The Los Angeles Police Department has allowed its three-year contract with license-plate-reading camera company Flock Safety to expire, ending — at least for now — one of the largest municipal deployments of Flock's automated license plate recognition (ALPR) network in the country. The contract lapsed on Saturday, July 12, 2026 TechCrunch.

LAPD Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas confirmed the non-renewal, telling reporters the department is discontinuing Flock services "until data, privacy, security, and sharing concerns can be ironed out through a contractual relationship." He cited serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights, specifically the handling of data collected from the camera network TechCrunch.

As the third-largest police department in the United States, the LAPD had been one of Flock Safety's largest government customers. Flock's network spans at least 80,000 ALPR cameras nationwide, deployed by thousands of local law enforcement agencies and, increasingly, private homeowners' associations and businesses TechCrunch.

Negotiations over renewal stalled specifically on data sharing protections, according to reporting ahead of the expiration Fox 11 LA. The Los Angeles Times reported that unresolved questions over who ultimately controls the captured plate and vehicle data — the department, the vendor, or downstream third parties with network access — were central to the suspension Los Angeles Times. Yahoo News similarly cited unresolved data-ownership disputes among the reasons for the lapse Yahoo News.

According to ABC7, the LAPD is now seeking new contractual language specifically addressing privacy and data storage before any renewed relationship is possible, rather than abandoning the platform outright TechCrunch.

The decision follows months of visible scrutiny inside city government. LA City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a motion on May 29, 2026 seeking to halt further expansion of Flock technology across Los Angeles Councilmember Jurado's office. Earlier still, the LAPD Police Commission scrutinized the department's Flock relationship at a March 2026 meeting attended by Chief Jim McDonnell, where questions about data governance were raised publicly Los Angeles Times.

Flock Safety spokesperson Holly Beilin said the contract's expiration caught the company by surprise, and expressed confidence that Flock could resolve what it characterizes as misconceptions underlying the LAPD's decision TechCrunch. An LAPD spokesperson did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment over the weekend.

Flock has faced comparable pushback elsewhere. Mountain View, California and South Portland, Maine both previously ended their relationships with the company, citing privacy concerns and specifically the risk of federal immigration authorities querying the network TechCrunch. Flock has responded to that category of concern with product changes: in January 2026 it introduced an administrative control letting any agency disable all federal data sharing outright, and by February the company was describing federal sharing as "default off," with federal agencies excluded from participating in statewide or national lookup networks Flock Safety Flock Safety.

Those safeguards evidently did not resolve the LAPD's specific concerns, which centered less on federal query access than on data ownership and storage terms within the contract itself. That distinction matters technically: an opt-out toggle governs query-time access controls, whereas the disputes reported by the Times and Yahoo concern the underlying data architecture — retention periods, export rights, and who holds custodianship of plate-read logs once they leave LAPD's own systems. Those are the kinds of terms that typically live in data processing agreements and service-level contracts rather than in a product's default settings, which may explain why a feature-level fix from Flock did not resolve LAPD's objections.

The broader context here touches a debate that has followed ALPR and similar surveillance-as-a-service platforms since municipal camera networks began scaling nationally: vendors control the infrastructure and increasingly the analytics layer, while municipalities retain nominal ownership of the data generated on their streets. Worth flagging: LAPD's move does not end Flock's presence in Southern California, since numerous smaller agencies and private networks in the region continue to feed the same searchable database, and LAPD investigators may still access shared regional data through other participating agencies even without their own subscription.

What happens next depends on whether Flock and the LAPD can draft contract language satisfying the department's custodianship demands. Given the size of the account and Flock's stated intent to resolve the dispute, a renegotiated agreement remains plausible rather than a permanent breach. For now, the largest known law enforcement disconnection from Flock's network stands as a test case for how vendor and municipal customer negotiate data governance terms going forward, a question every jurisdiction running similar contracts will now be watching.