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

Flock Safety operates 138 cameras across Los Angeles, each capturing and cataloging vehicle license plates as they pass. The collected data feeds into a shared network used by LAPD and other agencies. The LAPD signed its original agreement with the Atlanta-based company in 2023; that deal lapsed last weekend, and renewal negotiations have stalled over data governance Engadget.

The core dispute

The central question is where Flock-collected data travels after leaving LAPD custody. The company has reportedly shared license plate records with state and federal authorities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a practice that conflicts with California law restricting what private surveillance vendors can pass to government agencies Engadget. For a department operating in a state with strict data-sharing regulations, that exposure creates legal exposure independent of internal policy choices.

ABC7 reported on July 10 that LAPD cited civil liberties and privacy concerns as its stated rationale for declining renewal ABC7. In addition, Flock cameras have been publicly documented to carry multiple cybersecurity vulnerabilities, adding a technical dimension to the privacy debate Engadget.

The suspension also follows political pressure from the city council. 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 came roughly six weeks before the contract expired, signaling that council scrutiny of the vendor relationship preceded the contract lapse.

What happens next

With the contract expired, the 138 cameras are effectively offline from LAPD's perspective, at least for now. The department has not outlined a replacement system or interim solution. Gialamas's public comments frame this as a pause pending renegotiated terms rather than a permanent rejection of license plate reader technology itself. That distinction carries weight: LAPD is not abandoning automated license plate readers (ALPR) as a class of tool; it is withholding renewal until Flock demonstrates compliance with state data-sharing law and resolves the documented security gaps.

Flock Safety's business model rests on rapid municipal adoption, with thousands of agencies nationwide using its cameras under similar terms. A suspension by a department the size of LAPD's is a significant data point for other cities evaluating their own renewals, especially in states with data-sharing restrictions. Whether other California departments follow suit, or whether Flock offers contractual guarantees that satisfy state law, will likely shape whether this remains isolated or spreads.

The underlying tension is one we have seen repeatedly over the past thirty years: surveillance technology arrives faster than the legal and policy frameworks meant to govern 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 infrastructure, questions about downstream access — whether to ICE, to other state agencies, or to holders of legal subpoenas — become as important as the original crime-fighting function. It is worth noting that the ICE data-sharing allegation is the detail most likely to sustain political attention in a city that has adopted public stances on immigration enforcement cooperation, independent of what the underlying technical vulnerabilities require in a remedy.

For now, the practical outcome is a gap in camera coverage across a network that had presumably become routine in LAPD investigative work. How long that gap persists depends on whether Flock can offer contractual guarantees that limit data sharing and survive legal pressure from federal information requests or subpoenas.