Where surveillance is proposed, misused, and pushed back

The Windsor Town Council voted 5-4 on July 6, 2026 to permanently turn off the town's 16 Flock Safety cameras and end its contract, closing a months-long fight that began with a February 18 vote to switch them off while officials pressed Flock over who could access the data. The mayor said the company could not guarantee residents' privacy. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. The council voted 5-4 to turn off all 16 cameras PERMANENTLY and end the contract, with the mayor's stated reason being that Flock could not guarantee residents' privacy -- a vendor-trust rationale that does not by itself rule out a different supplier.

Killingworth is not renewing its contract for the four Flock cameras on Route 81. First Selectman Eric Couture said concerns about security and privacy surfaced after both the board of selectmen and board of finance had already approved and the town had signed -- the recurring problem of the vendor's risks becoming clear only after the deal is done. Killingworth and Windsor ended their Flock contracts the same week, as a Connecticut state law restricting ALPR use, including a ban on immigration-investigation use, takes effect in October.

Governor Ned Lamont signed HB 5449 on May 5, 2026, Connecticut's first comprehensive automated license-plate-reader law. It caps data retention, bars sharing plate data with out-of-state agencies for immigration, reproductive, or gender-affirming-care investigations, limits reciprocal sharing to Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island, requires usage reporting, and gives the Attorney General enforcement authority. It followed a CT Insider investigation showing Connecticut Flock data queried thousands of times by outside agencies for immigration purposes.

Hamden joined the wave of municipalities barring town government, including police, from using facial-recognition technology, citing accuracy, bias and privacy concerns.

Statewide group DeFlock CT is organizing against ALPR surveillance across Connecticut.

OLD TOWN IS CONSIDERING A BAN ON FIXED PLATE READERS BEFORE IT HAS ANY. Councilor Zachary Wyles proposed an ordinance prohibiting fixed automatic license plate reader cameras, with any future repeal requiring a public hearing. Old Town police do not run fixed readers, though some cruisers carry mobile ones. No vote was taken at the September meeting; Police Chief David White was asked to brief the council and the city attorney to review the text, with discussion expected on Sep 21. Wyles argued it is easier to write rules before a vendor contract is on the table. NOT ESTABLISHED: the Sep 21 outcome, and whether the ban would reach the mobile readers.

GORHAM IS WRITING A PLATE-READER BAN BEFORE ANY CAMERAS ARRIVE -- AND IT MAY GO TO VOTERS. In early September 2026 the Town Council voted unanimously to send a proposed ordinance restricting or banning automated license plate readers to its Ordinance Committee (Councilors Seven Siegel, Kelly Dearborn and Lou Simms). Gorham police do not use Flock; the point is to keep it that way. Siegel said the town does not need the cameras and that they are causing strife elsewhere. One open question is scope: the University of Southern Maine's Gorham campus already uses plate recognition for parking. A later report says the question will be on the November ballot. NOT ESTABLISHED: the ballot wording and date, and whether it covers the university's parking system.

SWITCHED OFF SEP 1, 2026, AND THE VENDOR DROPPED. Brewer police cut power to their Leonardo plate readers -- fixed cameras on Route 1A and a mobile unit bought with a 2020 Homeland Security grant -- on Sep 1, the day after learning that the system had been keeping plate data beyond Maine's 21-day legal limit, and the city ended its relationship with the vendor, the Bangor Daily News reported. The cameras had run for about seven years with little public notice. Brewer's safety director said the city had no server it could get into to erase anything, which is the point: the data sat with the vendor. The Penobscot County DA says the retention breach is all but impossible to prosecute. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the hardware is physically down, and how old the oldest retained records are.

SWITCHED OFF, NOT ENDED. The Waldo County Sheriff's Office disabled its Leonardo plate readers on Sep 1, 2026, the same day Brewer learned the system was keeping data past Maine's 21-day limit, Chief Deputy Matthew Curtis told the Bangor Daily News. The county's cameras watch both directions of Bangor Road in Unity; county commissioners started the purchase in 2021-2022. The BDN's Sep 3 report that the cameras 'could be subject' to a civil-liberties lawsuit refers to the ACLU of Maine's statewide campaign, not a filed case; the ACLU is gathering local records and backing Rep. David Boyer's bill to limit plate readers to toll collection, due after the Legislature returns in January. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the county will turn the cameras back on, who could search them, and whether any searches were audited.

OFFLINE AFTER THE RETENTION FAILURE. Washington County Sheriff Barry Curtis confirmed in September 2026 that his office has stopped using its Leonardo plate readers, after it emerged that the vendor's software had been keeping plate data beyond Maine's 21-day legal limit, the Bangor Daily News reported on Sep 18. He did not give a date or say whether the cameras will return. Veazie police, who first found the problem on Jul 13, have had theirs off since Jul 14; Penobscot Nation public safety did not respond. NOT ESTABLISHED: when the cameras went dark, how many there are, and whether the office intends to end the contract.

