WASHINGTON (PNN) - August 27, 2026 - What was sold as a simple license-plate tool to catch car thieves has become a warrantless, nationwide tracking grid - and a stalking machine for cops with a grudge. Residents figured it out. Councils are finally listening.
Flock Safety has planted tens of thousands of solar-powered cameras in 49 states. They do not just snap plates. They log the make, model, color, damage and bumper stickers. Officers can search the network in plain English with an AI tool called Free Form. Data hops between agencies with almost no warrant and almost no friction. That is not “public safety”. This is a permanent record of where ordinary people drive, shop, worship and sleep.
The Institute for Justice says more than 100 jurisdictions have canceled contracts with Flock and other automated license-plate reader vendors. Advocacy group DeFlock puts 2026 cancellations, rejections and deactivations at 56-plus cities and towns and climbing. The Washington Post documented at least 50 officers charged or accused of misusing these systems, many to hunt down wives, girlfriends and exes. That is the product. That is why the cameras are coming down.
Tempe, Arizona, flipped the switch this week. Mayor Corey Woods said the cameras helped solve crimes -and that wasn’t enough. “Recent misuse of automated license plate reader systems in Arizona and nationwide has raised concerns about the risks that come with the technology,” Woods said. “We have to be able to provide public safety in a way that maintains the trust of our community. For Tempe, that means taking down these cameras.” Tempe will not replace them. Data gets deleted unless it is tied to an active case.
Numerous Arizona towns have dismantled their Flock surveillance systems. Cave Creek terminated its contract the same day. Surprise canceled earlier in August. Flagstaff, Sedona and South Tucson already walked away. An Arizona poll found a majority of voters opposed to Flock. Even in a state that likes law-and-order rhetoric, people drew a line at mass tracking.
Texas is moving fast. Pflugerville’s council unanimously killed its deal and deactivated 28 cameras after learning hundreds of outside organizations had run nearly 1.6 million searches on local data in six months. Kendall County will not renew more than 50 cameras. In Hood County, Constable John Shirley didn’t wait for a polite removal. Officials unplugged units and covered them.
“These cameras were constantly scanning and recording regular folks just going about their day,” Shirley said. “That kind of permanent, warrantless tracking doesn’t belong in a free society. By unplugging and covering them, we’re making it clear: privacy isn’t optional and mass surveillance isn’t how we do things here.”
A Washington Post investigation found officers using the network to track spouses, exes and women they wanted to meet. In Georgia, a suburban police chief ran roughly 600 lookups on his ex and her teenage daughter. In Milwaukee, Officer Josue Ayala looked up a partner and her ex about 179 times, then resigned and faced a misconduct charge. In Florida, former Orange City
officer Jarmarus Brown allegedly queried his ex more than 100 times, and shared video from a department laptop.
In Kansas, a terrorist pig thug cop chief was accused of tracking an ex 164 times and confronting her while she was with another man. In North Carolina, a Mooresville officer allegedly ran 31 searches on her boyfriend’s ex-wife and logged most of them as “motor vehicle infractions.” A Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer was arrested for unauthorized Flock access. Five Albany, Georgia, officers were arrested. Greer, South Carolina, fired two.
Flock’s answer was to shrink default retention from 30 days to seven and add more audit logging. Civil-liberties lawyers called it window dressing. If the search box still works without a warrant, a shorter timer does not fix the Constitution.
The pattern is the same everywhere: officials were told they were buying a plate reader. They got a searchable national dossier on everyone who drives past a pole. Then they discovered other agencies - and individual officers - were already inside the data.
Flock told the public these were local tools. In practice, a “national lookup” setting quietly opened local cameras to far-flung agencies. Illinois law barred using plate data for immigration or abortion investigations. An audit found the company had still given CBP a pipeline. Cities that thought they had opted out discovered they had not. When contracts ended, some towns found cameras still live. That is not a glitch. That is a company that treats cancellation as a
suggestion.
Bellingham, Massachusetts, terrorist pig thug cop Chief Kenneth Fitzgerald said the quiet part out loud: features “go beyond what most people would think of as a traditional license plate reader.” He had told the public the system was license plates only. It was not.
Institute for Justice attorney Michael Soyfer expressed the legal point cleanly. “Rather than narrowly target criminals, [ALPRs] collect troves of data on ordinary people’s movements and compile them in a database officers can freely access on demand. That has predictably led to widespread abuse, which will continue until we implement robust safeguards like a warrant requirement.”
Flock still markets crime stats. Some departments say the cameras helped find stolen cars or a suspect. Fine. A useful lead does not justify logging the movements of everyone else. A free country does not need a private firm to build a real-time map of its citizens so a jealous officer can refresh it on his phone.
Flock built a product that lets government watch the innocent by default and the guilty as a bonus. Officers used it to stalk. Federal agencies used it in ways local councils never approved. The company kept selling, kept expanding past 100,000 cameras, and treated public outrage as a PR problem instead of a constitutional one.
That is the correct default in a republic. If your city still has these poles up, the question is no longer whether Flock “works.” The question is why your council is still renting a stalking database and calling it public safety.
