked to the Halloween posts.
• Who pays. Flock says a replacement camera costs “at least $2,400” (vendor figure), and the contracts WKYT reviewed for four Kentucky cities do not mention Flock’s Camera Protection Plan; Winchester’s police chief said “we’re responsible for those cameras” WKYT (25 Sep 2026). A destroyed camera is often a cost to the city, not to Flock.
• Owner consent is the difference. Dayton and South Lyon covered cameras lawfully because they were the customers (see above and the October update); that authority does not extend to individuals.

• Public comment before a council vote. In Lafayette more than a dozen residents spoke on 6 October before the council voted 5–1 for a budget without Flock funding Boulder Reporting Lab (8 Oct 2026); Reno residents raised privacy objections in public comment before the city said it would not renew KOLO (9 Oct 2026). It does not always win: College Station renewed after about three hours of largely opposed comment (see the October update).
• Records requests. Audit records preceded exits in Bend OR and Newburgh NY (see what you can do). Templates and deadlines: our surveillance-tech FOIA guide and the 50-state records request tracker.
• Contract non-renewal. The renewal date is the lever: 277 local governments had cancelled or declined to renew ALPR contracts (IJ, as of 15 Oct 2026) Institute for Justice (15 Oct 2026), and Reno’s decision came months before its contract ends in March 2027.
• State law and funding. Washington’s SB 6002, the Texas and Florida actions in August and Missouri’s executive order all came through legislatures and governors, not through damaged hardware.

Takeaway: the Halloween posts have no identified organiser, damaging or covering a camera you do not own can be charged as criminal mischief, and the contracts that have ended so far ended through council votes, records requests and state action.

Do anti-AI clothing or car wraps beat Flock?

Clothing printed with animal parts, extra faces or "adversarial" patterns, and wraps that disguise a car, are legal in a way plate covers are not. They still don't stop Flock from identifying you, and a striking design can make you easier to find. The reason is in what each part of Flock is actually looking for.

Clothing

• Flock searches for people by description. Its FreeForm search lets officers type plain-English descriptions to search Flock’s plate and video cameras. Flock says people searches work only on video cameras Flock FreeForm page (read 15 Oct 2026). Search data reviewed by 404 Media show searches by clothing, tattoos, body type and race, such as "heavy-set male with a black and white hat" and "person on skateboard" 404 Media (16 Jul 2026). In September 2026, 404 Media and WIRED examined a removed Flock camera and found its on-device software explicitly detects people, bicycles and plates as well as vehicles. They found no evidence that face recognition was active.
• Adversarial patterns only fool the model they were designed against. The best-known study, an adversarial T-shirt presented at ECCV 2020, kept one detector (YOLOv2) from seeing the wearer 57% of the time in the physical world. Cap_able's knitwear, tested against the YOLO detector, made it see dogs, zebras or giraffes in the fabric, or no person at all, but no success rates were published. Flock's models are proprietary, and no garment has been publicly shown to beat them.
• Partial success doesn't help. That recovered camera logged about 1.6 million images of roughly 50,200 vehicles in 21 days, around 30 frames per vehicle. One clean detection is enough, and a person reviewing the footage isn't fooled at all.
• Distinctive is searchable. "Person in a hoodie covered in animal faces" is an easy FreeForm query. Prints full of decoy faces were designed to overwhelm face recognition, which Flock says it doesn't use, so against Flock they mostly make you memorable.

Car wraps

• The plate is the identifier. Every read logs the plate with a time and place. A wrap doesn't change the plate, and covering or altering a plate is illegal in every state (see above).
• A wrap only changes the vehicle description: the make, model, color, roof racks, bumper stickers and damage Flock records to find cars when the plate is unknown or only partly read. A loud or one-off wrap is itself a distinctive feature, so it makes the car easier to pick out, not harder.
• A plain color change breaks the color match, not the plate match, and some states require you to update your registration. Indiana has required owners to report color changes, vinyl wraps included, within 30 days since 1 January 2026.

