Well said fellow citizen.

To Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels, the installation of automatic license plate reader cameras has been revolutionary.

Flock Safety, a leading supplier of these cameras, brags that they’re used by over 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and that Flock technology can go beyond simply recording a license plate. Many of their devices can also identify a car’s make, model, color, dents, roof racks, window stickers and even a dog in a truck bed. It’s a nightmare for privacy advocates, but a dream come true for a sheriff with a tight budget. Nowels said it’s saved hundreds of investigative hours, helped drive down auto thefts and made it easier to prosecute criminals.

“To replicate this with humans, I would have to have 70 people standing on the street 24/7 and they’d have to have perfect recall for everything they took a picture of for 30 days,” Nowels said. “It’s impossible.”

Yet, he’s reluctant to say too much about Flock’s particular vulnerabilities in Washington, knowing the tool could be particularly dangerous in the wrong hands.

“I have concerns about this getting into print, because I don’t want people to get any ideas,” Nowels said.

“Let’s say an ex-boyfriend who’s violent decides that he can’t find his ex, but he wants to, and he thinks she lives here in Spokane, and he happens to know what car she drives,” Nowels said.

In theory, Nowels said, he could submit a records request to Spokane County, asking for every time his ex’s license plate had been recorded by a Flock camera in the past month.

With Flock already under fire for its use in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, multiple Washington cities have shut down their Flock camera programs, in part because of these public-record concerns.

Washington lags behind nearly half of the states, including Idaho, that have passed laws and regulations around automatic license plate readers. As the 2026 legislative session kicks off in Olympia, legislators have introduced a bill to rein in these cameras by limiting which Flock records the public can access.

The bill would dramatically limit the use of Flock cameras by both the public and law enforcement. The cameras would be banned outside of hospitals, schools, food banks and churches. They couldn’t be used for immigration enforcement or to track protests. And crucially, only academic researchers would be allowed to make public records requests for the data.

But to do that lawmakers must contend with the three conflicting interests: the law enforcement officers who say Flock cameras are vital to protect the public, the civil rights groups who see the cameras as an invasion of privacy, and the public record advocates who worry that cutting off transparency paves the way for government abuse.

“That’s going to remain probably one of the contentious points of the bill and negotiations moving forward,” said Sen. Yasmin Trudeau, D-Tacoma, the bill’s co-sponsor. “There are people that feel very passionately about public records, and they should.”

How the cameras are being used

It was public records, after all, that first revealed information about Flock cameras that outraged civil liberties groups.

In May, independent journalists at the tech site 404 Media revealed that records had uncovered cops across the country conducting Flock camera searches on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Flock boasts about giving their users access to “real-time alerts and footage from partners across the country.” But each search leaves a record — an audit trail — in each city or county’s Flock system. Those audit trails also revealed that Texas deputies had searched cameras across the entire country, including Spokane County, to locate a woman who’d given herself an abortion. Spokane County has since stopped allowing their Flock network to be accessed by nationwide searches.

A University of Washington research project this summer harnessed its own records requests to show that at least eight different Washington state law enforcement agencies had given the U.S. Border Patrol access to Flock images to potentially aid with immigration enforcement. In many states, including Washington, local law enforcement is forbidden from helping federal immigration enforcement.

By the time a Washington superior court ruled on a records case in November that such camera data was open to the public, cities like the Seattle suburb of Redmond had already shut down their Flock cameras. Other cities had to contend with a wave of new records requests. Some were broad and voluminous, creating the kind of financial burden that comes with preserving massive amounts of photos.

Other requests were more targeted. One person requested photos taken of his own license plate.

Another, Jim Leighty, a longtime Spokane area activist, figured out a way to start tracking ICE using the same kind of cameras ICE had used to track others. He sent a public records request to Spokane County asking for all “camera locations, dates and times for Washington License Plate 72715RP” captured during the first dozen days of December.

That vehicle is used by a private company to transport ICE detainees from Spokane to the holding facility in Tacoma, Leighty said, and he wanted to figure out the schedule.

“How often is it coming over?” Leighty said. “That could give us an idea of how active ICE can be in our community.”

Leighty also intended it as a test: If the government was going to violate the right to privacy of average citizens, it only seemed fair to him that citizens could turn around and demand the same sort of information from the government.

Leighty got the record he requested — a single camera hit for the vehicle — after a little less than a month, though he said the county first notified the transport company and called Leighty to ensure that he wasn’t intent on harming anybody.

