Flock cameras are getting mobbed nationwide — ABC7 New York

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Flock cameras are getting mobbed nationwide — ABC7 New York | AIPROPX

SOCIETY Flock cameras are getting mobbed nationwide By T.M. Brown, CNN Friday, July 31, 2026 5:04PM Eyewitness News has the latest. Over the last few months, people have cut down surveillance cameras owned by the company Flock Safety with an electric saw in upstate New York, thrown paint on them in Oakland, California, and rammed a truck into them in Idaho. One man in Florida sits in a lawn chair holding up a piece of cardboard on a pole to block the camera's view. City governments have joined in by deactivating the cameras or canceling contracts with Flock in Fort Collins, Colorado; Eugene, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; Knoxville, Tennessee; Syracuse, New York; and Walla Walla, Washington.

Flock sells its services as a crime-fighting tool, built on a network of cameras that record and analyze everything that passes by them. Law enforcement agencies that have contracts with Flock use its troves of observed license plate numbers and other vehicle data to track or reconstruct the movements of vehicles in criminal investigations.

Flock says it has 120,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) and pan, tilt, and zoom (PTZ) cameras deployed throughout the US, capturing tens of billions of data points a month. Flock's ALPRs automatically scan every license plate that passes them, while the PTZs record live footage that can be reviewed and analyzed. Because Flock cameras are all connected, the result is a nationwide latticework of recorded activity. Across the majority of states, a police officer in one state can be alerted if a car they're looking for pops up in another and can inform the local authorities.

In recent weeks and months, though, another kind of network has taken shape: a coast-to-coast pattern of opposition to the company. The objectors range from public officials to individual vigilantes, spanning metropolitan and rural America alike. In a politically divided country, opposition to Flock cameras is the rare issue that binds people across the ideological spectrum. "It's a violation of people's privacy," said Caleb Williams, a 24-year-old in rural South Carolina who identified as a political independent.

"Rational people know it comes down to violating personal liberties," said Adrien Kaiser, a self-described constitutional conservative who lives northwest of Houston.

"I firmly believe the government can do things to make life better for people, but a surveillance state is the first step towards a police state," said Jon Dendy, a progressive in Massachusetts.

"Oftentimes our critics will say we need to make a choice between safety or privacy. And I think that's I think that's wrong," Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent interview with CNN's Eric Levenson. "As a country, as a society, as a species, we have proven over and over and over again that we can have safety and privacy."

Over the last few months, Flock has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Police have been caught using the system to stalk exes and colleagues, and journalists have reported that, contrary to the company's claims that it only logs vehicles, the cameras can be used to track people.

These revelations have been met by a growing guerilla mindset among average citizens. Dozens of Flock cameras have been forcibly disabled in recent weeks, with many people cheering on the vigilantes. In June, a West Virginia man accused of destroying several Flock cameras was arrested. Under a Facebook post from the local NBC affiliate announcing his arrest are dozens of people volunteering to provide alibis. "He was out fishing with me that day, you got the wrong guy," one man wrote.

"The one thing that's bringing all of us together, which is exactly what they don't want," one woman wrote on Facebook. "The two biggest signs that we can indeed get along are 1) the world cup & 2) our collective middle finger to flock cameras," added someone else.

In Houston, near where Kaiser lives, there are nearly 4,000 Flock cameras, making it one of the company's most comprehensive deployments. He said that he supports law enforcement but that it shouldn't come at the expense of people's rights and privacy. "Individual rights have always been big on the left and conservatives see things in terms of constitutional rights. So that's where there's coming together," Kaiser said. "We see the same problem from two different angles."

Like Kaiser, Dendy thinks that Americans on either side of politics are coming to the same conclusion from different routes. "Conservatives are concerned with big government," he said. "And for progressives it's the idea of abuse by the government."

Williams added that he has seen several stories of Flock's data being misused by police officers who have commandeered the cameras to track ex-partners. "Even if Flock helps solve a crime, it seems like they're not worth keeping, given the uproar that citizens have shown against it around the country," he said.

Though Flock has denied that the cameras are also used to track people on foot, and says it does not use facial recognition technology, there is also evidence that the data can be used to search for individuals. 404 Media reported that a Flock capability called "FreeForm" allows users to search camera records based on what someone was wearing, their tattoos or even their race. The site also reported that, despite Flock's not sharing data with agencies like ICE, police officers have been performing searches to aid in immigration sweeps. Flock said in a statement to 404 Media that FreeForm includes "guardrails" that alert system administrators when someone uses search terms that include "race, ethnicity, religion, nationality."

Populist commentators who have recognized the growing animosity toward Flock are joining in the discourse as well. "Every single American is being surveilled at every single moment of the day," the leftist YouTuber Hasan Piker said on a livestream last year. Earlier this month, the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson...