FLOCK, AXON & THE ONE QUESTION
NO ONE'S ASKING AT THE COUNCIL MEETING

I'm not here to bash Flock Safety or Axon. That's not my lane, and honestly, it's not the point. As a data security professional who's spent thirty years in this industry, my concern isn't which brand of camera goes on the pole. My concern is the same question I'd ask about any system that touches sensitive data, whether it's employee records, patient files, or footage of your kid walking home from school: who owns it, who controls it, and who can access it?

That question has turned into open warfare in city council chambers across the country over the last year, and if you're evaluating physical security for your city, HOA, school district, or business, you need to understand why.

01THE COUNCIL MEETINGS GOT LOUD

Since 2025, dozens of cities have terminated or declined to renew their Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) contracts. Tracking efforts from NPR and 404 Media put the number of localities that have deactivated cameras or ended agreements at 30 or more since the start of 2025, with some running tallies now well past 50. This isn't a fringe concern. Residents show up, they're angry, and they're asking pointed questions the vendor can't answer cleanly.

• Cambridge, MA
• Harrisonburg, VA
• South Kingstown, RI
• Columbia Heights, MN
• El Cerrito, CA
• Berkeley, CA
• Binghamton, NY
• Mountain View, CA
• Santa Cruz, CA

The specifics vary by city, but the throughline is data governance, not hardware. Mountain View found more than 250 unapproved law enforcement agencies had queried its Flock cameras roughly 600,000 times in a single year, after a "national lookup" setting was reportedly toggled on without the city's knowledge. Berkeley's city attorney flagged that Flock had piloted a program letting U.S. Border Patrol search its national database without notifying the jurisdictions whose data was in it, a real problem for sanctuary cities. El Cerrito's mayor pro tem summed up the anxiety plainly: the law can change, and once your data's in a national system, you don't control what happens to it next.

02THE "TEST" SEARCHES

Here's the part that should bother anyone who cares about personal safety, not just policy. ALPR searches get logged with an officer's own stated reason, so we actually have a paper trail of misuse, and it's not short. A Jerome County, Idaho sheriff ran his wife's plate more than 700 times over three months, logging each search as "test." A Milwaukee officer ran nearly 200 searches tracking someone he was dating and that person's ex, logging each one as "investigation." A Missouri officer ran 542 "test" searches over ten months.

This is the practical reality of a mass surveillance database: the technology doesn't misuse itself. People do, and the audit log after the fact is cold comfort to the person who got tracked.

03SAME PROBLEM, NEW LOGO

Here's where I need you to pay attention. A lot of cities celebrating their Flock cancellation as a privacy win are turning around and signing with Axon, the maker of Tasers and police body cameras, for the exact same function. Denver is the clearest case: the city let its Flock contract lapse and handed the ALPR job to Axon, its existing body camera vendor, in early 2026. The same pattern is playing out in smaller cities like Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Contract terms sometimes improve on paper: shorter data retention, no default access to a vendor-run national lookup database, audit trails on every query. That's real and worth noting. But the architecture doesn't change. Axon's own investor disclosures name Flock as a direct competitor in this exact category, and its broader "ecosystem" now includes drones, ground robots, real-time AI activity detection, and integration with body cams and cloud storage, all under one vendor's roof. Security researcher Bruce Schneier put it about as bluntly as I would: the data doesn't go away, it just gets a different dashboard.

I'm not saying Axon is worse than Flock, or that either company is acting in bad faith. I'm saying that swapping vendors without asking the ownership and access question first is how you end up back in this same council meeting in eighteen months.

04WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN LAST YEAR

Data loss prevention is a multi billion dollar industry, and most market analysts size it well into the billions today with 20%+ annual growth projected. Enterprises spend that money because they've accepted a hard truth: data that leaves your control is data you can no longer protect, no matter how good your intentions were when you collected it.

Most communities haven't caught up to that reality when it comes to the camera on the corner. Footage of you at the grocery store, your license plate tracked driving your kid to school, that data can be queried by agencies you've never heard of, for reasons that may or may not hold up. And the AI layer on top of this has moved fast. Deepfake fraud attempts are up several hundred percent year over year by multiple industry trackers, and the models now need only a few seconds of audio or a single photo to generate a convincing synthetic version of a real person.

05THE QUESTION I'D ASK BEFORE SIGNING ANYTHING

Not "Flock or Axon." Not even "which vendor has the better false positive rate." The question is: who owns this data once it's collected, who can access it and under what authority, how long is it retained, and can the vendor actually prove the answer to all three in writing?

If a vendor can't answer that clearly, that's your answer.