Meanwhile, Thomas Stotts, who runs the private investigation agency Strategic Intelligence Services, made two Flock camera records requests in his attempt to locate a parent who’d fled another state with their children.

“As soon as you walk out the door, you have no expectation of privacy,” Stotts said.

Washington law gives private detectives some special rights — they are able to look up a person’s license plate number, for instance — but Nowels argues that private detectives don’t have the same level of accountability or training as law enforcement.

“I don’t know anything about their integrity,” Nowels said. “I’d like to think most people are ethical and moral, but there’s plenty of people who aren’t. … That’s my issue with that information available to just about anybody.”

For now, Tony Dinaro, the public records officer for Spokane County, said the county has been attempting to use the existing law to prevent known abusers from looking up specific license plates, by cross-referencing the records requests with a list of all the people who have had protective orders leveled against them.

Since Washington’s records laws currently allow the government to decline to release records if the disclosure could endanger a crime victim’s physical safety, Dinaro said, the county attorneys felt they were “definitely on solid ground legally” to deny such a request from an abuser.

“That’s our red line,” he said.

The trouble is, requests can come in anonymously. A stalker could simply refuse to leave his name. In those cases, Dinaro said, the county plans to contact the owner of the vehicle being tracked, giving them a chance to go to court and say, “I am being stalked … and I don’t want this information released.”

Shuttering cameras

Local governments face another big problem. Flock, as a default, deletes the images off their servers after 30 days. But what if someone makes a last-minute request to the city on Day 29? If the requested pictures get deleted before the city can ask Flock to preserve them, the city could be fined for violating the state’s transparency laws.

Trudeau’s bill seeks to fix that vulnerability by cutting off almost all public records access. The bill would slash the amount of time most Flock images could be preserved from 30 days to just three.

Nowels worries that such legislative restrictions could make the cameras “completely useless.”

Trudeau is well known for supporting measures to restrain law enforcement, including a controversial restriction on vehicle chases. But this latest bill, she notes, is co-sponsored by Sen. Jeff Holy, R-Cheney, a former detective who spent 22 years with the Spokane Police Department.

“Everyone is happy and unhappy about my current draft, which means we’re probably on a good path to compromise,” Trudeau said.

Holy sees the bill as an example where a conservative and a progressive can find common ground: libertarianism. Both of them worry about how a tyrannical government might abuse its powers.

The proposed bill requires governmental agencies to keep their own logs tracking Flock usage. Yet the fact that it also cuts off the underlying public access to the data in those logs has some public records advocates wary.

“Some of the board members have said, as long as the government is receiving information, that should be considered public record,” said Collette Weeks, executive director of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, an organization that advocates for public transparency.

Weeks said that the bill “raises 100 questions for me, with each question leading to 100 more.”

And Leighty, the Spokane activist, argued that the bill was “locking citizens out, but not actually protecting citizens.”

It isn’t clear whether a license plate number included as part of a Flock audit log would still be considered a public record.

“It’s really just a question of balancing transparency with privacy,” said Tee Sannon, technology policy program director with the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

The ACLU has warned that audit log data itself is often not enough to identify abuses of the technology and can be vague and misleading. Records first obtained by Range Media show that more than a dozen Flock searches were made by Spokane County sheriff’s deputies in November with no recorded explanation logged other than the word “investigation.” (Nowels told InvestigateWest that he’s urged his deputies to be more specific with their Flock requests.)

So far, the most prominent examples of Flock technology being used for stalking have not involved records requesters — but law enforcement officers.

A police chief of a city outside of Atlanta, Georgia, was arrested in November for allegedly using the city’s license-plate readers to stalk and harass people. In Kansas, a police chief used Flock cameras to track the license plates of his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend over 200 times across five months, according to news reports, while a police lieutenant in a neighboring city used the cameras to track his estranged wife.

Nowels is well aware that, in the hands of an unethical sheriff or officer, the technology can be used for evil ends.

“I’ll be the first one to stand up and say, ‘If you can’t use this tool appropriately and ethically and lawfully, it needs to go away,’” Nowels said. “It just does.”

Either way, when Washington state legislators drive near the Capitol in Olympia this month, their license plates won’t be recorded by Flock. Last month, Olympia shut off its Flock cameras at the police department’s request, due to the concerns that had been revealed through public records.

