Texas turned a $1 insurance fee into 3,200 Flock surveillance cameras

A 2023 Texas law raised auto insurance premiums by $1 per policy to fight catalytic converter theft, but a Texas Tribune investigation found that at least $30 million of the resulting fund has instead been steered into the state’s Flock license plate reader network. The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority — a board largely appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott — has used the money to underwrite roughly 3,200 cameras through 95-plus grants to local police, with another $15.9 million and a fresh $3 million round expanding the Department of Public Safety’s coverage across highways and tollways. By the count of watchdog group DeFlock, which maps about 13,000 cameras statewide, the insurance fee has paid for one in four cameras in Texas.

The funding path drew objections partly because it was never debated: the bill’s author and sponsor say surveillance was never mentioned when the fee passed unanimously, and one senator said she was surprised to learn the money bought AI-driven plate readers rather than officers on the street. Flock cameras build a searchable “vehicle fingerprint” — plate, make, model, color, and distinguishing marks — that participating agencies nationwide can query without a warrant, raising Fourth Amendment concerns among lawmakers and a growing grassroots opposition. Documented abuse has sharpened the backlash: officers in multiple Texas jurisdictions have been arrested, disciplined, or investigated, including a Lufkin officer indicted on 100 counts of misusing official information.

After repeated questions from the Tribune, Abbott’s office announced it was pausing state grant funding for Flock cameras and said agencies would clarify that the insurance-fee money can’t be used to buy them. The scope of the spending is likely understated, since 124 grants lack clear public records of what was purchased, and the state agency does not itemize how much grant money went specifically to cameras. Flock, which does not disclose its deployment numbers, defends the network by pointing to more than 10,000 missing-persons cases it says the shared data helped resolve last year.