‘Risk of misuse is too great’: US city announces it’s having Flock cameras removed
Tempe, Arizona, will stop using its Flock camera system.
The city of roughly 180,000 people will end its contract with the company, and Flock will remove its cameras from the city, a press release said.
“The risk of misuse is too great,” said Tempe Mayor Corey Woods. “We have to be able to provide public safety in a way that maintains the trust of the community.”
Video above: Massachusetts city council moves to ban Flock cameras after privacy uproar
According to the city, the automated license plate reader system helped Tempe’s police solve crimes, but reports of misuse from around the country raised concerns. In Kentucky, for instance, a police officer was arrested Tuesday after authorities said he used the Flock system to track his ex-girlfriend more than 2,000 times, including more than 200 searches that happened after she filed an order of protection against him. That officer listed the reason for the investigation as a drug or narcotics investigation, but the woman was not the subject of any such investigation.
Other misuses of the system have happened in Milwaukee, Georgia and South Carolina. Past romantic partners are common targets.
The city said it hasn’t found any misuse of its own Flock system.
A sign taped to a street light points to a Flock brand automatic license plate reader camera (ALPR) along 16th Street Northwest on August 19, 2026 in Washington, D.C.
Flock’s cameras automatically capture license plate numbers, as well as images of vehicles and information about their make, model, color, and other identifying characteristics. When a community has a wide enough network of cameras, police who access that information can use it to determine a person’s daily movements, whether that’s to work, a restaurant, or a friend’s house.
That information is uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search, according to the ACLU, though the city of Tempe said it stopped sharing its Flock data with other law enforcement agencies earlier this month.
Proponents say Flock cameras have helped advance crime investigations, such as the search for the Brown University shooter last year. But legal experts have objected to the technology on Fourth Amendment grounds, pointing out that there’s no blanket law preventing police from using the system without a warrant to access information on any car that drives by.
Individual police departments and communities are theoretically free to decide how to regulate the system’s use, and the company announced new changes on Aug. 13 meant in part to give more local control. But according to the ACLU, officers were able to easily get around previous tools meant to enforce system-set requirements for police to give a reason for searches. That raises questions about whether the new tools will succeed at allowing states or counties to set specific local rules that actually block certain searches — say, no use of Flock data for immigration investigations.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley told CNN in an interview that the company launched an AI “audit assistance tool” last month that alerts an auditor when there’s an “abnormal” use of its system. And it was that tool that flagged the Kentucky officer’s thousands of searches.
Nevertheless, some opponents of the system concerned about surveillance have taken to destroying cameras in their areas. According to the advocacy group Deflock, dozens of municipalities and cities have rejected or canceled their Flock contracts or deactivated their cameras amid the controversy.
Flock isn’t the only company that makes automated license plate readers, and in some places where leaders have stopped using Flock cameras, they’ve quickly replaced them with systems from other companies. One is Axon, a company that also produces Tasers.