The city council left camera funding out of the proposed budget and let the contract expire. Defunding recurs as a distinct route -- Taos NM reallocated the money, Dane County WI voted 32-1 to strip it -- because a council that cannot agree to ban a technology can often agree not to pay for it. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

South Portland ended its Flock Safety contract, part of the wave of 82 Flock contract terminations across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026 -- 39 of them in the first five months of 2026 alone. SUCCESSOR CHECK: NO SUCCESSOR FOUND -- and note the grade of that answer. State-level and national searching surfaced nothing indicating a replacement vendor here, but no source positively confirms what the agency did next, so this is negative evidence rather than a verified exit. Two cheap ways to firm it up: Flock's own transparency portal marks departed agencies "[Inactive]" and publishes their data-sharing counts, and the Who Approved This tracker records how each contract was authorised.

COUNCIL APPROVED A FREE TRIAL, THEN REVERSED ITSELF 5-0. On Sep 16, 2025 Sanford City Council passed an order approving a 60-day free Flock trial and asking the police chief to find money to continue it, after a car theft was solved with a plate hit. Weeks later the council rescinded the approval unanimously. Deputy Mayor Maura Herlihy and councillors Bob Stackpole and Ayn Hanselmann spoke against; Stackpole said the city was not ready and pointed to data held on central servers and possible sharing with state and federal agencies. NOTE FOR ANYONE USING TRACKERS: the Who Approved This tracker files Sanford as a cancellation dated Sep 16, 2025 -- that date is the APPROVAL; the reversal came later. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether any cameras went up during the trial, and the exact reversal date -- reported in the Portland Press Herald on Oct 31, 2025 -- which council minutes would settle.

Portland, Maine voters approved a facial-recognition ban by ballot measure, with an enforcement provision letting residents sue the city over violations.

BOYLSTON IS ENDING FLOCK ON PROCUREMENT GROUNDS. On Sep 11, 2026 the police department and Select Board moved to end the town's Flock agreement, saying the problem was how it was procured, not whether the technology works -- the same exit route Hopkinton and Auburn used. NOT ESTABLISHED: the camera count, whether the contract is terminated or only suspended pending a fix, and whether a new, properly procured contract could follow.

STOUGHTON POLICE CANCELLED FLOCK ON SEPT 4. The department ended its Flock Safety contract and announced it on Sep 8, 2026, saying that although the cameras were a valuable investigative tool, community confidence mattered more. It is one of a run of Massachusetts exits this autumn, alongside Boylston and Auburn. NOT ESTABLISHED: how many cameras Stoughton ran, what it paid, whether the Select Board voted, and when the hardware comes down.

TOWN MANAGER AND POLICE CHIEF ENDED FLOCK ON AUG 31, 2026, BEFORE TOWN MEETING COULD VOTE ON IT. Town Manager Mark Haddad and Police Chief Michael Luth terminated the contract with immediate effect after several weeks of internal review, saying trust and transparency had to come first, and pointing to more than 14 Massachusetts communities that had left Flock over privacy and out-of-state data sharing. It is not a final no: a Police Camera Working Group will bring a camera proposal to Spring 2027 Town Meeting. Watch that article -- the successor question is open. NOT ESTABLISHED: camera count and what the working group will propose.

SELECT BOARD VOTED 3-0 ON AUG 31, 2026 TO CANCEL FLOCK AND PULL THE CAMERAS AT ONCE. The motion called for the cameras to be disabled and uninstalled immediately, not left to the end of the contract. Seven residents spoke before the vote. Ayer acted the same day as neighbouring Groton and as Abington and Southbridge, part of a Massachusetts run of more than a dozen exits in August. NOT ESTABLISHED: how many cameras Ayer had and the date they came down.

POLICE CHIEF ENDED FLOCK ON AUG 31, 2026 AND IS TAKING THE CAMERAS DOWN. Abington Police Chief John Bonney said the decision was about keeping the trust and confidence of residents. It was announced the same day as Ayer, Groton and Southbridge. A chief's decision, not a board vote. NOT ESTABLISHED: camera count, removal date, and any successor system.

POLICE SUSPENDED FLOCK BEFORE EVER USING IT, announced Aug 31, 2026. Southbridge's cameras had been installed but, per the report, never put into operational use. Recorded as a pause because the contract was not reported ended. It was announced the same day Ayer, Groton and Abington ended their contracts outright, in a month when more than a dozen Massachusetts towns left Flock. NOT ESTABLISHED: camera count, contract status, and whether the town intends to cancel -- the police department or select board would know.

Stow's police chief announced the cancellation of the town's Flock contract following MISUSE BY AN OFFICER OF THE SAME DEPARTMENT. The underlying case is one of the most serious on this map: officer Jason Rogers was placed on unpaid leave and a criminal complaint filed after he allegedly used Flock and other databases to stalk a former partner WHO HAD CHANGED HER IDENTITY TO ESCAPE HIS ABUSE. She discovered the stalking through the HaveIBeenFlocked website rather than through any departmental oversight. The town's response was to end the programme rather than only the employment -- the same choice Lufkin and Chandler made in the same month. UPDATE, 25 AUG 2026: ROGERS RESIGNED THE DAY BEFORE HIS DISCIPLINARY HEARING, so there will be no termination finding. The town's release lists what the internal investigation found: at least five unlawful criminal-record (CORI) lookups through CJIS, repeated Flock and CJIS vehicle queries with no law-enforcement purpose, and search reasons that were false or unsubstantiated -- the reason field was filled in and it was not true. Stow filed a criminal complaint on July 17 and it has gone to the Middlesex District Attorney; the case was also referred to the state POST Commission, which decides whether he can work as an officer anywhere in Massachusetts. The victim told Boston 25 she found the searches herself by typing her plate into a public lookup site. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether charges have issued, and the POST outcome. ASK: the Middlesex DA's office for the status of the Stow complaint.