This story was originally published by InvestigateWest and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

NORFOLK — A federal judge on Wednesday challenged the argument by an attorney for a Northern Virginia privacy rights organization suing the city of Norfolk over its Flock Safety surveillance system.

U.S. District Judge Mark S. Davis appeared skeptical over the assertion that Flock cameras are tracking residents “in the whole of their movements” — which is crucial language that’s been used by the U.S. Supreme Court in prior cases.

In their federal lawsuit, local residents Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington contend the Norfolk Police routinely violate their constitutional rights with the city’s 176 Flock cameras and the database of pictures the cameras amass. Searching the system without a warrant, they maintain, is a violation of their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches.

But Davis said the number of times Schmidt’s license plate was captured by a Flock camera, or about four times per day, doesn’t appear to be enough.

“You have a few hits by Mr. Schmidt on a particular day,” Davis told attorneys suing Norfolk. “But you don’t have anything that will track the whole of his movements … That’s one of my biggest problems with your argument.”

The Supreme Court has opined that people’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” can be violated if the whole of their movements are tracked.

In other words, while people might believe it’s reasonable to be occasionally photographed by public camera systems, they draw the line at being tracked going to the store, to work, church and visiting relatives.

Aside from the four times a day that Schmidt’s license plate was captured on the system, there were several times a day that a partial plate was captured that could have been tied to him with further data about the car.

Davis noted the Flock system is unlike cell phone location data, which courts have ruled require a search warrants for police to access. He said it’s also unlike a Baltimore program that tracked people by plane, also ruled a privacy violation.

It’s also different, he said, “from a police officer tailing you, following you for a certain amount of time.”

But Michael Soyfer, an attorney for Institute for Justice who is suing Norfolk, said that lots of information about people’s whereabouts can be gathered with the Flock data.

“You can glean insights about people’s habits and routines from the Flock data,” he said. For a system to be illegal, he said, the police “don’t need to have an 8 x 10 glossy photograph of everywhere you’ve been.”

He noted that when Arrington visited her father, police could draw inferences from the Flock cameras in the area about “when and how long she is visiting him.”

In a court filing, the Institute for Justice said that the Norfolk police have conducted more than 200,000 searches, with no oversight on the justification for the searches and cursory “audits” only beginning last May.

But Justin Raphael, a San Francisco attorney representing the city of Norfolk at Wednesday’s hearing, said that for a technology to be illegal, it must truly track people.

“They’re not able to show continuous tracking,” he said.

To be considered “tracking,” Raphael asserted, the Flock system would have to say “where the car started, where it ended and what it’s doing in between.” It’s not enough, he said, to say “where they were at this hour or that day.”

Though an expert witness for the plaintiffs was able to say that Arrington was “in the general area” of her father’s home on a particular date, Raphael said, the witness was not able to go beyond that.

There are now more than 700 Flock cameras in Hampton Roads.

The cameras — typically mounted on 12-foot poles — take pictures of all cars that pass. The system logs not only license plates, but a vehicle’s make, body type and color, and such features as bike racks, dents and bumper stickers.

Detectives can query the database to find out which vehicles passed the cameras at certain times and places. The data is stored for 21 days and is widely shared among police agencies.

Police rave about the Flock cameras in helping solve a wide range of crimes, but privacy advocates are increasingly concerned.

Aside from casting doubt on Flock’s ability to “track” people at current levels of deployment, Judge Davis on Wednesday noted that the Virginia General Assembly took up the issue last year. Lawmakers passed a state law in 2025 that implements guardrails on police usage of the systems.

The legislative process in Virginia, Davis said, “allows for the public to be heard and weigh in on how technology is being gathered and used.”

The process of drafting legislation, he said, helps to arrive at the public’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” in a particular matter.

Under the state’s resulting rules, for example, police can use Flock only for law enforcement purposes and can’t share the data with out of state or federal agencies without a court order. Police agencies must provide detailed information to the public annually on how they use the systems.

Significantly, lawmakers did not require that police officers get warrants to use the systems.

The counterargument is that just because the General Assembly allows something doesn’t make it right.

Soyfer asserted that ever since the nation’s founding, the judicial system serves as a “check” on any violations of “people’s security in their persons.”

At that time, he said, the police had “a very limited ability” to search people without a judge’s involvement.

“This was guaranteeing people to be free from permeating police pressure,” Soyfer said.