Clothing and wraps also leave two things untouched. One is the phone, smartwatch, earbuds and AirTags you carry, which broadcast their own identifiers; Leonardo's SignalTrace already links those to plates (see our SignalTrace explainer). The other is policy: how long plate reads are kept and who may search them. That is where the real wins are, through retention caps such as Washington's 21 days, warrant requirements, and the 277 local governments that have ended or declined to renew camera contracts (IJ, as of 15 Oct 2026).

The builders — what the community has reverse-engineered

The policy fight is well documented. Less well known is that a small community has been taking Flock hardware apart and publishing what it finds. If you cite GainSec's 51 findings — as this guide does — it is worth knowing they also ship hardware:

Independent security research (context, not instructions)

Because the question comes up: the Flock hardware itself has significant documented security exposure. Independent researcher Jon Gaines ("GainSec") published a formal white paper in November 2025 documenting 51 findings across the Falcon/Sparrow ALPR, Raven audio detector, and Bravo compute box, of which 22 have assigned CVEs and 8 more are pending. Highlights (redacted per the researcher's own responsible-disclosure convention):

• A Java keystore file (flock_rye.bks) bundled inside a shipped Android application, with the unlock password also hardcoded in cleartext (salvacybersec analysis).
• Falcon/Sparrow devices shipped with development Wi-Fi credentials in cleartext (CVE-2025-59409), and a button-press sequence that starts a hotspot, which the researcher chained to an ADB shell over the network. He counted over 900 Wigle.net hits for the hotspot, some from 2025.
• A misconfigured Flock demonstration site publicly exposed an administrative ArcGIS API key with administrative access to more than 50 private data layers and about $120,000 in map credits (salvacybersec analysis). In parallel, PRC state-sponsored group "Flax Typhoon" was documented compromising ArcGIS instances (Simeon on Security).
• Hardcoded DataDog API token (CVE-2025-59405) and unauthenticated administrative API endpoints on the Collin's internal API server (CVE-2025-59403).
• Flock's response: "None of the vulnerabilities detailed in the report have an impact on our customers' ability to carry out their public safety objectives." It added that exploitation would require physical access to a device and detailed knowledge of its internal hardware Flock blog (6 Nov 2025).
• Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) asked the FTC on 3 November 2025 to investigate Flock’s cybersecurity, citing its failure to require multi-factor authentication Wyden release (3 Nov 2025).

GainSec's white paper (GitHub, Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17529423) also ships a Defender's Checklist meant for agencies operating these devices. This is defensive research on devices the researcher owned. It is included here for situational awareness — if you sit on a city council reviewing a Flock contract, "your vendor ships CVEs" is a citable fact.

What do Flock contracts actually cost over time?

Short answer: Flock is sold as a yearly subscription per camera, so the bill grows with every camera, drone or add-on. A 2023 California council report listed $2,500 per camera per year on a five-year term, with installation, data and software included San Leandro staff report (18 Dec 2023 agenda). Contracts can renew automatically, and ending one early can still cost money. These local records show how it adds up.