Grafton police began deactivating all 12 Flock cameras on Aug 21, 2026, ABOUT ONE MONTH AFTER ANNOUNCING THEIR INSTALLATION -- the shortest deployment this map records. Chief Neil A. Minardi cited growing concerns about the technology in the community and, separately, vandalism and theft involving the devices. When the cameras went in, officials had tried to reassure residents that they did not use facial recognition and that every use had to be tied to a legitimate law enforcement purpose; that framing did not hold for a month. Neighbouring East Bridgewater announced the same day that it would end its contract and remove the single camera it had installed of four planned, with Chief Michael Jenkins having already paused the project for public discussion before it became fully operational. More than a dozen Massachusetts municipalities have suspended or terminated Flock in recent months, and the day before, Hopkinton ended its contract after a legal review found the agreement violated state procurement law -- hours after Lynn police disclosed that an internal audit had found a concerning pattern in some searches and placed two officers on leave.

Hopkinton ended its Flock contract in August 2026 after a legal review found the agreement VIOLATED STATE PROCUREMENT LAW. The town is one of a handful on this map to exit on procurement grounds rather than privacy ones -- Auburn, Massachusetts cancelled the same month citing a contractual defect, and Knox County, Tennessee declared its contract invalid. That route matters because it does not require winning the privacy argument: a contract that was never lawfully formed can be undone without persuading anyone that plate readers are bad. The announcement came hours after Lynn police disclosed that an internal audit had found a concerning pattern in some searches, placing two officers on leave.

The police department said it would not renew its Flock contract, citing concerns about TRANSPARENCY AND FUNDING together. It was one of three Massachusetts towns to cut ties in the same week alongside Auburn and Douglas. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The police department severed its relationship with Flock citing a CONTRACTUAL DEFECT. With Hopkinton's procurement-law finding and Knox County TN declaring its contract invalid, that is a third exit route on this map and the most portable one: a contract never lawfully formed can be undone without winning the privacy argument. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The police department ended ALPR use immediately, citing the DIVISIVE atmosphere around the cameras. The stated reason is neither privacy nor cost nor misuse but the community conflict itself. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The town ended a two-year Flock trial about a year early, saying the landscape around the technology had changed overwhelmingly. A trial abandoned mid-term because the surrounding facts moved, not because of anything the trial itself found. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The police chief announced the programme would be terminated after public outcry, before deployment. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

Police suspended the programme after an internal review found MISCONDUCT. Recorded as a pause rather than a removal because the contract was not ended; the misuse finding is the reason and is the department's own. SOURCING: recorded from a public-records compilation of terminated and paused Flock contracts (Aug 28 2026 edition) which supplies the agency, action type, date and the primary linked here; the primary has not been read directly in every case, so provenance is marked accordingly.

POLICE ARE ENDING FLOCK AT YEAR-END AND HAVE ALREADY STOPPED USING IT. Easton Police said in late August 2026 that they will end the town's Flock contract at the end of the year, citing residents' concerns; the town has two cameras. Network sharing is already off and the system is suspended until the cameras come down. Easton was one of several Massachusetts towns to pull back the same weekend -- Abington, Ayer and Groton ended contracts and Southbridge suspended. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the select board voted or the chief decided alone, the exact contract end date, and whether another plate-reader vendor replaces Flock.

Littleton moved to cancel its Flock contract after discovering the vendor had turned the cameras back on by itself. The sequence, from the town's own update of Jul 30, 2026: in May the Select Board ordered all six cameras temporarily powered down while it reviewed the technology, governance policies and residents' privacy concerns -- the town's FAQ page dated the deactivation May 12. In late July, Select Board Chairman Gary Wilson asked the police department to verify the system's status, and the review found FIVE of the cameras on public ways had been reactivated by Flock Safety without notifying the town. The Select Board's response was physical rather than contractual: it directed the Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments to cut power to each device, then moved to cancel the contract. The town says no data was shared with other jurisdictions while the cameras were powered and that Littleton police accessed none of it; the announcement did not say how long the cameras had been live before they were caught. Why this record matters beyond one town: a municipal off switch that the vendor can override is not an off switch, and every community that has voted to pause its cameras is trusting the same company honoured the pause. Littleton is the first documented case on this map where it did not.

Salem is not renewing its Flock Safety contract and will remove the ALPRs installed at the city's entry points and major intersections, Mayor Dominick Pangallo announced July 23, 2026. The stated reason is the one driving the national wave: 'insufficient protections for the ALPR data generated by Flock's systems' -- data, the city said, that should be owned and used only for Salem's own public-safety priorities. The city credits the cameras with a role in nearly every recent major investigation and intends to keep license-plate reading through other means: a data-ownership divorce, not a surveillance retreat.

