At Least 10 Local Governments Have Moved to Drop Flock Safety Cameras Since Summer

At least 10 local governments and police departments have moved since summer 2026 to curb, restrict, or end their use of Flock Safety technology, according to a TechCrunch report.

Six of those jurisdictions moved to end their Flock contracts in the three months before November 5, 2026: Monroe, Ohio; Newburgh, New York; Richmond, Virginia; Hopkinton, Massachusetts; New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Lansing, Michigan. Police in East Bridgewater and Grafton, Massachusetts, have announced plans to stop using Flock cameras. In League City, Texas, residents voted against their police department's continued use of Flock license plate readers, and the cameras are set to be removed. Asheville, North Carolina, police lost access to Flock after the city voted in August to terminate its contract.

The El Paso County Sheriff's Office in Colorado announced in September that it would discontinue its use of Flock Safety cameras. Sheriff Joseph Roybal said the decision was the right one for the county.

The moves have not all followed the same path. Toledo City Council's vote on ending its Flock contract ended in a tie, which leaves the future of the cameras with Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz. In San Diego, the Budget and Government Efficiency Committee voted unanimously to advance a proposal to cancel the city's contract with Flock Safety. That is a step toward cancellation, not a final decision. In North Liberty, the council voted to end its contract with Flock, and Councilor Brian Wayson voted to keep the cameras.

The largest single contract on the list was the Los Angeles Police Department's. In July, the LAPD let its contract with Flock expire, citing serious concerns over civil liberties and privacy. The department had been one of Flock's biggest government customers.

Flock was founded in 2017. Its product line includes license plate readers, which photograph vehicle plates and log them for later search, along with drones and microphone-based edge-computing devices that pick up gunshots and other sounds. Edge computing means the device analyzes sound locally rather than streaming raw audio to a central server, much as a smoke detector decides on its own whether to sound an alarm. More than 100,000 Flock cameras are in use nationwide as of November 2026. The concerns cited in the local moves range from privacy to how data is shared and with whom, along with procurement concerns.

The relationship with Amazon's Ring has also drawn attention. Ring canceled its partnership with Flock in February. Flock's network of AI cameras had been used by ICE, federal agencies, and police. Flock and Ring also canceled a planned Community Requests integration before it launched. Flock states that no Ring video was ever shared with Flock.

Flock's public position is that the removals are not a product failure. In February, the company said recent camera removals by some cities were not because the technology failed, but because public trust was strained. In October, CEO Garrett Langley told TechCrunch that the company has not canceled the contract of any police department or law enforcement agency as a customer.

In my view, the distinction between those two framings matters for anyone who writes or negotiates these contracts. A dispute about technical reliability is settled through testing and benchmarks. A dispute about trust and data sharing is settled through governance: retention periods, access controls, audit trails, and written rules about which agencies can query which footage. Flock's own explanation places the problem in the second category, and the stated concerns of the councils that voted against it sit largely there as well.

The broader context here is that the next round of decisions will test whether that gap can be closed in contract language. Councils that renegotiate terms, rather than terminate them, would leave a documented record of what data is kept, for how long, and who can see it. Whether that record satisfies the councils that have already voted against Flock is the open question. The Toledo tie and the San Diego proposal are the next places it will be answered.