Surveillance company Flock generates controversy, and L.A. customers
Santa Cruz tried surveillance company Flock Safety for a little over a year before deciding it was time to move on.
Cambridge, Mass. He got fed up and tore up his contract in December. Now some officials in San Diego have begun to change their minds.
Dozens of cities in recent months have cut ties with Flock, the nation’s largest provider of automatic digital license plate readers, over fears that data captured by the company would fuel President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
The same can’t be said for one particularly surprising place: Los Angeles. Here, Flock still has a willing customer base of local elected officials, police officers, homeowners associations and businesses.
Unlike some rivals, the Atlanta-based company not only markets its license plate readers to law enforcement as a vital crime-fighting tool, but also aggressively pitches its product to private citizens, experts say.
“These are tremendous investigative tools,” said LAPD spokesman Capt. Michael Bland.
But for critics, this has an obvious downside: the potential for law-abiding citizens to be surveilled without a warrant on a scale once thought unimaginable.
“These can be really powerful tools for finding and identifying someone. But when you don’t have a suspect, anyone can be a suspect,” said Hannah Bloch-Wehba, a law professor at Texas A&M University.
A Herd spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
Typically mounted on street poles or on top of police cars, license plate readers constantly monitor passing vehicles and record their location at a specific date and time. But Flock’s AI-powered cameras go further by documenting distinguishing marks like scratches or dents on the bumper, as well as other identifying details like the vehicle’s make, model, and color.
From there, police can easily look up the location of specific vehicles in the company’s vast national database, allowing them to not only potentially retrace the location of someone suspected of a crime, but also receive predictions of future movements.
In a presentation to the Picfair Village Neighborhood Assn., Flock boasted that license plate readers helped solve “10% of reported crimes in the United States.” In Los Angeles, its technology was used to catch porch pirates and car thieves, as well as playing a role in solving “a high-profile crime involving guns stolen from a politician’s home,” the company said.
The problem, at least on the minds of a growing number of privacy and immigration advocates, is that readers are getting their hands on vast amounts of information that is not relevant to any specific criminal investigation. Critics say the ability of federal authorities to access Los Angeles Police Department surveillance data directly from companies like Flock or regional intelligence centers called fusion centers undermines the city’s promise as a haven for immigrants.
“License plate readers play a critical role in providing ICE with directions and a road map to abduct people,” said Hamid Khan, an organizer with the activist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Hamid Khan, an organizer of the activist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, wrote a letter to the Police Commission last spring demanding that the LAPD rewrite its policies to ensure that information on law-abiding drivers is not shared with federal authorities.
The commission, the LAPD’s civilian oversight panel, ordered a study of the department’s license plate reader system, which is expected to be completed this summer.
LAPD officials say records collected by license plate readers are only accessible to five smaller police agencies with whom the department has a data-sharing agreement. They also say that, like other police technologies, the use of readers is restricted by state laws that limit information sharing with federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
License plate reading technology has been around for decades. But as the Trump administration’s push for deportations mounts, residents, privacy advocates and officials in some cities across the country have launched campaigns urging local governments to stop using the technology.
Much of the backlash has been specifically aimed at heavyweight Flock, which contracts with 5,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies in the surveillance market. of the company sharing data with federal authorities And cyber security breaches documented by 404 Media and other outlets.
Flock Chief Executive Garrett Langley, who previously denied having federal contracts, admitted in interviews in recent months that the company was working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations. The company has since said it has cut ties with both agencies and is responding to other concerns by giving communities more power to decide who to grant access to its state or nationwide search networks.
According to Bloch-Wehba, Flock’s meteoric rise is a triumph of marketing over results.
“There is little evidence of the actual impact of these technologies on violent crime rates,” said Bloch-Wehba, noting that there has been an explosion in surveillance technology in 2020 to monitor protesters during the pandemic or enforce rules implemented to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
In the L.A. area, Flock has competed with rival Vigilant Solutions, which has supplied most of the LAPD’s license plate readers for years. But today cops are touting Swarm cameras at community meetings, and some City Council members are paying to bring them to their districts.
