One hundred and seventy-three. That’s the number of American public entities, including cities, counties, universities, and special districts, that have canceled, declined to renew, paused, rejected, or deactivated contracts with Flock Safety. Flock is the Atlanta-based company that operates the largest private automated license plate reader network in U.S. history.
But the number isn’t the story. The slope is.
Between 2021 and 2024, over four full years, six entities walked away from Flock. In 2025, forty-five more followed. In 2026, as of this writing, 122 have done the same. That’s a jump of more than 1,900 percent over the entire four-year stretch that came before it, and the year isn’t over. Thirty-three of those happened in the last three weeks alone. On August 21, four did it in a single day.
Flock Safety operates more than 120,000 cameras across 6,000 communities in 49 states, scanning billions of license plates every month. The company says its technology has helped solve roughly 700,000 crimes a year. But a convergence of police abuse scandals, unauthorized federal data-sharing, documented inaccuracies, and aggressive vendor behavior has turned what was once a quiet procurement decision into a national revolt that cuts across every political and geographic line in the country.
The 173 figure is the result of merging three independent tracking databases, cross-referencing against original news reports and public records, auditing every row, correcting 106 entries, and removing two that were factually wrong. It is larger than any previously published tally.
The 24-Hour Lie
On Tuesday, April 22, 2026, the Oshkosh, Wisconsin Common Council voted 5-2 to renew its contract with Flock Safety.
During the meeting, a Flock representative told the council that the system does not create heat maps to track vehicles. It was a direct answer to a direct question from Council Member Brad Spanbauer.
It was also untrue.
Police Chief Dean Smith reviewed the product’s security documentation after the vote and found that the system does, in fact, generate heat maps of vehicle movements using aggregated images from multiple cameras. He had personally seen them. Smith called a special council meeting himself.
Less than 24 hours after approving the contract, the council rescinded it unanimously.
Smith told the council he felt obligated to act. “I know that you trust me to give you my best recommendations, that are in the best interest of the city,” he said.
Flock’s response: their representative had “misunderstood the question,” hearing it as whether people could be tracked, “to which the answer is categorically ‘no.'”
The Oshkosh reversal is the cleanest documented case of a surveillance vendor misrepresenting its product’s capabilities to a legislative body. And the correction didn’t come from privacy activists or the ACLU. It came from the police chief.
Why They’re Leaving
There is no single reason 173 entities have cut ties with Flock. The departures cluster around four distinct problems, and conflating them weakens the story.
The stalking. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, a department audit on July 31 flagged Officer Emily Pacheco for allegedly using the Flock database to track her ex-girlfriend, including from a police cruiser. She was placed on leave. The department suspended all Flock use and opened investigations into whether other officers had done the same.
The cascade was immediate. Within days, Lynn, Massachusetts put two officers on leave after its own audit. Hopkinton terminated its contract on August 20. East Bridgewater and Grafton followed on August 21. In Wisconsin, a Menasha officer was sentenced August 18 for abusing the system to stalk someone.
These are not isolated incidents. On August 12, the Institute for Justice published a database documenting more than 100 cases of police abusing ALPR systems nationwide. A Texas deputy used tens of thousands of Flock cameras to search for a woman who had obtained a medication abortion. A Georgia police chief tracked his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter hundreds of times. In Norfolk, Virginia, officers used generic justifications for nearly a third of approximately 230,000 searches.
One officer, asked to record a reason for the search, repeatedly typed “la la la la.”
Flock’s own chief legal officer has publicly acknowledged that officers using the system to track romantic interests is “the most common form of platform abuse.”
The immigration pipeline. In Dayton, Ohio, an audit revealed more than 7,100 searches of the city’s Flock data for immigration enforcement purposes. Those searches were explicitly prohibited under the city’s own policy. Unable to immediately remove the cameras due to contract complications, city workers physically covered all 72 units with trash bags. In Salem, Massachusetts, law enforcement logged at least 230 searches tagged as “immigration” or “ICE” within a two-month span. In Mountain View, California, federal agencies accessed local plate data against city policy without the city’s knowledge.
The accuracy problem. When the Los Angeles Police Department let its three-year Flock contract expire in July 2026, it wasn’t over privacy politics. It was over a searing internal audit that found a 32.3 percent false-positive rate on stolen-vehicle alerts. Roughly one in three “stolen car” hits was wrong. Each of those hits can produce a felony traffic stop with weapons drawn. The LAPD Inspector General warned that the false alerts created “the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions.”
In Oak Park, Illinois, the village’s police oversight commission found that over 99 percent of Flock alerts produced no police action at all. Marine City, Michigan removed its cameras for the same reason: false positives.
This is the angle that reaches people who don’t care about surveillance politics. The product doesn’t always work.