After months of resident organizing led by the group Framingham Fights Back, the Police Department decided not to renew its Flock contract. Access is shut off June 30, 2026 and the cameras decommissioned. The City Council is weighing a Trust in Local Law Enforcement ordinance to govern any future plate-reader use. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. Police declined to renew on about Jun 25, 2026 after residents had pressed since February through public meetings, letters and council testimony. Two things make this record carry beyond Framingham. First, City Council Chair George King said the quiet part out loud about what a municipal cancellation actually achieves: people need to remember the cameras are everywhere, stores like Home Depot and Lowe's have them in their parking lots, so the cameras come off city streets without leaving the city. Second, the council is drafting an ordinance restricting the technology rather than simply walking away -- which matters because Waltham's city solicitor told its council it was NOT permitted to do that, so whether a municipality may legislate on ALPRs at all is unsettled between neighbouring Massachusetts cities.

After an extensive public hearing at the June 23, 2026 Select Board meeting, Tewksbury opened a comprehensive review of its Flock license-plate-reader program, and the police chief said the department had voluntarily pulled out of Flock's National Lookup Network -- now sharing plate data only with Massachusetts law enforcement. Residents pressed the board on data privacy and cybersecurity, including Flock's use of collected data for machine learning.

The City Council voted 5-2 (two present) to end ShotSpotter, ordering the city manager and police to stop using it within 90 days and remove the acoustic sensors. Critics cited false positives, no independent validation, and that SoundThinking's CrimeTracer database has been accessible to federal agencies. A caution documented by The Record: Flock cameras here remained active after officials believed they had been deactivated -- the same ghost-camera pattern later seen in Cleveland. Removal votes require verification that the hardware actually went dark.

Attleboro ended its contract with Flock Safety in March 2026 amid statewide Massachusetts pushback over automated license-plate-reader data sharing. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor found, though note that neighbouring North Attleboro MA PD still appears as an active agency on Flock's transparency portal -- adjacent-agency coverage is the thing to check here rather than a new Attleboro contract.

City Manager George Proakis cancelled the town's Flock contract on January 27, 2026 after a public comment session where residents objected. A signed contract would have placed eight cameras across the city; they were never fully deployed. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. Watertown's exit fed directly into state-level action: Rep. Steven Owens (D-Watertown) has filed legislation capping ALPR data retention at 14 days statewide and requiring legal authorization for many searches -- the durable version of what a single council vote cannot hold.

After Flock cameras were installed as part of an unannounced pilot, the Select Board voted unanimously to end the trial following resident objections over privacy and surveillance. Police Chief James Hicks publicly apologized for not disclosing the pilot and took responsibility for it. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor -- and this one is confirmed by the vendor itself. Natick MA PD is listed as "[Inactive]" on Flock's own public transparency portal, which is the cheapest available confirmation that a departure actually took effect.

In January 2026 Greenfield's police chief announced the city would end its Flock Safety ALPR contract, part of a wave of Massachusetts cities cancelling over federal data-sharing and ICE-access concerns. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor found. Greenfield is counted among the completed Massachusetts departures alongside Cambridge, Natick, Watertown and Framingham.

Paused the program in October 2025, then terminated the contract for cause in December after discovering Flock had installed two cameras without the city awareness. A caution documented by The Record: Flock cameras here remained active after officials believed they had been deactivated -- the same ghost-camera pattern later seen in Cleveland. Removal votes require verification that the hardware actually went dark. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor found -- but note a different kind of incomplete ending. This city is one of the places (with Cleveland) where terminating the Flock contract and actually ending the surveillance turned out to be two different things: the cameras did not go dark when the vote said they would. The gap between the decision and the hardware is the thing to verify here, not a new logo.

Fall River discontinued ShotSpotter; the police chief called it a costly system that was not effective enough to justify the expense.

Brookline banned town and police use of face recognition, part of the cluster of Massachusetts municipalities that prohibited the technology; its ordinance subjects rule-breaking employees to workplace discipline.

Springfield prohibited police use of face recognition in 2020 as the ban ordinances spread across Massachusetts through that summer.

Boston banned police and city use of facial recognition, and barred officers from asking another agency to run it on their behalf.

Easthampton joined neighboring western-Massachusetts cities in banning municipal use of face recognition technology by police and city government.

Cambridge, home to Harvard and MIT, banned municipal use of face recognition in early 2020, becoming one of the largest East Coast cities at the time to prohibit the technology for police and city agencies.

Northampton barred city and police use of face recognition in 2019, among the first Massachusetts communities outside Somerville to adopt a ban.

Somerville became the second US city to ban government use of facial recognition, kicking off a wave of bans across Massachusetts.

New Hampshire prohibits police from using facial recognition in combination with body-worn cameras.

NEW HAMPSHIRE'S PLATE-READER LAW -- AMONG THE STRICTEST IN THE COUNTRY -- IS SET TO REPEAL ITSELF ON JAN 1, 2027. The official statute page for RSA 261:75-b notes that it is repealed by the 2016 act that wrote it (HB 1154, chapter 78, section 3). That act was a ten-year trial: it let police use plate readers only under tight rules -- photographs of plates, not people; readings that are not hits deleted within three minutes; a hit alone is not grounds for a stop without independent confirmation; every lookup logged. We found no 2025 or 2026 bill that extends or replaces it; a 2024 attempt to rewrite the section died in the Senate. NOT ESTABLISHED, AND IT MATTERS: what the law will be after Jan 1. Depending on how RSA 236:130, New Hampshire's general ban on scanning devices, reads once 261:75-b is gone, police use could fall back under a near-total ban, or it could continue without the three-minute rule. Ask the Department of Safety and the House Transportation Committee which it is, and whether a bill is planned for the 2027 session. The date shown is when the 2016 law took effect; the sunset is Jan 1, 2027.

