Major cities across the United States are terminating or significantly restricting their surveillance technology contracts following a cascade of privacy lawsuits and federal data access violations. The Los Angeles Police Department, one of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies, allowed its three-year contract with Flock Safety to expire on July 11, 2026, citing data privacy disagreements that had become untenable. This decision by LAPD reflects a broader national movement: 82 Flock Safety contracts have been terminated across 28 states since August 2021, with 39 of those terminations occurring in just the first five months of 2026 alone. The wave of cancellations stems from documented evidence that federal agencies—including the FBI, ICE, and CBP—accessed license plate data from these systems without proper authorization or warrants, fundamentally undermining the privacy protections cities believed they had negotiated.
The cascade accelerated dramatically after investigations revealed the scope of unauthorized federal access. San Francisco’s police chief disclosed in June 2026 that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center had made 299 improper inquiries on behalf of federal and out-of-state agencies over approximately one year. More starkly, federal agencies queried San Francisco’s Flock database 1.6 million times in just seven months—from mid-2024 to early 2025. These disclosures triggered a class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court in February 2026, alleging that Flock Safety violated California’s ALPR Privacy Act by knowingly sharing license plate data with federal agencies without residents’ knowledge or consent. Cities have responded by pulling the plug entirely, rejecting new contracts, or demanding dramatic restrictions on data access and retention.
Table of Contents
- What Prompted Cities to Abandon Flock Safety Surveillance Networks
- Federal Data Access Violations and the Pathway to Lawsuits
- Nationwide Scope of Flock Terminations and Rejection
- Constitutional and Legal Arguments Against Automatic License Plate Recognition
- The Risk of Hidden Data Sharing and Inadequate Transparency
- State Legislation as the Emerging Constraint on Surveillance Technology
- Ongoing Litigation and the Future of City Surveillance Contracts
What Prompted Cities to Abandon Flock Safety Surveillance Networks
The central issue driving contract terminations is the disconnect between what cities believed they were purchasing and how the technology was actually being used. When municipalities adopted Flock Safety cameras—marketed as tools for solving local crimes like auto theft and hit-and-runs—officials assumed the data would remain under local control. Instead, federal agencies were accessing these systems through workarounds that bypassed local oversight entirely. Dayton, Ohio discovered this reality the hard way: after conducting an audit of data access logs, the city found more than 7,000 instances in which federal agents had queried the system for immigration enforcement purposes, a use that directly violated Dayton’s written policies. The city suspended its Flock deployment as a result, joining dozens of others in recognizing that the technology had become something fundamentally different from what had been approved by local officials.
What distinguishes these terminations from typical vendor disputes is their legal foundation. Multiple lawsuits allege that Flock’s architecture and Flock’s partnerships with federal data fusion centers create unconstitutional mass surveillance systems. In Boulder, Colorado, two residents sued the city in May 2026 over 31 Flock Safety cameras, citing privacy violations and unconstitutional surveillance practices. San José residents filed a similar lawsuit, claiming the cameras enable mass surveillance incompatible with constitutional protections. These legal challenges forced cities to confront not just Flock’s data-sharing practices, but the underlying legality of automatic license plate recognition itself when deployed at scale without explicit consent or judicial oversight.
Federal Data Access Violations and the Pathway to Lawsuits
The mechanics of unauthorized federal access involved a systematic routing mechanism that cities claim they did not fully authorize. Flock Safety’s cameras feed into regional fusion centers—law enforcement intelligence hubs that combine data from multiple sources. In practice, these fusion centers honored federal requests for license plate searches without requiring warrants or notifying local police departments that the queries had occurred. When San Francisco’s police chief began investigating why federal agencies were accessing the city’s data, the investigation uncovered that agents from the FBI, ICE, Customs and Border Protection, ATF, DEA, and even the U.S. Postal Inspection Service had made 299 improper inquiries over a single year.
The system had essentially become a searchable national database of movements through San Francisco’s streets, accessible to any federal agent with basic credentials. This pattern was not unique to San Francisco. The sheer volume of federal queries suggests a systematic exploitation of Flock’s infrastructure rather than isolated misuse. Across all of San Francisco’s Flock data, federal agencies made 1.6 million queries in a seven-month window—an average of more than 7,600 queries per day from federal law enforcement. That rate of access indicates federal agencies were running searches on a routine basis, likely including searches for immigration enforcement, which several cities explicitly forbade in their service agreements with Flock Safety. The class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court in February 2026 centers on this violation: Flock allegedly knew that federal agencies were accessing the data without authorization and failed to disclose this arrangement to the cities purchasing the cameras or to residents being surveilled.
Nationwide Scope of Flock Terminations and Rejection
The scale of contract terminations demonstrates that the privacy violations are not isolated incidents but rather symptomatic of a fundamental problem with how Flock’s system operates. Fifty-three cities across 20 states have terminated or rejected Flock Safety contracts in response to privacy and federal data access concerns. This represents a rejection not just of Flock as a vendor, but of a specific surveillance architecture that proved impossible to control at the local level. In Huntington, West Virginia, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the city in July 2026 over a $2.1 million Flock Safety contract, alleging procedural violations in how the contract was approved and arguing that the city failed to conduct adequate privacy impact assessments before committing to the system. The lawsuit centers on the question of whether local governments have an obligation to protect residents’ movement data even when federal agencies claim authority to access it.
The terminations have been particularly pronounced in the first half of 2026. Between August 2021 and May 2026, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states. However, 39 of those 82 terminations—nearly half—occurred within just the first five months of 2026. This acceleration coincides with the filing of multiple lawsuits and the public disclosure of federal data access violations. Cities that had adopted Flock in good faith, believing they were implementing a crime-fighting tool, found themselves defendants in privacy lawsuits and subjects of federal investigations into their surveillance practices. The reputational and legal costs of defending these contracts became higher than the cost of terminating them.
Constitutional and Legal Arguments Against Automatic License Plate Recognition
The lawsuits challenging Flock Safety cameras are grounded in constitutional privacy arguments that extend beyond Flock itself. Residents in Boulder and San José are arguing that the cameras, when deployed densely enough to track patterns of movement through a city, constitute a fourth amendment violation—a warrantless search of movements that the Supreme Court has increasingly recognized as protected privacy interests. The courts have not yet ruled on these specific claims, but the legal framework is strengthening. Colorado passed SB 26-070, which now requires warrants before sharing ALPR data with federal agencies. Washington State enacted the Driver Privacy Act (SB 6002), which imposes similar federal data-sharing restrictions.
Kentucky became the first state to cap data retention, limiting storage to 90 days under HB 58. These legislative responses suggest that courts and lawmakers increasingly view automatic license plate recognition as requiring robust privacy protections precisely because the technology enables such comprehensive tracking. Unlike a single search or a traffic stop, ALPR systems create a permanent record of a person’s movements through space over time. When that data is accessible to federal agencies for immigration enforcement, welfare investigations, or other purposes unrelated to local crime, the constitutional implications become severe. Maine also passed a comprehensive ALPR privacy law in response to these concerns. The Huntington lawsuit is significant because it challenges not just Flock’s practices but the procedural adequacy of local government approval processes—arguing that cities must do more than simply bid out surveillance contracts without genuine public input and impact analysis.
The Risk of Hidden Data Sharing and Inadequate Transparency
A critical vulnerability exposed by these cases is that cities often have limited visibility into how their data is actually being used. Even when contract language prohibits federal access, the regional fusion centers that host the data operate in a grey zone where federal agencies can claim authority independent of local restrictions. No city contract can truly prevent an FBI agent from accessing a database if the FBI claims it has independent legal authority to search it—and most federal law enforcement agencies operate under broad interpretations of their search authority. This structural problem means that even new contracts with more stringent privacy language may not prevent future violations. The gap between local policy and actual practice creates liability exposure for cities.
When residents learn that their movements have been tracked without their knowledge, and that data has been accessed by federal immigration agents despite local prohibitions, they sue the city. The municipality becomes the liable defendant even though Flock Safety and federal agencies are the actual parties violating the privacy agreement. Cities must either accept this liability risk or abandon the technology altogether. The Dayton discovery of 7,000+ immigration enforcement queries demonstrates that this is not a theoretical risk—it happened, and it happened repeatedly, without the city’s knowledge. That is precisely the kind of hidden practice that plaintiffs’ attorneys cite to argue for constitutional violations.
State Legislation as the Emerging Constraint on Surveillance Technology
State legislators have begun to act decisively to constrain ALPR systems and federal data sharing. Colorado’s SB 26-070 and Washington’s SB 6002 create enforceable requirements that cities can build into their procurement decisions. Kentucky’s 90-day retention cap is particularly significant because it prevents the long-term accumulation of movement profiles that would enable predictive policing or retroactive surveillance. Maine’s comprehensive ALPR privacy law addresses multiple aspects of the technology at once, from access controls to deletion procedures to public transparency.
These laws are reshaping the economics of surveillance technology procurement by making compliance expensive and liability severe. Cities that have terminated Flock contracts in Colorado and Washington are doing so partly because new state law requirements would force expensive system modifications or compliance audits. In other states without such legislation, cities continue to face the choice between accepting the privacy risks or abandoning the technology unilaterally. The patchwork of state-level protections means that federal agencies face increasing restrictions on accessing ALPR data in some jurisdictions while facing no restrictions in others. This creates an incentive for federal agencies to concentrate their surveillance apparatus in permissive states—exactly the kind of federalism problem that some legal scholars argue requires federal legislation to resolve.
Ongoing Litigation and the Future of City Surveillance Contracts
The multiple lawsuits filed in 2026 remain unresolved, meaning the legal definition of cities’ liability for surveillance technology data breaches is still being established. The San Francisco class action, the Boulder resident lawsuit, the San José mass surveillance claim, and the Huntington procedural violation lawsuit all involve different legal theories. Some focus on federal data access; others focus on the cameras themselves; still others focus on how cities approved the contracts. If plaintiffs prevail in any of these cases, the precedent will constrain how municipalities can procure and deploy surveillance technology going forward. Cities will likely face requirements to conduct privacy impact assessments, obtain public input, and implement concrete data access restrictions with monitoring mechanisms to verify compliance.
The pattern of contract terminations suggests that even cities not yet sued are treating Flock Safety as a cautionary tale. The decision by LAPD to let its contract expire on July 11, 2026, rather than renew it, sent a signal to other large cities that the reputational and legal risks outweigh the crime-fighting benefits. When the LAPD—an agency that has historically been aggressive about surveillance technology adoption—abandons a system due to privacy concerns, other departments recognize that defending the technology is becoming indefensible. Going forward, cities will likely demand much more rigorous contractual restrictions on data access, independent audits of data usage, and explicit prohibitions on federal agency access. Whether vendors like Flock Safety can or will agree to such restrictions remains unclear.
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