• Kyle, Texas: more than $420,000 a year. Three Flock contracts, dated 2023, 2024 and 2025, cover 47 cameras and two drones. Together they cost over $420,000 a year FOX 7 Austin (13 Sep 2026). Council member Claudia Zapata moved to end the city’s Flock relationship. The council rejected that 6–1, with Zapata the only vote for it FOX 7 Austin (13 Sep 2026); the vote was at a 5 September meeting Texas Tribune via States Newsroom (24 Sep 2026). Zapata said outside agencies had run 1.5 million searches on Kyle’s system: “And out of those 1.5 million, only 2,888 were made by KPD.” Police Chief Jeff Barnett said safeguards are in place to stop officers misusing the system FOX 7 Austin (13 Sep 2026). The city attorney later said two contracts could be ended by not funding them, but the third would need continued payments Community Impact (7 Oct 2026). The drone deal alone is a five-year agreement approved 6–1 in October 2025. The Hays Free Press put it at $1.45 million in total, renewing as long as the money is budgeted Hays Free Press (29 Oct 2025). In October the council voted 4–3 to switch the cameras off until a non-binding referendum in May Community Impact (7 Oct 2026).
• Muncie, Indiana: a $300,000 contract no council vote approved. Muncie Voice, an independent local outlet, reported from contracts and invoices it obtained through Indiana’s public-records law. It found that then-Chief Nathan Sloan signed a 2022 agreement for 20 cameras and a larger 2023 one Muncie Voice (14 Sep 2026). The 2023 deal covers 24 cameras for a 60-month first term at $60,000 a year, “for a total contract value of $300,000.” The outlet found no council vote on either. By its reading of the contract, the deal rolls over unless either side gives 30 days’ notice. Ending it means “a one-time removal fee of $500 per Flock Hardware unit” Muncie Voice (14 Sep 2026). Indiana Public Radio reported that the cameras were paid for from an economic development income tax fund the mayor controls. Mayor Dan Ridenour said he is “very supportive” of the cameras Indiana Public Radio (10 Sep 2026). The police department told Muncie Voice: “Private Flock users cannot access our system.” Muncie Voice (14 Sep 2026)
• San Leandro, California: a price rise, and a discount for signing longer. City staff reported that Flock notified police of price increases for its 41 existing cameras and 41 planned new ones. The new prices would apply after the original agreement ended on 30 June 2024. Flock offered savings for a five-year extension instead. Staff said that deal would give the city “an annual savings of up to $41,000.00 per year” San Leandro staff report (18 Dec 2023 agenda).
• Knox County, Tennessee: an automatic renewal. InvestigateTV reported county Flock purchases of $24,990, which is $10 under the county’s $25,000 review threshold. The county law director said of the agreement: “it automatically renews the contract.” The county declared the contract invalid, and the sheriff’s office stopped using fixed plate readers. Flock told the reporters that approval rules are “governed by each agency’s applicable laws, policies, and procurement procedures” InvestigateTV via FOX19 (12 Oct 2026).
• Greenville, South Carolina: a campaign group’s figure. DeflockSC, a group campaigning against plate readers, says city records it obtained show yearly Flock costs rising from $2,000 in 2019 to about $131,000. It calls this “A 62x increase over 5 years.” Its own figures show the city’s camera count also grew, from 11 to 52 DeflockSC (10 Mar 2026). We found no news outlet reporting the figure. The scanned records the group posted could not be read as text, so this remains the group’s claim.

What to ask for. Before a renewal vote, ask for every Flock order form, not just the latest one. Check the renewal notice period, any removal or termination fee, and whether a multi-year term was offered at a discount. Ask who approved each purchase, and whether any purchase sat just under a review threshold.

Model language for city-council testimony

If you have three minutes at a public-comment podium, the following facts are the ones that consistently move votes, drawn from the coverage that has actually flipped contracts in 2025-2026:

• 277 local governments had cancelled or not renewed ALPR contracts since January 2025 (IJ, as of 15 Oct 2026). An earlier San Francisco Standard tally, using Secure Justice data, found 82 ended Flock contracts in 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, counting pauses and suspensions.
• Flock's Chief Legal Officer said on a Maine radio show in May 2026 that officers using the system to find an ex-partner is "actually the most common thing" (IPVM, June 2026).
• The Institute for Justice’s list of police using plate readers to stalk romantic interests held 82 cases when we read it on 16 October 2026. IJ calls the cases "almost certainly an undercount." Its separate ALPR Abuse Database (launched 12 August) listed 279 incidents of all types on the same date.
• The University of Washington's Center for Human Rights found at least eight Washington agencies shared their Flock networks directly with U.S. Border Patrol in 2025. It also found searches for federal immigration enforcement likely inconsistent with the Keep Washington Working Act.
• A single search from Johnson County TX queried more than 83,000 cameras in 6,809 networks over an abortion investigation (EFF / 404 Media, May 2025).
• Bend, Oregon found federal immigration officials made 279 queries into its Flock data in the first three weeks of a pilot (The Source, May 2026).
• Independent security research has assigned 22 CVEs to the hardware, with 8 more pending (GainSec, November 2025).
• Kyle TX pays more than $420,000 a year for 47 Flock cameras and two drones (FOX 7 Austin, September 2026). Ask what your city pays, and when its contract renews (what contracts cost).
• Flock's recommended retention default dropped from 30 to 7 days in Aug 2026 under pressure — but Washington's SB 6002 had already proven a shorter statutory floor is politically workable, and a statute binds where a vendor's recommendation does not.