New Jersey requires prosecutors to notify defendants when facial recognition was used in their case, under a 2024 attorney general directive, and limits how results may be used.

Trenton dropped ShotSpotter, one of nine cities a Seattle councilmember cited as having ended gunshot-detection contracts.

NORTH TONAWANDA WITHDREW PERMISSION FOR THE COUNTY'S FLOCK CAMERAS, UNANIMOUSLY. On Aug 18, 2026 the Common Council rescinded its April 2025 resolution that let the Niagara County Sheriff's Office put Flock readers inside the city. Only one had been installed -- a county-owned camera at Niagara Falls Boulevard and Ohio Street -- and the sheriff has 30 days to take it down. Mayor Austin Tylec said the city wanted to hit the brakes after months of national reporting on misuse in other states, and said there had been none locally. The Lockport Journal called it the first Western New York municipality to pull support from the county program. The case shows the lever a city holds over a sheriff's network: not the contract, which is the county's, but permission to mount cameras on city property and rights-of-way. NOT ESTABLISHED: how each member voted by name and confirmation the camera is down.

The city voted unanimously to cancel after residents raised concerns. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

THE TOWN OF TONAWANDA IS SWAPPING FLOCK FOR AXON -- SAME CAMERAS' JOB, DIFFERENT VENDOR. In late August 2026 the town board voted to replace its 12 Flock plate readers with an Axon system, to be in place in early 2027, citing cost. Town Supervisor John Flynn made the case for the cameras themselves, crediting them with solving a recent bank robbery. This is a vendor change, not a retreat from plate-reader surveillance, and it lands a week after neighbouring North Tonawanda pulled permission for the county's Flock camera. Readers should ask what the Axon contract says on retention, sharing with outside agencies and audit logs, since a vendor switch is usually approved without those terms being debated. NOT ESTABLISHED: the vote count, the exact meeting date (reported as Aug 24), the Axon price and term, and when the Flock units come down.

Common Council voted to revoke the Flock contract and switch to Axon, after police inadvertently opted into national data sharing and Border Patrol ran more than 2,000 immigration-related searches. Update, July 2026: Flock physically removed its 13 license plate readers from city property, finalizing an eight-month breakup that began with the council's revocation. Two caveats keep the win partial: Flock remains in Syracuse through separate contracts with Syracuse University and the Destiny USA mall, and statewide ALPR legislation from Assemblymember Pam Hunter will not be considered until the 2027 session. Completion and aftermath, July 2026: all 131 Flock cameras are down, ending an eight-month breakup -- February's 7-1 council vote for a five-year, $422,636 Axon contract (passed as officers removed protesting activists from the chamber), March's revocation of Flock's street permissions, hardware out by the May 26 deadline. But critics say the switch solved nothing: the NYCLU strategist on the city's own surveillance working group reports being refused both the ALPR policy and the Axon contract for six months, and notes Axon's reach -- body cameras, drones, and its Fusus real-time crime center -- may raise the stakes rather than lower them. Assemblymember Pamela Hunter's Albany bill (retention caps, use limits, warrant requirements for federal or out-of-state sharing) is the proposal privacy advocates now point to as the fix that survives vendor swaps. Axon's plate product is Fleet 3, a dual-view 4K reader that checks scans against hotlists; notably, local demonstrators rallied against Axon too, not only Flock, over its own federal relationships -- underscoring that for Syracuse activists the objection was to the surveillance, not merely the vendor. Then the follow-through stalled. As of July 24, 2026 -- nearly a year after the vote to drop Flock and five months after the Common Council approved the Axon contract 7-1 on February 9 -- the Flock cameras were reportedly still physically standing. Daniel Schwarz, a senior privacy and technology strategist with the New York Civil Liberties Union who sat on the city's own Surveillance Technology Working Group, says he was shut out of the replacement process: he requested the department's ALPR policy and the Axon contract more than six months ago and has received neither, and was never consulted on the contract's terms. He notes this mirrors how the city adopted Flock in 2023, when the group was likewise never shown any specific language. His own conclusion is the one worth recording here, because it cuts against reading a vendor change as a remedy: every one of these vendors presents surveillance risk and opportunity for abuse, all of them function by tracking any driver around the clock, and Axon's reach may raise the stakes rather than lower them because it sells far more than plate readers. Questions also remain unanswered about what data was shared during the Flock period. So Syracuse is a switch on paper whose oversight body cannot see the contract that replaced the system it reviewed.

Legislation introduced at the July 13, 2026 city council meeting would end Binghamton's contract with Flock Safety, citing privacy, data-misuse, and wrongful-stop concerns. Pending a vote.

Village considering restrictions and limits on ALPR use.