Wednesday’s hearing was regarding motions from each side for summary judgement — in other words, motions asking Davis to decide the case without a trial.

If Davis denies both motions, the trial can move forward as expected in February. But if he grants Norfolk’s motion, the trial is off.

Davis said the sides would hear from him soon on a ruling.

After the hearing, Norfolk Chief Deputy City Attorney Adam Melita expressed satisfaction with how it went.

“It went as well as we expected,” he said. “It gives us the confidence that the court is giving the case the tough analysis that it deserves.”

Soyfer sounded a hopeful note despite Davis’ skepticism.

“The judge was clearly very engaged,” he said. “He had looked at both of the parties’ arguments in detail. He asked fair and tough questions of each side. So we’re hopeful, but we don’t know which way it will ultimately roll.”

Soyfer noted that this was the first federal constitutional challenge to Flock Safety cameras to get this far in court.

“This is the first case anywhere across the country that has gotten past the initial stage, has gotten discovery, has gotten to summary judgment — almost all the way to trial —challenging the use of license plate readers to track ordinary people’s movements for weeks at a time.”

In the meantime, Soyfer said, “we’re going to prepare for trial — prepare to question witnesses and prepare to have our clients testify.”

If Davis rules against the plaintiffs, Soyfer said, the Institute for Justice will file an appeal to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals — and will take it even beyond that to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

“We plan to pursue this issue the whole way,” Soyfer said.

Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com

SANTA CRUZ – The Santa Cruz City Council voted 6-1 to terminate the city’s contract with Flock Safety, the company that provides automated license plate cameras to Santa Cruz, Capitola and Watsonville along with other jurisdictions across the country, at its meeting Tuesday afternoon.

Santa Cruz first signed its contract with Flock in 2024. Over the past several months, controversy around and opposition to the company has spread as reports about the use of the cameras’ data has emerged. Demands to cease the use of Flock cameras grew when Santa Cruz police Chief Bernie Escalante confirmed that the city’s Flock data had been accessed by out-of-state agencies. Now, the City Council has voted to end the contract with Flock and directed city staff to seek out alternative options for automated license plate readers.

Councilmembers Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, Gabriela Trigueiro, Scott Newsome, Susie O’Hara and Renee Golder, along with Mayor Fred Keeley, voted in favor of terminating the Flock contract. Councilmember Sonja Brunner was the sole vote against the motion.

O’Hara, who prepared the motion with Kalantari-Johnson and Golder, presented the case for ending the Flock contract. O’Hara outlined the issues Santa Cruz has had with Flock, including reports that the chief executive officer of Flock had referred to anti-Flock groups as “terroristic.” She also discussed the community’s fears that the Trump administration would use data from Santa Cruz for immigration enforcement purposes and said that the Flock platform had repeatedly created opportunities for Santa Cruz’s data to be used in ways the city never intended.

“The question isn’t whether we trust our own intent or even our own officers’ intent,” O’Hara said. “It’s whether we can guarantee our data won’t be used in ways that conflict with Santa Cruz values and create fear in our community. Right now, we do not believe we can, and that is why termination is necessary.”

Brunner presented a substitute motion during deliberation that would maintain and renew the city’s contract with Flock, but would put more safety measures in place. Many of these were already being considered by the city and police department, including limiting data sharing to nearby jurisdictions and having those jurisdictions sign attestations that they would use data only in alignment with Santa Cruz’s values. The motion also included regular reviews of the system and ways to continue reviewing the use of the technology.

Brunner said she felt a responsibility to maintain public safety, and that her motion was about creating a framework to use license plate cameras while addressing the community’s concerns.

Brunner’s motion did not receive a second from any other member of the council, and died on the floor. O’Hara and Kalantari-Johnson did, however, thank Brunner for speaking her mind and agreed that regulations similar to those in the substitute motion would be necessary if the city were ever to consider an alternative to Flock.

Several members of the council, including Golder and O’Hara, expressed that the decision to terminate was a difficult one. Both councilmembers acknowledged that the cameras had helped the Santa Cruz Police Department solve crimes, including recovering stolen vehicles and identifying suspects in some burglaries and violent crimes. They clarified that the motion to end the Flock contract was not a statement against the police department and expressed their gratitude to the Santa Cruz Police Department. Still, they said, the privacy concerns and lack of community trust in Flock outweighed the benefits to the police department.