Related resources

October 2026 update: two states pulled the funding, and the map changed

September was the month the cancellation story stopped being a list of individual city councils and became a state-level funding problem. Two executive actions in the last days of August set it off. On the night of 27 August Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered all state agencies to pause funding for Flock cameras Texas Tribune (28 Aug 2026). On 31 August the Florida Department of Transportation revoked every ALPR permit in state highway rights-of-way and ordered removal within 30 days. The EFF, which documented both, citing a Texas Tribune investigation, noted that a Texas state agency had quietly funnelled at least $30 million into building the network.

What followed in September was not a trickle. Ten Florida Panhandle sheriffs — Leon, Bay, Jackson, Gadsden, Franklin, Holmes, Jefferson, Liberty, Calhoun and Wakulla — paused or ended Flock use around 1 September. Tallahassee’s city commission voted unanimously on 9 September to suspend all 150 of the city’s Flock and Motorola cameras.

The September cancellations worth knowing by name

• El Paso, Texas — city council voted 8–0 on 15 September to have all Flock cameras and related hardware removed from city property within 60 days. On 13 October it voted unanimously to bar new contracts with Flock or similar providers unless the council directs otherwise. KVIA
• Arlington County, Virginia — the County Board ended all Flock use on 15 September, with 41 devices (26 LPRs and 15 PTZ cameras) to come down within 14 business days. ARLnow
• Wisconsin, statewide cluster — Menasha, Neenah, Fond du Lac County, Winnebago County, Racine County and Stevens Point had paused or ended Flock use by 9 September. Racine County’s sheriff said Flock was collecting and keeping more data than the office understood or agreed to. Sheboygan’s mayor said a Flock rep tried to sell the city data its cameras had collected. Spectrum News
• Newburgh, New York — council resolved on 28 September to discontinue routine Flock use within 14 days, citing audit logs showing the city’s own data had been queried thousands of times nationwide, including a 2025 Texas search connected to an abortion investigation. WAMC
• El Paso County, Colorado — Sheriff Joseph Roybal discontinued Flock effective immediately on 30 September, saying the office has “the tools, training, and experience to locate and apprehend criminals without relying on Flock cameras.” KRDO. Note this is a different jurisdiction from El Paso, Texas above — two unrelated decisions a fortnight apart.
• Moffat County, Colorado — Sheriff Chip McIntyre took ten cameras down himself after Flock repeatedly failed to send anyone to collect them. Cowboy State Daily
• South Lyon, Michigan — council voted 5–2 on 29 September to terminate and cover the cameras. Michigan Advance

The counter-trend is real and belongs here too. College Station, Texas renewed on 24 September by 4–2 — 84 cameras at roughly $400,000 a year — after about three hours of largely opposed public comment (KBTX). Watsonville, California kept its programme and added restrictions. Several other cities did not cancel so much as switch vendors, which is covered on the Flock-to-Axon page.

How many have actually cancelled? Three trackers, three answers

This page previously said “more than 160 local governments.” That number is now both out of date and ambiguous, because the three public trackers count different things:

IJ’s 277 (as of 15 October 2026) is the most defensible number to cite, because its methodology is stated and its exclusions are explicit. It is also incomplete: we found 59 more exits in local news that it does not list. One caveat: IJ’s list has the City of Newburgh NY twice (September 2026 via WAMC and October 2026 via Radio Catskill), so it covers 276 distinct places. The October additions include Henrico County VA (6 Oct; terminating within seven days, >120 cameras, about $1 million paid since November 2022, “privacy concerns” — VPM), Hamilton County OH (sheriff's early termination) and Milwaukee County WI (cameras removed from parks), with Nantucket MA (cameras removed) and Giles County VA (WDBJ7, 27 Aug) among the late-summer entries. Newer decisions, reported after 6 October (Milton and Lafayette are in IJ’s October list and Reno is not, checked 16 October 2026): Milton MA — the Select Board voted on 6 October to end the town’s Flock contract and stop using the cameras (Boston 25 (8 Oct 2026); Hoodline (8 Oct 2026)); Lafayette CO — set to cut, not yet cut: on 6 October the council voted 5–1 for a 2027 budget that removes the $77,500 annual fee for its 30 Flock cameras, after more than a dozen residents spoke; a second appropriations vote is due on 20 October and a separate decision on ending the contract before year-end later in October (Boulder Reporting Lab (8 Oct 2026)); Reno NV — announced on 9 October that it will not renew; the current contract runs to March 2027 and staff will bring a different vendor’s contract to the council on 21 October (The Nevada Independent (9 Oct 2026); KOLO (9 Oct 2026)); Kyle TX — a pause, which IJ does not count: the council voted 4–3 to temporarily disable its Flock cameras, and voters get a non-binding referendum in May 2027 (KUT (8 Oct 2026)). Also since 6 October: Damascus VA — the town council voted unanimously on 7 October to end its contract for three cameras (Cardinal News (8 Oct 2026)); Madison Heights MI — said on 11 October it will disconnect its three city cameras and not renew, saying that “without clear and reliable safeguards, the City cannot continue the operation of the ALPR system at this time” (WXYZ (11 Oct 2026); CBS Detroit (11 Oct 2026)). If you see a single figure quoted without a source, assume it is one of these three and check which.

More exits, confirmed in local news (read 13 October 2026). IJ’s 12 October update added these, among others. Richmond VA — Mayor Danny Avula said the city will not renew when its contract expires in July 2027; the city website lists 99 plate readers plus two mobile units. He said Henrico’s exit means “Flock specifically is now less useful as a tool” WTVR (10 Oct 2026). Montgomery County VA — Sheriff Robert Page said on 1 October his office will stop using Flock, after suspending it on 3 September WDBJ7 (1 Oct 2026). Oneida County WI — the sheriff’s office ended its Flock partnership and took down six cameras WXPR (7 Oct 2026). Custer County CO — the sheriff’s office ended its contract and its three cameras came down KOAA (7 Oct 2026). Caledonia WI — the village board defunded its six-camera contract for 2027 TMJ4 (8 Oct 2026). Cumberland RI — the town council voted 6–1 to end Flock use Uprise RI (9 Oct 2026). Warwick NY (10 cameras) and Greenport NY (two cameras) will not renew The Chronicle (9 Oct 2026); Daily Gazette (8 Oct 2026). South Windsor CT — the council voted 6–3 to remove eight units and purge their data Hoodline (7 Oct 2026). Also reported: Norwell MA police said on 1 October they will stop using Flock Boston 25 (1 Oct 2026). Hewitt TX ended its agreement, citing grant funding and the state funding pause Texas Scorecard (7 Oct 2026). Milford MI’s village council voted 7–0 on 5 October to remove its 10 cameras when the contract ends this month WDIV (5 Oct 2026).

Newest exits (read 14 October 2026). Frankfort KY — the Board of Commissioners voted 5–0 on 12 October not to renew its contract for 19 cameras. The contract ends in January 2027, and IJ already lists the city State Journal (13 Oct 2026). Midland TX — the city council voted unanimously to send Flock a termination notice, eight months into a two-year renewal. About 70 fixed cameras and two portable units under the city contract are to be removed within 60 days. Flock cameras run by businesses, hospitals and other private owners are not covered CBS7 (13 Oct 2026).

Exits missing from IJ’s list: 59 more found in local news

IJ’s database misses many exits. On 20 October 2026 we searched local news for places that ended, cancelled or declined to renew plate-reader contracts and checked each against IJ’s 16 October list. We found 57 that IJ does not list, and added Excelsior Springs, MO on 21 October and El Lago, TX on 22 October, for 59. 8 of them switched to another vendor, usually Axon, which IJ deliberately leaves out. We did not count pauses, covered cameras or votes against new contracts. Columbus OH, Lebanon OH, Kyle TX and Volusia County FL, for example, paused rather than ended.

Florida’s August order to clear state roads also led several sheriffs to stop using plate readers countywide; where they did not say they ended the contract, the table says so. Places that only appear on trackers, with no news report, are left out. Sources are in each row.

Northeast and Midwest (22). The largest are Fort Wayne (36 cameras), Dayton (37) and Boston’s ended pilot.

South (21). Most came in the two weeks after Florida’s order and Texas’s funding pause in late August.

