The Los Angeles Police Department has allowed its three-year contract with Flock Safety, a company that operates license-plate-reading cameras, to expire on July 12, 2026. For context: these cameras photograph license plates on streets and parking lots, then feed the images into a searchable database that police can query for investigations TechCrunch.

LAPD Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas told reporters the department is pausing Flock services while it resolves "data, privacy, security, and sharing concerns" in a new contract. The department cited specific worries about how the captured data is handled and who controls it TechCrunch.

As the third-largest police department in the United States, the LAPD was one of Flock's biggest government clients. Flock's camera network spans at least 80,000 devices nationwide, used by thousands of local police departments and an increasing number of private homeowners associations and businesses TechCrunch.

The sticking point was data ownership. Both the Los Angeles Times and Yahoo News reported that negotiations broke down over who ultimately controls the license-plate data once it is collected: the police department, Flock, or other organizations that have access to the network Los Angeles Times and Yahoo News. Related questions about how long data is stored and who can export it were also unresolved Los Angeles Times.

The LAPD indicated it will seek a new contract with stronger protections before returning to the platform, rather than abandoning it entirely TechCrunch.

The decision follows months of public scrutiny. In May 2026, LA City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a motion to halt further expansion of Flock cameras across the city Councilmember Jurado's office. Earlier, in March 2026, the LAPD Police Commission held a public meeting where Chief Jim McDonnell fielded questions about data governance Los Angeles Times.

Flock Safety spokesperson Holly Beilin said the contract's expiration surprised the company and expressed confidence that Flock could address what it views as misunderstandings behind the LAPD's objections TechCrunch.

Flock has faced similar pushback in other cities. Mountain View, California and South Portland, Maine both ended relationships with Flock previously, citing privacy concerns and worry that federal immigration authorities could query the network without the local agency's approval TechCrunch. In response, Flock introduced new controls: in January 2026, it let participating agencies block all federal data sharing, and by February the company was setting federal sharing to "off by default," meaning federal agencies would be excluded from nationwide and statewide lookups Flock Safety and Flock Safety.

But those changes did not satisfy the LAPD's core concerns. The police department's objections centered on data ownership and storage language in the contract itself — not on who gets to query the database at search time. Think of the difference this way: an on/off switch controls who can look at the data once it is already stored. The contract terms, by contrast, address how the data is kept, how long it sits in the vendor's systems, and who has the legal right to retrieve it. Those kinds of details typically belong in a separate data-processing agreement rather than in a software feature, which may explain why a product update from Flock did not resolve LAPD's objections.

The situation reveals a recurring tension in the surveillance-camera business. These companies design and operate the hardware and the databases. Cities own the streets where the cameras sit and generate the data, but vendors often control the underlying infrastructure and the tools used to search it. This creates ambiguity: when a police department buys a subscription, does it truly own the photos and plate numbers that cameras capture on its own streets, or is the vendor holding that data on the city's behalf?

Whether Flock and the LAPD strike a new deal depends on whether contract language can be written to satisfy the department's concerns about data control. Given the size of the account and Flock's stated willingness to negotiate, a revised agreement is possible rather than a permanent split. For now, the LAPD's decision stands as the largest known law enforcement disconnection from Flock's network, and how these two parties resolve it will likely influence how other cities negotiate similar contracts in the months ahead.