Cities are cancelling their Flock contracts. Here is the count.

Something changed in 2026. After several years of near-frictionless expansion, the company that sells automated licence plate readers to American police departments started losing towns faster than it was adding them.

The number

At least 54 cities across 23 states have voted to cancel, decline to renew, or reject a Flock contract since the start of 2026, according to a count compiled by the Washington Examiner and reported by Futurism in August.

California and Wisconsin lead with seven each. New York, Washington and Massachusetts have four apiece. Virginia has three.

That is not a uniform political story, which is the interesting part. The list runs through states that agree on very little else.

Why they are leaving

The reasons cluster into three, and they are not the ones a vendor would predict.

1. The audits found things

In August 2026, Chandler, Arizona announced it was discontinuing Flock and would not pursue renewal. The city's own language is worth reading carefully:

For the first time in three years, our routine audit process identified an anomaly in the use of the Flock system that could not be explained through standard police action.

Chandler was careful to say no privacy breach was found, and framed the outcome as the system working — "This is exactly what our audit safeguards are designed to do, catch irregular activity so it can be reviewed and addressed." The city left the door open to ALPR technology again after stronger policies, additional audits and reporting requirements. Forty fixed cameras remain Flock's property and are being removed by the vendor.

Read plainly: a city that audited its own use found something it could not explain, and the response was to stop rather than to investigate and continue.

2. The accuracy is not what was sold

Futurism reports that the Los Angeles Police Department acted on a searing internal audit that found a 32.3% false-positive rate for stolen-vehicle alerts over a two-month period.

Sit with that figure. Roughly one in three alerts telling an officer a passing car was stolen — the alerts that produce a felony stop, with guns drawn, on the basis of a camera reading — was wrong.

3. Nobody could tell residents where the data went

The ACLU has run a national campaign, Get the Flock Out, pushing councils to cancel ALPR contracts and describing the systems as around-the-clock mass surveillance that collects location and identifying data on drivers who are not suspected of anything. Local chapters have taken it city by city — San Diego among them.

The argument that lands in council chambers is rarely abstract. It is that plate data has travelled to federal agencies and out-of-state departments, sometimes after a city was assured it would not.

The context those votes happened in

None of this happened in a vacuum. Through 2025 and 2026 a run of reporting established what the network was being used for:

• a Texas deputy searching more than 83,000 cameras nationwide for a woman authorities said had self-managed an abortion
• audit logs showing searches entered with "immigration" and "ICE" as the stated reasons
• federal agencies holding access
• and, in June 2026, InvestigateTV filming a Flock Condor camera pan, tilt and follow a reporter along a public trail — after the company said it does not track people

We keep the dated, sourced version of that record on the guardrails audit.

What a cancellation does and does not mean

Three honest caveats, because the number is easy to over-read.

54 cities is small against the deployment. Flock has thousands of law enforcement customers. A cancellation wave in the dozens is a real trend and not a collapse.

Cancelled does not mean gone. A city that removes its own cameras still sits inside a county whose sheriff may operate them, and cameras on a neighbouring jurisdiction's roads photograph cars that drive through. Coverage is not bounded by the city that voted.

And a contract can come back. Chandler explicitly left the door open. Several of these are pauses pending better policy, not permanent exits.

Find out about your own town

We maintain a free lookup showing which law enforcement agencies are documented operating Flock ALPR cameras in a given US town or county, drawn from the Atlas of Surveillance.

Two limits worth stating up front: it covers plate readers rather than the people-pointed Condor cameras, and an empty result means nobody has documented an agency there yet — a fact about the research, not about your town.

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