Village cancelled its Flock contract after more than 450 residents petitioned officials. SUCCESSOR CHECK: NO SUCCESSOR FOUND -- and note the grade of that answer. State-level and national searching surfaced nothing indicating a replacement vendor here, but no source positively confirms what the agency did next, so this is negative evidence rather than a verified exit. Two cheap ways to firm it up: Flock's own transparency portal marks departed agencies "[Inactive]" and publishes their data-sharing counts, and the Who Approved This tracker records how each contract was authorised.

The Onondaga County Legislature approved a biometric-surveillance disclosure law in May 2026 (12-5), requiring public disclosure when biometric surveillance is used. It passed alongside the City of Syracuse's ban on facial recognition in places of public accommodation, part of a wave of central New York action modeled on a proposed statewide ban.

County legislature voted to end the Flock contract and remove the license plate readers and gunshot detectors used by the sheriff office. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor found. The county legislature voted at a special meeting in about Apr 21, 2026 to end the relationship, roughly six weeks after Ithaca. Note the scope, which is wider than ALPR alone -- the Sheriff's Office contract covered static plate readers AND gunshot-detection software, so this is two surveillance systems ending, not one. Also state-grant funded via GIVE. A correction published by the Ithaca Voice is worth carrying: an earlier report that the legislature had voted against RENEWING the Flock contract was wrong; that vote was about whether to accept the grant money that paid for it.

Village board voted 4-1 to cancel the Flock contract and never re-enter, after only 3 of 12 planned cameras had been installed. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor, and this is stronger than a cancellation -- on Mar 9, 2026 the village board voted 4-1 on an amended resolution that TERMINATED the Flock contract AND BANNED further installation of the company's cameras in the village, which forecloses a quiet return in a way a lapsed contract does not. Trustee Aurora White, who proposed the ban, put the reason on the vendor rather than the technology, saying Flock's data practices were what made it a company the village did not want as a business partner. The village of about 5,000 had signed in 2024 using a state public-safety grant, for roughly a dozen devices at about $32,000 a year -- reported as six license plate readers plus six AI cameras. What turned the room was process: emails showed the idea had circulated since a 2023 vandalism string, and residents and a Harrietstown council member argued the program was approved without the public knowing, with one telling the board every image captured had been taken in violation of the policies taxpayers were funding.

Common Council voted to terminate its Flock contract as out of line with Ithaca sanctuary-city policies. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor -- but DO NOT READ THIS AS FLOCK LEAVING ITHACA. The Common Council voted unanimously on Mar 4, 2026 to terminate the CITY contract, ending Ithaca Police Department use after nearly three years, with Mayor Robert Cantelmo citing resident feedback. The Tompkins County Sheriff's Office and the Cornell University Police Department operate their own Flock contracts covering the same streets, and neither is under the council's purview. Tompkins County did cancel the following month; CORNELL IS NOT RECORDED AS HAVING DONE SO, so cameras may still be running in the city under university contract. This is the sharpest example on the map of why a municipal vote does not clear a jurisdiction. Funding note: the cameras were paid for by New York State's GIVE (Gun Involved Violence Elimination) grant, not the city budget.

Council moved to stop payments to Flock; the mayor declared a state of emergency to keep the cameras on, and the council sued over the emergency order and the contract renewal.

Residents successfully pushed back against a Flock contract, per the NYCLU. Details are limited.

Residents successfully pushed back against a Flock contract, per the NYCLU. Details are limited.

Syracuse lawmakers blocked the police department's drone program four separate times in 2025, demanding privacy protections before any deployment.

With its SoundThinking contract expiring at the end of 2025 after nearly 8.5 million dollars spent over a decade, Pittsburgh faced a contested renewal debate; a 2025 city controller audit and critics questioned the system's effectiveness and its concentration in Black neighborhoods.

Pittsburgh passed a rule regulating municipal use of face recognition, which the EFF counts among cities restricting the technology; critics noted loopholes that one council member called significant.

COUNCIL REJECTED A FLOCK BAN 5-1 AND SENT A REGULATION BACK FOR REWRITING. Woonsocket's City Council voted down a resolution to ban Flock cameras, with Council President Daniel Gendron, Vice President Denise Sierra and members James Cournoyer, Michael Dubois and Sharon Harmon voting no and only the sponsor voting yes. A companion measure to regulate rather than ban the cameras was tabled so it can come back as a binding ordinance, built on the police department's existing eight-page ALPR policy with added oversight and transparency terms. Woonsocket is one of Rhode Island's earliest adopters: cameras went up in 2021 and the council approved them by resolution in 2022 and again in 2024. It stayed in while five other Rhode Island towns left. The next chance for residents is the public hearing when the ordinance returns -- ask the clerk for the date. NOT ESTABLISHED: the camera count and the sponsor's name.

FOSTER ENDED FLOCK ON SEPT 10 -- THE FIFTH RHODE ISLAND TOWN TO DO SO. The Town Council voted to terminate the contract for two Flock cameras on state roads, a $6,000-a-year system installed about two years earlier, after more than a dozen residents spoke against it. A month earlier, on Aug 14, the council had tabled a motion to pull the cameras and asked Flock to present first. Local concerns focused on where the data went: the town kept images for seven days, but outside agencies such as Providence police could search Foster's cameras directly. Council Vice President Heidi Rogers framed it as a question about data, not about the police. State Rep. Chippendale said the town would wait for state rules before looking at plate readers again, which ties Foster's next step to the governor's review. NOT ESTABLISHED: the vote count and when the cameras physically came down.

