The Los Angeles Police Department has stopped using Flock Safety's automated license plate reader cameras after its three-year contract with the company expired over the weekend. LAPD Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas told the Los Angeles Times the department will not resume using the system until data privacy, security, and sharing concerns are resolved through a new contractual arrangement Los Angeles Times.

Flock Safety operates 138 cameras across Los Angeles, feeding license plate data into a network used by the LAPD and other agencies Engadget. The LAPD signed its original agreement with the Atlanta-based company in 2023. That deal lapsed last weekend, and negotiations over a renewal have stalled specifically on the question of data sharing protections, according to a Fox 11 Los Angeles report citing sources close to the talks Fox 11 Los Angeles.

The core dispute centers on where Flock-collected data ends up once it leaves LAPD custody. The company has reportedly shared license plate data with state and federal authorities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a practice that runs against California legislation restricting what details private surveillance vendors can pass to government officials Engadget. For a department operating in a state with some of the country's more restrictive data-sharing statutes, that exposure creates legal risk independent of any policy preference at LAPD headquarters.

ABC7 reported on July 10 that the department cited civil liberties and civil rights concerns, particularly around privacy, as its stated rationale for declining to renew ABC7. Separately, Flock cameras have been documented to carry multiple cybersecurity flaws, adding a technical dimension to the privacy debate that predates the current contract dispute Engadget.

The suspension follows political pressure at the city level. Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a motion in late May calling for a halt to any expansion of Flock Safety technology within city limits CD14. That motion predates the contract's expiration by roughly six weeks and suggests the council had already begun scrutinizing the vendor relationship before it lapsed on its own terms.

What changes operationally

With the contract expired, the 138 cameras in the network are effectively dark from an LAPD standpoint, at least for now. The department has not described a replacement system or interim measure, and Gialamas's comments to the Times frame this as a pause conditioned on renegotiated terms rather than a permanent exit from license plate reader technology altogether. That distinction matters: LAPD is not renouncing ALPR as a category, it is withholding renewal until Flock can demonstrate compliance with state data-sharing law and address the security vulnerabilities that have been publicly documented.

Flock Safety has built its business on rapid municipal adoption, and thousands of agencies nationwide use its camera network under broadly similar terms. A suspension by a department the size of LAPD's is a meaningful data point for other cities weighing renewals, particularly in states with their own data-sharing restrictions on the books. Whether other California departments follow LAPD's lead, or whether Flock moves quickly to offer contractual guarantees that satisfy state law, will likely determine how isolated this episode turns out to be.

The tension here is a familiar one from three decades of watching surveillance technology diffuse into everyday policing: the capability arrives faster than the governance framework meant to constrain it. License plate readers solve a genuine operational problem for investigators tracking stolen vehicles or suspects fleeing a scene. But once that data sits in a third-party vendor's cloud, questions about downstream access, whether to ICE, to other state agencies, or to anyone with a subpoena, become as consequential as the original crime-fighting rationale. Worth flagging: the ICE data-sharing allegation is the detail most likely to keep this story alive politically in a city that has taken public positions on immigration enforcement cooperation, independent of whatever the underlying cybersecurity flaws turn out to require in a fix.

For now, the practical effect is a gap in coverage across a camera network that had presumably become part of routine investigative workflow at LAPD. How long that gap lasts depends on whether Flock can offer the department, and by extension the state, enforceable limits on data sharing that survive the next subpoena or federal information request.