Over 20 people, both in person and over Zoom, spoke out against the use of Flock cameras during the meeting. Among them were Peter Gelblum, chair of the Santa Cruz County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Jill Clifton from the Get the Flock Out group. Most of the people who spoke against Flock also opposed the use of any automated license plate reader technology in the future. Some expressed concerns that the technology was easy to hack, which could lead to stalking or escalation of domestic violence. A few other concerns included that the cameras capture people’s faces, and that Flock Safety has not proven itself to be a trustworthy company. One of the most prominent fears was that the cameras could be used to track down immigrants, despite Santa Cruz being a sanctuary city.

“Continuing to use the Flock cameras is irreconcilably inconsistent with Santa Cruz being a sanctuary city,” Gelblum said. “If we really mean that, you can’t have these cameras here.” Sgt. Josh Trog, president of the Santa Cruz Police Officers’ Association, also spoke at the meeting. He discussed the ways in which the Flock system had helped the Santa Cruz Police Department solve crimes more efficiently, and asked the council not to terminate the contract. He added that the department faces staffing challenges, and that losing effective tools can cause issues with morale and retention.

“We’re not asking for unchecked authority,” Trog said. “We’re asking to continue using a proven investigative tool within clear boundaries with accountability, transparency and oversight.”

Escalante answered some of the council’s questions during the meeting. In his answers, he said that the Flock cameras only capture a photo of the back of each car that passes by them. This statement is contrary to many claims that the cameras constantly livestream an audio and video feed, capturing pedestrians’ and drivers’ faces. Last month, journalists from 404 Media used Flock cameras to track themselves in real time on livestream video on the internet.

Escalante also said that Flock had never shared data from Santa Cruz without the city’s knowledge. Santa Cruz owns its own data collected by Flock cameras, Escalante said, and is in control of which other agencies to share it with. When data was searched by out-of-state agencies, it was because Santa Cruz — along with several other California communities, including Capitola — was “unwittingly” opted into a nationwide sharing portal, according to Escalante. This data sharing was against state law, and Flock disabled the setting in California on Feb. 11, 2025.

In November, Santa Cruz opted out of the system’s statewide sharing portal, as well. This meant that any outside agencies would have to get express permission to access Santa Cruz data. The police department began work on an attestation form that agencies would be required to sign if they were to have access to the Santa Cruz database, stating that they would operate in alignment with the city’s values.

Finally, Escalante discussed other measures that have recently been put in place to safeguard the Flock system. Flock prohibited searches in California that include terms such as “immigration,” “ICE” or “border patrol,” according to Escalante and Santa Cruz City Manager Matt Huffaker. Plus, agencies must now select a reason for the search from a drop-down menu of set options when they search Flock. Before, agencies could type anything into the box to justify their search, though Santa Cruz has always required a case number to be associated with each search, Escalante said.

Keeley addressed Escalante and the rest of the police department right before the vote. “Frankly, this is not about you. This is about a company we can’t trust,” he said. “We trust you, we don’t trust them.” Keeley said that he had been against the Flock system since the beginning, citing the fact that he voted against the contract back in 2024. He directed that city staff could go ahead and search for a replacement for Flock’s automated license plate readers, but expressed doubt that any system would meet Santa Cruz’s standards.

“I will probably vote against that, if that ever arrives here during my remaining time as mayor on the City Council,” Keeley said.

The Santa Cruz Police Department has already discontinued its use of Flock cameras, said Erika Smart, communications manager for the city of Santa Cruz. The police department is coordinating with Flock to remove the city’s eight cameras, and expects them to be taken down within a few weeks.

“This decision does not change the Police Department’s core mission, but it does remove a tool that had proven investigative value and could result in certain investigations requiring more time and resources, or going unsolved,” Smart wrote to the Sentinel in an email.

Huffaker added that though the Flock system was useful, the city prioritizes transparency and community trust.

“Public safety includes both effective investigations and protecting civil liberties,” Huffaker wrote in an email to the Sentinel. “While ALPRs (automated license plate readers) can be a useful tool, community trust and safety remain our top priority. That is why the City is ending the current contract and committing to only consider future use if a solution can be demonstrated to be truly safe, secure, and aligned with Santa Cruz values.”

The vote was met with applause and cheers from the crowd, with many audience members shouting “Thank you!” as they filed out of the City Council chambers.

Built With AI to make a safe space out of its reach!

Demo Video

Source

This privacy tool can be installed on most Linux distros, including my favorite....hosting from termux (android)!

