LAPD drops Flock Safety, citing civil liberties and privacy concerns

The Los Angeles Police Department is letting its three-year contract with Flock Safety lapse rather than renew it, with the department’s CIO Dean Gialamas citing serious concerns over civil liberties, privacy, and how data from Flock’s license-plate cameras is collected, stored, and shared. As the third-largest U.S. police force, the LAPD is one of Flock’s biggest government customers, so the non-renewal is a notable defection. The department says it wants new contract language addressing data storage and privacy before it would consider working with Flock again; the company said the expiry caught it by surprise and blamed unspecified ‘misconceptions.’

The move fits a broader pattern of cities including Mountain View, California and South Portland, Maine cutting ties with Flock, often over fears that federal immigration agents were using the roughly 80,000-camera network to track people in violation of local sanctuary policies. Flock has faced grassroots backlash too, with residents dismantling or bagging cameras and reports of the company reinstalling units without local permission.

The surveillance system’s reliability and security are also under fire. Researchers have documented motorists being pulled over at gunpoint or jailed over false plate-reader hits, including a journalist boxed in by police after a loaner car was wrongly flagged as stolen. Separately, security lapses have exposed live camera feeds—404 Media watched itself on a publicly accessible Flock camera—and lawmakers have flagged that many police logins lack multi-factor authentication, after reports that a DEA agent used a local officer’s password without consent to search for an immigration suspect.