TIVERTON PUT ITS FLOCK EXPANSION ON HOLD ON AUG 24, 2026 -- A MONTH AFTER VOTING 3-1 FOR IT. On Jul 27 the Town Council approved four more cameras over the objection of Deborah Janick; the police already ran two. After Gov. Dan McKee asked municipalities to stop installing new plate readers during a 60-day state review, the council agreed not to proceed for now, with Council President John G. Edwards saying it made sense to follow the state. The four-camera contract had not been signed as of Aug 28. This is a pause on growth, not an exit: the two existing cameras are not covered by the governor's request. The decision point is the end of the state review in mid-October, when the council can sign the contract, drop it, or wait for the state standards. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the Aug 24 action was a recorded vote, and the contract value.

THE GOVERNOR PAUSED NEW PLATE-READER INSTALLS FOR 60 DAYS -- EXISTING CAMERAS STAY ON. On Aug 18, 2026 Gov. Dan McKee ordered a 60-day halt on new automated license plate reader installations across Rhode Island and a review led by the State Police, with the Department of Public Safety to draft statewide policy recommendations with stakeholders. The pause covers growth only: the ACLU of Rhode Island counts at least 295 cameras already up, and they keep running. It came as towns were leaving on their own -- South Kingstown, Narragansett, Glocester, North Kingstown and later Foster ended contracts, Lincoln paused before switching on, and Warren and Portsmouth turned down a state police camera plan -- while Woonsocket, Cranston and Pawtucket, users since 2021, stayed in. Tiverton shelved a four-camera expansion to wait for the state. The decision point is mid-October, when the 60 days end: ask whether the State Police review is published and whether it produces binding rules or only guidance. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether this is a formal executive order or a request to municipalities, and the precise end date.

NORTH KINGSTOWN VOTED 3-2 TO END FLOCK AND SIX CAMERAS CAME DOWN. At its Aug 17, 2026 meeting the Town Council terminated the contract on a split vote, with Councilman Matt McCoy leading the motion. The contract dated to 2023, took effect in 2025 and had renewed automatically in early 2026 -- an auto-renewal is the kind of step that never reaches a council agenda. Police Chief John Urban, who argued the cameras keep the town safe and are constitutional, was away on vacation for the vote. It made North Kingstown the third South County town to leave Flock in a month, after South Kingstown and Narragansett, and came as Gov. Dan McKee ordered a 60-day statewide pause on new plate-reader installations. NOT ESTABLISHED: which two members voted no, and the contract's value.

LINCOLN STOPPED ITS FLOCK NETWORK BEFORE IT SWITCHED ON. On Aug 13, 2026 Town Administrator Phil Gould paused installation of a planned 12-camera, $45,400 Flock system; one camera was already up but had never gone live. Gould pointed to neighbouring Cumberland, where a woman says she was falsely arrested after a Flock misidentification and has sued the police department, and said the town needed to be sure the tools were not doing residents a disservice. He also said Flock had helped solve crimes in Lincoln, and police leadership went to a Connecticut roundtable on standards. The pause preceded Gov. McKee's Aug 18 statewide hold on new installations by five days. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the contract is cancelled or only suspended, whether the installed camera has come down, and what would restart it -- ask the town administrator whether a council vote is required.

Glocester's town council voted 4-1 to cancel its Flock contract AFTER RESIDENTS PACKED TOWN HALL. Narragansett cancelled unanimously in the same state and month, and South Kingstown ended its programme in July, giving Rhode Island three cancellations in two months in a state of about a million people. Glocester itself has roughly 10,000 residents -- the packed-hall detail matters at that scale, where a few dozen people are a substantial share of anyone who votes.

The town voted unanimously to cancel over resident concerns. Rhode Island now records three cancellations in short order with Glocester and South Kingstown -- a small-state cluster. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The Town Council voted 5-0 to terminate its Flock Safety contract and asked staff to take the license plate readers down as soon as possible, after councillors said they had received hundreds of emails from residents raising misuse and privacy concerns. Councillor Michael Marran said that just because the technology exists does not mean the town should use it; Councillor Deborah Bergner said the potential for federal use of the data made the risk too unpredictable to measure. A Flock representative said he respected the decision and maintained the company does not sell data and that the community owns it. The Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association defended the technology as a tool for solving crimes with privacy safeguards in place. IMPORTANT LIMIT ON THIS RESULT: Rhode Island State Police hold their own separate Flock contract, so cameras can still appear inside South Kingstown along state roads. Ending the town contract removes the town's cameras, not all cameras in the town. The town is seeking a partial refund of remaining operational costs.

Portsmouth's town council rejected a proposal to place Flock Safety cameras in town in January 2026, a month after neighboring Warren did the same -- two Rhode Island towns declining the network at the proposal stage.

Warren's town council rejected a proposal to place Flock Safety cameras in town in December 2025 -- stopping the network before it started, the cheapest kind of win.

Providence launched Rhode Island's first real-time crime center, letting detectives pull live feeds from hundreds of public and private cameras through Axon's Fusus platform. The city is paying $750,000 to run the system through at least July 2028 under a contract signed in June 2024 that auto-renews annually, funded by a $1 million federal earmark secured by Sen. Jack Reed. Private camera owners opt in voluntarily -- the model that quietly folds privately owned cameras into a police surveillance network without any city-wide vote on mass surveillance.