The project was driven by a my desire to create a private space for spreadsheet collaboration with no fluff, tracking ect.

Fully open and free tech stack

• SQLite Database
• Gunicorn WSGI Server backend
• Python for API and Application Routes
• Pure JS, HTML, CSS Frontend
• TOR for worldwide encrypted connection to the service.

Formulas

Supported functions include:

• Math: SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, COUNT, ABS, - ROUND, SQRT, POWER, MOD
• Logic: IF, TRUE, FALSE
• Lookup: VLOOKUP
• Text: CONCAT, LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, UPPER, LOWER, TRIM
• Date: TODAY, NOW

Hope you enjoy. While I plan to continue polishing the UI/Expirence, it is not complete but is in a usable state. I will continue to iterate on the application as I continue with real world testing and data processing.

Open to critique and suggestions for improvement!

NORFOLK, Va. — A federal judge will hear arguments Wednesday in a case challenging Norfolk's Flock camera surveillance program, with two residents claiming the system violates their Fourth Amendment rights.

The lawsuit, filed by neighbors from Norfolk and Portsmouth, argues that the city's 172 Flock cameras constitute warrantless surveillance that infringes on constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.

Flock cameras are designed to photograph vehicles and identify license plates. Local law enforcement says the technology has helped solve crimes by providing investigators with vehicle identification data.

The plaintiffs' main concern centers on police department access to the camera database without obtaining warrants first.

"We look forward to persuading the court tomorrow that the city's warrantless surveillance of every driver in Norfolk violates the Fourth Amendment. Our clients and all Hampton Roads residents deserve to be free from this unconstitutional dragnet. If the court does not decide the case after tomorrow's hearing, then we look forward to proving the city's constitutional violations at trial next month," Michael Soyfer, Institute for Justice Attorney said.

Flock Safety, the company behind the camera system, has previously defended the technology's legality.

"License plates are issued by the government for the express purpose of identifying vehicles in public places for safety reasons. Courts have consistently found that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a license plate on a vehicle on a public road, and photographing one is not a Fourth Amendment search," the company said.

The company argues that courts have established no reasonable expectation of privacy exists for license plates displayed on public roads, since governments issue them specifically to identify vehicles for safety purposes.

If the judge does not rule after Wednesday's hearing, the case is scheduled to go to trial during the first week of February.

This is a alpha release of spreadsheet-termux: a self hosted collaborative spreadsheet right from your pocket.

This still in development and I plan to continue working through all the bugs and polishing the experience. It is in a functional proof of concept state.

Desktop Example

Termux CLI

Install

Clone

git clone https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/spreadsheet.git

Change directory

cd spreadsheet

Make install script executable

chmod +x spreadsheet.sh

Run

./spreadsheet.sh install

Optimized for desktop use over Tor but it is usable on mobile.

Like I said, alpha stage be nice! Open to critique and suggestions.

Full story

After residents of a Virginia town complained about AI-powered license plate reading cameras in their community, the head of the company that provided them to the local police department pushed back. His message was defiant.

“Let’s call this what it is: Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack,” Garrett Langley, chief executive of Flock Safety, wrote in an unsolicited email to Staunton Police Chief Jim Williams. “The attacks aren’t new. You’ve been dealing with this forever, and we’ve been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.”

Langley’s defiance backfired.

Last month, Staunton joined the growing list of cities that are canceling contracts with Flock, amid a growing public backlash over the surveillance technology’s expansion.

City council meetings from Washington state to Massachusetts have been filled with concerned residents, many of whom accuse their local officials of entering into contracts that allow unwarranted spying without their input or knowledge.

Williams, the longtime chief in Staunton, a town of about 25,000 in the Shenandoah Valley where Flock installed six license plate reading cameras in 2024, rejected Langley’s assertion that law enforcement is under attack.

“What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes,” Williams wrote to Langley. “These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders.

“In short,” he said, “it is democracy in action.” Video spurs scrutiny

More than 80,000 Flock cameras are said to be in use throughout the U.S. Flock’s customers include an estimated 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 1,000 corporations.

Scrutiny of the company has intensified since a YouTube video revealed how live feeds from more than 60 cameras were exposed to the open internet.

The video has been viewed more than 953,000 times. Its producer, technologist Benn Jordan, told Straight Arrow News that he sent an email thanking Williams for what he saw as a rational response to Flock’s CEO.

