A Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) camera at the parking lot of a Lowe's store near Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.Paul Weaver/Getty
Flock Safety is having a hard month. The surveillance technology company, which has sold more than 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras to some 6,000 police departments across the US, is up to its neck in cancelled contracts—at least 34 since the start of 2026—and public backlash.
Dozens of police officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for allegedly abusing the technology, which allows police to track vehicles’ movements, to stalk people. Flock’s safety reforms in response to the stalking issue, which mostly consist of voluntary security practices police departments can adopt if they choose, left advocates unimpressed.
“Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7.”
In total, at least 56 municipalities have canceled contracts, deactivated their cameras, or rejected potential Flock contracts since the beginning of this year, according to the advocacy group DeFlock. Many of those towns are simply contracting with competitors like Axon or Motorola instead—so they’re still working with surveillance-tech companies, but encroaching on Flock’s market share as they do so.
Meanwhile, Americans continue to invent creative ways to break a Flock camera: one House candidate in Tennessee allegedly took an extremely direct approach and shot some Flock cameras with a gun, while comparatively pacifist Flock-haters online post satirical videos teaching viewers how to saw through a Flock camera’s pole or spray-paint over its lens.
In response, Flock is trying a new public-relations tactic: Some of its leadership team is publicly arguing that stories keep coming out about Flock abuse not because Flock is especially liable to be abused, but because Flock is better at catching abusers.
Rahul Sidhu, the company’s chief strategy officer, called Flock “the only company in the industry with this level of auditing at scale” in a series of posts in which he also wrote that taking away a police officer’s Flock database access would be tantamount to taking away their gun.
“Guns can break the law if you choose to use them that way, and if used incorrectly, would kill an innocent person,” Sidhu posted. “Do we take all that away from them?”
“One of the many problems with Flock as a company is that they they treat legitimate privacy concerns as if they are just PR issues,” said ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow, “and so once again they are seeing this uprising against Flock throughout the country as a public relations problem.”
Flock, Marlow said, created the problem. In dozens of cases dating back to at least 2021, police officers have reportedly used Flock cameras to stalk their partners, their exes, and even women traveling across state lines to get abortions. And now, “[Flock] thinks if it just includes itself as a watchdog of the problem it’s creating, it somehow deserves a pat on the back.”
Flock Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. The firm is apparently no longer sending out the auto-reply with which it responded to journalists earlier this month: “Thanks for reaching out to Flock. Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”
“I think more accurately they’re probably smoking grass if they think they can do an entire PR campaign and then disappear so they don’t have to defend it,” Marlow said.