Flock also sought to increase his political power. City records show the company has stepped up its lobbying efforts at City Hall in recent years; He’s hiring Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based firm that includes former City Councilman Joe Buscaino among its employees.
However, many Flock license plate readers have been purchased by community groups. In many cases, residents band together to raise money to purchase the devices, and then give them access to or donate them to the LAPD through the Police Foundation, the department’s nonprofit charity. By donating equipment, neighborhood groups can control what type of technology is installed and by whom.
“My real preference would be a fully staffed LAPD, and then we don’t have cameras,” said Jim Fitzgerald, who lives in Venice and serves on the neighborhood council.
Roy Nwaisser, who chairs the Encino Neighborhood Council’s public safety committee, said Flock frequently cited the police officer shortage in presentations to residents.
“I personally have concerns about how Flock conducts their business, but they are the biggest players and if the LAPD is working with them, they just need to make sure those security measures are in place,” he said. “I don’t know that automatic license plate readers are that effective when they belong to neighbors who live down the street and decide to get together.”
Police executives have defended the practice, saying license plate data has helped solve countless crimes, from ordinary porch thefts to high-profile cases such as the 2024 attempt to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at a Florida golf course. The technology also came into play during the investigation into the fatal drive-by shooting of a 17-year-old boy at a North Hills intersection last month. Detectives tracked a suspicious vehicle to a home in Sun Valley after it was picked up by several scanners near where the shooting occurred, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Because many license plate scanners are in private hands, it’s hard to tell how many devices are in operation across the city.
The LA Bureau of Street Lighting, which is responsible for installing the devices on city-owned properties, said it installed 324 in five years, but that number does not include mobile license plate readers.
Bland said the LAPD has 1,500 police vehicles equipped with scanners. He said police also have access to an additional 280 license plate readers owned by private individuals or the ministry, located in fixed locations across the city. He estimated that about 120 of those readers belonged to Flock.
The cameras are also being integrated into the department’s new drones, paid for by a $1.2 million grant from the police foundation.
The devices are also used for many other purposes outside of regular law enforcement. Major retailers like Home Depot and Lowe’s have installed Flock cameras in hundreds of parking lots. Many border crossings have them. They are used as an emissions reduction tool by following semi-trailers in East Los Angeles. USC uses them to enforce parking violations, and the LA Department of Transportation uses such cameras to catch drivers parking in bus lanes.
Since the beginning of 2025, a small but growing number of states and cities have enacted laws aimed at curbing the use of surveillance technologies such as license plate readers.
Under California law, police departments are required to adopt detailed use and privacy policies governing license plate data, restrict access for permitted purposes, and regularly monitor searches to prevent misuse. Gov. Gavin Newsom previously vetoed a bill that would restrict the use of such data, saying the regulations would hinder criminal investigations, but the bill was reintroduced this year.
About 50 cities across the country have mostly opted to disable their scanners or cancel their contracts with Flock in recent months, according to the website DeFlock.me, which sets out to map the locations of the company’s cameras. Responding to public pressure, some places like Santa Cruz canceled their contracts after realizing they were sharing their data more widely than they knew, including with federal authorities.
Other Flock customers, such as Oakland, decided to use their cameras at the urging of local homeowners association representatives and small business owners, but over the objections of the city’s own Privacy Advisory Commission.
San Diego is among the places that are starting to reconsider their relationship with Flock. City leaders disagreed on the issue in December but voted to continue using Flock’s scanners after a contentious public meeting at which hundreds of residents heard they opposed the surveillance technology.
Council member Sean Elo-Rivera said he voted against working with Flock based on the company’s poor track record on “data retention” and “consumer protection.” Although the city has been operating Flock license plate readers and cameras for years, the risks are much higher now, he said.
“We have a presidential regime that not only breaks the law, but takes pride in ignoring due process, violating the rights of people they feel are undeserving of rights and protection,” said Elo-Rivera, who represents an ethnically diverse district in San Diego’s Downtown district. “They have a necessary approach when it comes to immigration enforcement by any means necessary. And now they have a tool that makes it very easy to track people down.”
Times writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