Jordan also expressed concern over Langley’s email, which he believes may have been sent out en masse.

“I realized that Garrett Langley’s original email was unsolicited and impersonal, coming from a ‘no_reply’ address, which suggests that this kind of message is going out to large amounts of law enforcement agencies around the country,” Jordan said. “Intentionally misleading law enforcement and trying to get them to ‘join the fight’ against people critical of your company is incredibly reckless and dangerous.”

“I’ve already had police show up to my house after taking video footage of Flock Safety cameras,” Jordan continued. “How will they approach my house if they have reason to believe that I’m part of a ‘lawless coordinated attack’ on them?”

SAN reached out to Flock with specific questions about Langley’s email and the contract cancellation in Staunton. The company replied only with a link to a page on its website outlining its privacy and ethics guidelines. A clash of values

In Staunton, Williams said the Flock cameras had helped officers locate missing and wanted persons, recover stolen vehicles and identify suspects in crimes.

However, the damage from Langley’s email could not be undone. After Williams met with the city manager and city council to discuss Langley’s remarks, they decided to end the contract with Flock.

In a statement, the city said that Langley’s “narrative does not reflect” Staunton’s values.

“The Staunton Police Department reported numerous successes utilizing this technology,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, the city does not agree with the assessment as detailed by the CEO of Flock Safety.”

The city says it is currently coordinating with Flock to finalize the contract’s termination and to turn off and remove all license plate reading cameras.

‘A new era’

The situation in Staunton is similar to a growing number of others, including in Flagstaff, Arizona, which terminated its contract with Flock in December after a month of pushback from local residents. Despite efforts by police to ease concerns by outlining policy guardrails, the Flagstaff City Council ultimately voted unanimously to end the partnership.

Jan Carlile, a local resident who supported terminating the contract, said during public comment that the potential privacy ramifications were too much to bear.

“I admire and respect the efforts of our police department to try to do the very best they can to protect our safety, and until the advancement of AI and frankly the troubling efforts by our current national administration, both of those can potentially very seriously undercut our privacy as citizens,” Carlile said. “I would not likely have been concerned about the use of cameras as a tool for public safety [in the past], but we are in a new era.”

Cambridge, Massachusetts, initially paused the use of 16 cameras in October. But city officials canceled their contract entirely after it was revealed that Flock had installed two additional cameras without the city’s knowledge.

“Concerns about Flock were substantiated,” said city spokesperson Jeremy Warnick. “Due to this material breach of our trust and the agreement, the city terminated its contract with Flock Safety.”

In Evanston, Illinois, a similar series of events unfolded. After the city terminated its contract in late August and deactivated 19 cameras, Flock began reinstalling cameras across the city, seemingly unbeknownst to local officials and residents. The city responded in September by issuing a cease-and-desist order against Flock, which said that it would uninstall the cameras.

The controversy came around the same time that an audit by the Illinois Secretary of State found that Flock had violated state law by allowing U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to data collected by its license plate-reading cameras. Flock refuted the charge.

Washington state has also been a hotbed for backlash against Flock. The cities of Redmond and Lynwood deactivated their cameras in November while reevaluating their contracts after complaints from residents. The City Council in Mountlake Terrace unanimously canceled its contract in November, while the capital city of Olympia uninstalled 15 cameras and canceled its pilot program with Flock in December.

APPLETON (WLUK) -- Menasha police officer Cristian Morales was charged Friday with one count of misconduct in office for allegedly using a license plate recognition system to track his ex-girlfriend.

Morales, 31, made an initial court appearance Friday afternoon, where a $10,000 cash bond was set. Conditions include not accessing Flock camera systems or working as an officer. A preliminary hearing date was not immediately set, but is expected to be held within 10 days.

According to the complaint, Morales’ ex-girlfriend complained he had used the Flock system to monitor her location. A review of Morales’ activity showed he tried to use it five different times for her vehicle in early October.

“Cristian indicated that "desperation, and bad judgment, combined with a lack of sleep", contributed to his decision to use Flock. He also indicated he knew his decision to use Flock was wrong, but it was out of a pure moment of "desperation and lack of judgment,” the complaint states.

The Menasha Police Department said Morales was placed on administrative leave.

Separately, a civil filing seeking a temporary restraining order in a domestic abuse case was filed against Morales Thursday by an unnamed petitioner. A hearing is set for Jan. 21 in that case.