Updated February 19, 2026 at 3:02 AM MST
The use of automatic license plate readers has exploded across the country in recent years. The cameras on roads and freeways that take images of the back of passing cars are popular with police for solving crimes.
But as President Trump's immigration enforcement crackdown has escalated in recent months, residents of various American cities are urging local leaders to stop using these cameras, citing fears of mass surveillance and concerns that local data could be aiding a federal deportation dragnet.
Many of the grassroots campaigns have targeted cameras made by Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. Some cities have grappled with the issue and decided to keep their cameras due to public safety, but in a number of places, the pressure has worked.
The liberal college towns of Flagstaff, Ariz., Cambridge, Mass., Eugene, Ore. and Santa Cruz, Calif., are among a list of at least 30 localities that have either deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled their contracts since the beginning of 2025 – with much of the activity happening in just the last three months.
"We are seeing a lot more momentum," said Will Freeman, a Colorado-based activist who opposes the cameras and runs the DeFlock.me website, which through crowdsourcing has mapped the locations of more than 76,000 license plate readers across the country. "I expect there to be more cities dropping Flock."
Questions over data sharing
Police have praised license plate readers for helping officers track down stolen cars and find criminal suspects. The cameras have been credited with assisting in solving high profile crimes, including locating the body of the Brown University shooting suspect at a New Hampshire storage facility in December.
Flock's AI-powered cameras scan license plates as well as vehicles' identifying details, such as make, model and color, that police can use as search terms. Flock operates a national network of this data that police can query to track the location of specific vehicles, far beyond their own city limits.
One of the main issues that has come up in debates over Flock cameras are questions about who can potentially access the data local cameras record.
Flock says cities control their sharing settings. "Each Flock customer has sole authority over if, when, and with whom information is shared," the company wrote in an email to NPR. Records are created showing which agency initiated a search, and for what stated purpose.
But many city officials have realized after the fact that they were sharing their data more broadly than they had known, and that federal agencies, including U.S. Border Patrol, had searched their data.
Flock says it made changes over the last year to "strengthen sharing controls, oversight and audit capabilities within the system."
Town officials in Hillsborough, North Carolina announced in October they had ended their relationship with Flock after "town leaders became concerned about language that could be interpreted as allowing Flock Safety to disclose data to any government entity or third party if the company had a 'good faith belief' of a need to do so."
Late last year, the Flagstaff Police Department responded to growing community concerns about Flock cameras by tightening up the city's data sharing controls. The department removed the city's data from both Flock's national and state-wide lookup networks, and instead opted to only share data with two local agencies.
The police department also changed its data retention period to 14 days, down from 30.
"It is such a valuable piece of technology that has worked," said Deputy Chief of Operations Collin Seay at a December city council meeting about whether to continue Flagstaff's contract for 36 Flock cameras.
But after the police presentation, the public comment period was dominated by residents sharing concerns about Flock.
"We do not support AI mass surveillance as the current federal administration is gathering and weaponizing data," said Flagstaff resident Michele James.
Another resident referenced an Electronic Frontier Foundation analysis that found a significant number of police departments had searched Flock's network in connection with protest activity. Multiple speakers brought up a report by the independent tech outlet, 404 Media, about Texas sheriff's deputies who searched for the car of a woman who had an abortion.
Flagstaff Mayor Becky Daggett told NPR she initially hoped it would work to keep using the cameras with more guardrails in place, but she came to understand the community had lost trust in Flock.
"In the end, it was just clear that this wasn't going to be a technology that was going to be well received or that we could continue to use," Daggett said. The council voted to end their Flock contract.
A pattern of revelations
Susie O'Hara, a city council member in Santa Cruz, Calif., was also growing increasingly concerned about her city's eight Flock cameras last year.
Santa Cruz was among a number of California cities that learned their local data had been shared with Flock's national network without city officials' knowledge or intent. It was alarming to some officials given that state laws forbid cities from sharing license plate data with federal or out-of-state agencies, or assisting federal immigration enforcement.
In August, Flock admitted to 9News in Denver that it had a pilot program with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol. The company's CEO Garrett Langley had previously denied the company had federal contracts.
"[T]here have been conflicting reports in the media about Flock's relationship with federal agencies, and some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information," Langley later acknowledged in a statement. "We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn't create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users."
The same statement acknowledged Flock also had a pilot program with Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. The statement said federal agencies would no longer be given access to state or nationwide lookup networks.
The pattern of revelations became frustrating to O'Hara. "I was very dissatisfied with a multibillion dollar company continuing to make mistakes and putting our local data at risk — and really against our Santa Cruz values," she told NPR.
O'Hara and others grew concerned they could not be sure their city data would not be used to aid federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Flock says its pilot programs with CBP and HSI have ended, and says Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have "direct access" to the Flock platform. But reviews of audit logs by researchers, journalists and officials have found local police departments appear to be conducting searches on behalf of federal agencies. In such cases, the officer performing the search listed terms like "ICE" or "immigration" as the reason for performing the search.
O'Hara said Santa Cruz audits found some California police departments performing what appeared to be immigration-related searches, which she called "very concerning."
In an October statement, Flock said it had introduced keyword filters to "block attempts to search for terms related to civil immigration or reproductive healthcare where state law forbids it." Flock later added a dropdown menu that requires police to choose an "offense type" before they can search.
O'Hara was not impressed with that solution, since she worried police performing an immigration-related search could choose a more "palatable" option from the menu.
Another turning point for O'Hara came on Jan. 7, the day Renee Macklin Good was killed in Minneapolis by an ICE agent. That convinced her further that she did not want Santa Cruz to have anything to do with surveillance that could wind up as part of the Trump administration's crackdown.
"I have goosebumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis," she said. "And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing … It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all – just no way."
On Jan.13, the Santa Cruz city council voted to end their Flock contract, less than two years after it began.
CEO's comments add fuel to fire
Flock has said the number of new law enforcement agencies partnering with the company significantly outpaces the number that are ending their agreements.
Langley, the company's CEO, has also had harsh words for some of the activists opposing Flock technology. He referred to DeFlock, the crowdsourced mapping project, as "terroristic," in a September video interview with Forbes. Flock did not respond to a question asking why Langley had used that word.
Freeman of DeFlock told NPR, "I really didn't know what to say when I heard that accusation because the only thing we did was make a website mapping them out. We encourage people to fight mass surveillance legally and respectfully."
The following month, in an email that went out to Flock customers, Langley wrote his company and partner law enforcement agencies are under "coordinated attack." He wrote the attacks come from "the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness."
Those comments did not land well with Jim Williams, the police chief in Staunton, Virginia. He wrote back to Langley disagreeing with the characterization.
"What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes," Williams wrote. He added their efforts to seek answers about the technology, "is democracy in action."
The correspondence was included in a Staunton news release a few days later announcing the city was ending its Flock contract.
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