THE CLASSIFIED RECORDhttps://theclassifiedrecord.com/documents/flock-alpr-camerasQuote:
Flock Safety has installed more than 100,000 automated license plate reader cameras across all 50 states, covering over 4,000 communities and contracting with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies. The cameras are not purchased by the police departments that operate them. They are leased under multi-year contracts with Flock Group, Inc. Those contracts are government records, subject to public records law in every state, and most people do not know they can ask for them. In 2024, a trial court called a Flock camera network a dragnet over an entire city and compared it to placing GPS trackers on every vehicle. The Los Angeles Police Department suspended its Flock contract in 2026 over unresolved questions about data ownership and federal sharing. Cambridge, Massachusetts removed cameras that Flock had installed without city awareness. The City of Bloomington, Indiana withheld its Flock contracts from public records requests for over a year before the documents were forced out. This page documents what those contracts contain, what the courts have found, and how to request the contract governing the cameras in your jurisdiction.
Flock Safety does not sell cameras to police departments. It leases them. A city or county signs a multi-year agreement, typically two to five years, and pays an annual fee per camera. That fee covers the hardware, the software platform called Flock OS, technical support, and access to what Flock calls the national network: the ability to query license plate data collected by cameras operated by other agencies across the country.
The lease structure has a specific consequence for public records law. The cameras are Flock property, not city property. The software is Flock's. The data is collected by Flock's infrastructure. But the contract between the police department and Flock is a government contract, negotiated by a public agency, paid with public funds, and therefore subject to public records disclosure in every state. Flock contracts obtained through public records requests in California, Indiana, Minnesota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and other states have revealed provisions that were not disclosed to city councils when the contracts were approved.
In Benicia, California, documents obtained through a public records request revealed that the city was billed for a camera it had not yet installed, because Flock's billing is triggered by the first camera in a contract, not by each camera individually. In Bloomington, Indiana, the city withheld Flock contracts for over a year in response to multiple public records requests, initially claiming that releasing an order form would create a reasonable likelihood of threatening public safety by exposing a vulnerability to terrorist attack. Indiana courts disagreed.
Flock cameras are sold to police departments primarily on a traffic safety and crime-solving justification. The cameras are mounted on public roads, the argument goes, and public roads carry no expectation of privacy under existing Fourth Amendment doctrine. A license plate is visible. A public road is public. The cameras document what is already observable.
That argument weakens when the camera is not on a road. Flock cameras appear in city park parking lots, at public basketball courts, in apartment complex driveways, and in other locations where the traffic-safety rationale does not apply and the non-roadway placement receives less public notice and less permitting scrutiny than a road installation. In South Carolina, the state Department of Transportation discovered more than 200 Flock cameras installed on state roads without the required encroachment permits in 2024.
A non-roadway camera is still governed by the same city contract as the roadway cameras. The contract specifies where cameras may be placed. Whether the contract requires city council approval for each placement, or delegates placement authority to the police department or to Flock directly, is language that appears in the contract and that most residents never see. The records request gives you that language.
In 2024, a trial court evaluating a challenge to a city's Flock network described the system as functioning as a dragnet over the entire city and compared it to the practice of placing GPS trackers on every vehicle in the jurisdiction, a practice the Supreme Court addressed in United States v. Jones (2012). The court's concern was not any single camera but the cumulative effect of the network: every trip, every route, every destination, logged and searchable without a warrant.
In January 2026, a federal judge in Norfolk, Virginia ruled that the city's Flock camera network did not yet rise to a constitutional violation, while explicitly warning that ALPR surveillance could become too intrusive and run afoul of constitutional privacy standards at some point as the technology expands. The ruling allowed a lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice to proceed.
The Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States established that long-term collection of location data is categorically different from simple record-keeping and that the third-party doctrine, which holds that information shared with a third party carries no Fourth Amendment protection, does not apply when the collection is comprehensive enough to reveal a person's patterns of life over time. The courts have not yet applied Carpenter directly to ALPR networks, but multiple ongoing cases are testing that question.
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