West (16). Los Angeles is the largest police department on any of these lists. Colorado’s exits are mostly switches to Axon.

How we checked: three regional searches of local news on 20 October 2026, each finding read in the original report. Several outlets block automated readers, so a few rows rely on a second outlet. Coverage of Louisiana, Georgia, West Virginia, Maryland, New Mexico, Montana, Alaska and Hawaii was thin. If you know an exit we missed, see About.

Courts: a suppression ruling, and a judge who wants to know how a Flock search works

Oklahoma: a warrantless Flock query suppressed (full explainer). On 1 October 2026, in United States v. Kyle (N.D. Okla., No. 26-CR-00189-SEH), U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill granted a motion to suppress. A Tulsa County deputy had run a car’s California plate through Flock and used its travel history to justify searching the car. Relying on Carpenter and Chatrie, the court held the plate-reader query “was a search under the Fourth Amendment” and that it “was not supported by probable cause”. It wrote: “This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance.” Everything found after the Flock search “must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree.” The judge separately held that the deputy unlawfully extended the stop without reasonable suspicion, and suppressed the evidence on that ground too. Opinion and order (1 Oct 2026). A single district-court ruling does not bind other courts TechCrunch (3 Oct 2026).

September’s most consequential ruling was procedural. In United States v. Thomas (a federal court in California, 9 September 2026) the court granted a defendant an evidentiary hearing on suppressing Flock evidence. It found that “without more information on how Flock works” it could not decide whether the search intruded on protected privacy rights. The court ordered the officer produced for examination and evidence on the mechanics of a Flock search — which is the question every one of these cases has so far been argued around rather than through. UNC School of Government

Schmidt v. City of Norfolk is still waiting for a hearing. The district court ruled for Norfolk, and the Fourth Circuit appeal (No. 26-1227) has been fully briefed since the residents’ reply of 23 July. Justia docket (retrieved 23 Jul 2026) As of 16 October 2026 no argument date had been published: the case is not on the court’s argument calendars, which were posted through the 8–11 December session. Fourth Circuit calendar (read 16 Oct 2026) An argument would be the next point at which the constitutional question could get a real answer.

Regulation: a governor and a wave of federal bills

On 16 September Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe issued an executive order requiring most plate and vehicle data to be deleted within 30 days, barring vendors from commercialising Missouri-generated ALPR data, restricting use to “legitimate criminal justice and life saving purposes,” setting misuse penalties, and — the provision with the longest reach — banning the pairing of facial recognition with ALPR. It directs the Department of Public Safety to set safeguards for state agencies and state-funded departments; local agencies are only encouraged to follow them. KCUR. The order number and effective date were not stated in the coverage available; check the governor’s office before citing either.

On 2 October Senator Bernie Sanders, with Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, introduced a “Ban Flock Act” that would bar federal agencies from using ALPRs or accessing ALPR data from local police and private firms, condition grants from five federal departments on state and local bans, and create a private right of action. TechCrunch. No bill number had been reported at the time of writing. It is one of at least six federal ALPR bills introduced since July 2026, from members of both parties: Rep. Keith Self’s PRIVACY Act (16 July), Rep. Thomas Massie’s Flock-Off Act, H.R. 10221 (2 September), the bipartisan Krishnamoorthi–Cloud No FLOCK Act (15 September), Rep. Greg Steube’s FLAFO Act (24 September) and Sen. Josh Hawley’s bill (30 September), with a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on 23 September. Details and sources: ALPR and the 2026 midterms → federal.

One correction to a claim circulating elsewhere: Washington’s Driver Privacy Act (SB 6002) is not a new development. It was signed on 30 March 2026 and took effect immediately. If you see it described as a September or October change, that is wrong.

Flock’s own answer: mandatory audits

This restates the commitments in the 13 August safeguards post. On 1 October Flock said that from 31 December 2026 it will make audits “routinely mandatory” for all owning agencies and automatically lock users on suspicious activity, alerting command staff. KBTX. Worth reading against the record on the misuse page: audits are what produced most of the officer arrests in the past two months, so making them mandatory is likely to raise the documented misuse count rather than lower it.

Frequently asked questions