Overview
- Hundreds of cities and towns have canceled, paused, or not renewed Flock contracts after reporting and audits showed frequent outside searches and broad sharing of plate‑scan records.
- Reporting and municipal reviews have led to multiple police arrests, firings and internal probes for officers who ran improper or personal searches of the Flock system.
- Flock has imposed new technical and policy guardrails that require case codes for searches, add an Audit Assistance misuse detector, and cut its default data retention from 30 days to seven days.
- Federal and state pressure is rising: Texas froze state funding for the cameras, Florida barred them from state highways, and lawmakers introduced the bipartisan No FLOCK Act to condition federal transportation grants on tighter ALPR limits.
- A central unresolved issue is what happens to the vast, cross‑jurisdictional database once contracts end, since many agreements let the company retain and share past vehicle‑movement records without clear limits.