The vendor behavior. Cambridge, Massachusetts terminated its contract after discovering that Flock technicians had installed two additional cameras weeks after the city had canceled the work order. Officials called it a “material breach of our trust.” In Evanston, Illinois, Flock reinstalled cameras after the city had terminated the contract, prompting a cease-and-desist. In Menominee, Michigan, a camera was activated without council approval hours before the council met to vote on the contract, which it then rejected 8-0. In Verona, Wisconsin, the city voted to end its contract in November 2025. Flock left the cameras up for months, ignoring removal requests and sending sales teams to pitch a new deal instead. The mayor eventually had city workers cover the cameras with black plastic bags. Only then did a Flock technician show up.
Lake County, Florida ordered Flock cameras removed back in 2021 after they were installed without permits. Five jurisdictions, five years apart, describing the same pattern.
It’s Not Partisan
The backlash against Flock is sometimes framed as a progressive privacy crusade. It isn’t.
In Pinal County, Arizona, the elected Republican sheriff let the Flock contract expire, citing privacy and Fourth Amendment concerns and expressing worry about a private company compiling a searchable database of Americans’ movements. The Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to issue its own non-renewal notice. In Knox County, Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs, the former professional wrestler known as “Kane” and a Republican, has been among the most vocal elected critics of the technology, arguing that warrantless surveillance of vehicles violates constitutional rights.
Green River, Wyoming rejected Flock. Ord, Nebraska voted 5-0 to remove its cameras, becoming the first city in the state to do so. In Arkansas, six cities ended or suspended their Flock contracts within a 29-day span between late July and mid-August: Pea Ridge, Cabot, Mayflower, Centerton, Greers Ferry, and Searcy. Farmington made seven. When reporters asked the mayor of Fairfield Bay whether his city used Flock cameras, he answered: “No, we wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that.”
One Republican commissioner in North Carolina captured it best, describing the crowd at a public hearing: “We had work boots and Subarus in our parking lot and they were united in their position against the Flock cameras.”
The Campaign Behind the Cancellations
The acceleration in 2026 didn’t happen in a vacuum. In June, the ACLU launched “Get the Flock Out,” a formal national campaign coordinating litigation, advocacy, and legislative efforts across all 50 state affiliates. The campaign produced real results: ACLU affiliates worked directly with local coalitions that delivered cancellations in Santa Cruz, Mountain View, and El Cerrito in California, and filed a lawsuit alongside the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenging San Jose’s warrantless searches. The Delaware affiliate sent open letters to more than 20 municipalities after Wilmington decommissioned its cameras. Massachusetts released a community toolkit with public records request templates and a model ordinance that residents could bring directly to their city council.
“I’ve been fighting mass surveillance for almost 25 years at the ACLU,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, told the Daily Caller. “And I really haven’t seen anything like the popular uprising against license plate scanning that we’re seeing now.”
What the State Map Actually Shows
California leads the cancellation count with 21 entities, followed by Washington at 18, Wisconsin at 12, and Massachusetts and Michigan at 11 each. North Carolina, buoyed by its Orange-Chatham corridor cluster and the addition of Macon County, now stands at eight. Arkansas produced all seven of its cancellations in under a month.
But the state rankings are the most misleading number in the dataset.
Washington’s 18 didn’t come from 18 independent community uprisings. At least six trace directly to two state-level legal events: the passage of SB 6002, the state’s Driver Privacy Act, and a court ruling that Flock data constitutes public records under state law. Agencies in Edmonds, Spokane, Spokane County, and Pierce County moved because they discovered they had legal exposure. Residents did not pack a council chamber. The same pattern holds in Iowa, where Coralville acted on an Attorney General ruling, and in Vermont, where Manchester went dark under a new statute. Hopkinton, Massachusetts terminated because a legal review found the contract violated state procurement law.
State legislatures and courts are doing more structural damage to Flock than city councils are. Nobody is counting it that way.
Wisconsin tells the opposite story: genuine grassroots revolt. The Fox Valley cluster of Oshkosh, Appleton, and Kaukauna forms a contiguous cancellation zone driven entirely by community pressure and police accountability. Dane County’s board of supervisors voted 32-1 to eliminate $80,000 in Flock funding, cutting data access not just for the county but for 140 agencies that had been querying it. Some were as far away as Missouri and Tennessee.
Beyond City Hall
Universities are leaving too. Stanford University ended its Flock contract and switched to a system that does not allow third-party data access, following a petition with more than 1,000 signatures. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s police department did not renew its contract after the Academic Staff Assembly formally voted to demand cancellation. Kent State University ended its pilot program because community members reported the cameras made them “feel less secure.”
The Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California disabled all external data sharing and physically covered its camera lenses, citing risk to “vulnerable students and employees.” Oceano Community Services District in California rejected a Flock proposal outright. The Dutchtown Community Improvement District in Missouri ended its contract over ICE data-sharing concerns.
What’s notably absent: zero hospitals or health systems and zero K-12 school districts have publicly cut ties, despite targeted searching. Flock actively markets to healthcare. The Cleveland Metropolitan School District operates 201 Flock readers and faces an organized campaign demanding cancellation, but has not acted.
Pennsylvania and the Story Nobody Has Reported
Abington Township in Montgomery County is the only confirmed Flock cancellation in Pennsylvania. The township’s police department is letting both of its Flock contracts expire (one lapsed in August 2026, the second runs through February 2028) after thousands of the department’s own license plate searches leaked into public datasets surfaced by HaveIBeenFlocked.com and 404 Media. The leak exposed criminal investigation details that should have been redacted.
“We don’t want anybody’s personal data getting out into the public without their knowledge or permission,” Lt. Joe Blei told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
But the more significant Pennsylvania finding is the one that hasn’t been reported.
Cheltenham Township holds no Flock contract. Yet its police access the national Flock network through what are called business subscriptions, a mechanism that grants investigative access to the full plate-reader database without requiring a municipal contract or a public vote. If that access model is common across Pennsylvania, the map of which departments can search license plate data is far larger than the map of which municipalities have signed contracts. The public has no visibility into how many departments are using this backdoor.
New Jersey, meanwhile, has produced zero cancellations. Every neighboring state has. Pre-cancellation pressure is building in Franklin Township, Somerset County, where residents packed a council meeting and an active petition demands the contracts end. Franklin Township is the likeliest first domino.
Flock’s Response
On August 13, with cancellations accelerating, Flock announced a package of changes: a recommended default data retention period cut from 30 days to seven, a new “Evidence Mode” for preserving case-specific data, offense filtering that lets communities block searches for specific crime categories including immigration enforcement, and mandatory audit tools and case codes for all law enforcement customers by year-end.
CEO Garrett Langley apologized publicly. “I’m sorry that the system has failed you,” he said. “I’m sorry that you no longer trust the police department whose job is to protect you.”
Privacy advocates were unimpressed. The ACLU called the retention cut a step forward and the rest “window dressing.” Reporting has already noted that the case-code requirement includes an emergency bypass, and officers can enter any case number. The warrant gap that enables abuse stays open.
It’s also worth noting that not every departure is permanent. In Lucas County, Ohio, the sheriff sued after commissioners rescinded the contract 2-1, and a county prosecutor argued the rescission was legally invalid. The Village of Milford, Michigan declined to renew a five-camera contract but has a separate ten-camera contract up for renewal in November. And some entities that left Flock didn’t leave surveillance. Grand Chute, Wisconsin dropped Flock and signed with Axon the same day, keeping all its cameras.
The product is being replaced. The concept is not.
The Number That Matters
The number that matters isn’t 173. It isn’t the 122 cancellations in 2026, or the 33 that happened in the last three weeks alone.
The number that matters is the denominator. Flock Safety still operates in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states, running more than 120,000 cameras that scan billions of plates every month.
Against that footprint, 173 departures is a sliver. This is not a company in collapse.
But four years produced six exits. The last eight months produced 122. That’s the more than 1,900 percent spike again, and it hasn’t leveled off. Massachusetts had four cancellations in four days this week. Asheville, North Carolina votes on Monday. Davidson County, North Carolina votes Saturday. Manitowoc, Wisconsin just received an 844-signature petition demanding a roll-call vote.
Run that trajectory forward. If cancellations continue at even a fraction of the 2026 pace, Flock loses hundreds of contracts a year, not dozens. At that rate, the 6,000-community network that took the better part of a decade to build could be cut in half within a few years, and reduced to a shell of its current self before the end of the decade. That assumes the slope holds. It also assumes Flock does nothing effective to stop it, which is a bet the company is clearly not willing to make. But the direction is set, and every week the list gets longer.
The question isn’t whether Flock will survive this. It almost certainly will. The question is whether the slope keeps steepening, and whether any community that signs a Flock contract today can do so without expecting the fight to follow. With the ACLU’s “Get the Flock Out” campaign now running in all 50 states, that fight isn’t going away.
Pocono Review compiled this dataset by merging the DeFlock, Finding Flock, and Who Approved This trackers, cross-referencing against original news reports and public records, and auditing every entry against its cited source. Two entities were removed as factually incorrect. 106 rows were corrected. The full dataset is available for download. Pocono Review has reached out to Flock Safety for comment.
Have information about Flock camera deployments in Wayne, Monroe, Pike, or surrounding counties? Contact us at tips@poconoreview.com.