THE CAMERAS WENT DARK UNDER STATE LAW, THEN CAME BACK; THE SELECTBOARD TABLED THEM ON AUG 18, 2026. Manchester put up five Flock cameras in March 2023 for about $39,000. Vermont's ALPR statute, in force Jul 1, 2025, lets police hold active data for one week before it passes to the state Department of Public Safety behind a warrant requirement -- and the state had built nothing to receive it, so by December 2025 the town had stopped using the system. By August 2026 all five were operating again. The Selectboard reached no decision, deferred to a visit to the police station, and agreed to look at less invasive options; the chief says data-sharing features are being limited. The town manager wants the question held to the fall budget; the contract is paid through March 2027. Trackers listing Manchester as suspended are out of date.

Vermont enacted one of the country's strictest limits on police facial recognition, effectively barring most law-enforcement use.

CAMERAS OFF BECAUSE OF A DEPUTY WHO DOESN'T EVEN PATROL HERE. Homer Glen, Illinois shut off police access to its Flock cameras on Sep 1, 2026 after a Will County sheriff's deputy was put on leave for possibly misusing the Flock database. Mayor Christina Neitzke-Troike noted the deputy does not answer calls in Homer Glen -- the village paused because the county's access ran through its cameras regardless. Five of the 12 approved cameras were up. It was an administrative pause, not a board vote. NOT established: what the deputy searched, how long the pause lasts, and what would bring the cameras back on. Ask the village board whether reactivation will come to a public vote.

The sheriff's office ended the contract over concerns about COMMUNITY TRUST. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The town council voted to terminate and have the cameras removed. SOURCING: recorded from a public-records compilation of terminated and paused Flock contracts (Aug 28 2026 edition) which supplies the agency, action type, date and the primary linked here; the primary has not been read directly in every case, so provenance is marked accordingly.

THE RENEWAL PASSED. On Jul 20, 2026 the Park Ridge City Council approved a one-year extension of its Flock contract 5-1, and the arithmetic of how is the record: as a sole-source contract it needed a two-thirds supermajority, at least five votes. Two alderpersons were absent, which under the city attorney's reading let Mayor Marty Maloney cast a vote that counted toward the supermajority. The measure had cleared its first reading 6-1 on Jul 6, with Ald. Fred Sanchez opposed both times. Police Chief Bob Kampwirth told the council the cameras were useful and did not invade privacy. Resident Erik Olijnyk urged rejection, arguing nothing prevents officers from sharing data with federal immigration authorities. Filed here because a map that logs only the cancellations is an argument rather than a record -- and because a one-year term means Park Ridge decides again in 2027.

The contract was cancelled after a CHANGE TO THE CONTRACT TERMS that concerned the mayor. A rare exit triggered by the paperwork moving rather than by anything the cameras did. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

Rockford already ran roughly 130 Flock cameras on its roads and in its squad cars when the council took up an expansion on March 2, 2026. The meeting ran hours. Every seat was filled, the room snapped and booed by turns, Mayor Tom McNamara warned the gallery about interruptions, and police escorted vocal Flock critics out of chambers. Resident Christopher Bayer, speaking to WIFR beforehand, pointed at the roughly fifty communities that had by then switched away from Flock or shut its cameras off, and asked Rockford to join them: surveillance is not safety, was how he put it. The council voted 13-1 to expand instead, approving $443,998.16 for 27 additional cameras, with Alderman Gina Meeks the lone no. Flock owns the hardware; the city holds the collected data, which flows into a Rockford Police database searchable for investigations. The record here is not a cancellation but the shape of the argument when a department is already invested: an hours-long hearing, an ejection, and a single dissenting vote on a contract that got bigger.

Evanston canceled its Flock contract in 2025 after local data sharing was revealed, bagging the cameras -- then in December 2025 the City Council voted 6-3 to approve a seven-year, $5.8 million renewal with Axon that ADDS the company's Fusus 'real-time crime center' platform, aggregating body-worn cameras, fixed surveillance cameras and outside feeds (including Evanston Township High School) into a 'single pane of glass' augmented by Axon's CORE AI. The city has contracted with Axon for over 15 years. Ending one vendor's plate readers did not end the surveillance build-out; it moved it to the incumbent. RECLASSIFIED from removed to switched -- the vendor field already recorded the successor (Flock ended, replaced by Axon plus Fusus); only the action lagged. AND FLOCK PUT THE CAMERAS BACK. After Evanston terminated in late August 2025 and deactivated 19 cameras, the company BEGAN REINSTALLING CAMERAS ACROSS THE CITY, apparently without the knowledge of local officials or residents. The city responded in September by issuing a CEASE-AND-DESIST order, after which Flock said it would uninstall them. THAT IS THE SECOND DOCUMENTED INSTANCE ON THIS MAP of a vendor restoring service a customer had ended -- Littleton, Massachusetts found its cameras switched back on by the vendor after the Select Board powered them down, and ordered removal and the electricity cut. Two towns, two states, the same pattern: TERMINATION IS NOT SELF-EXECUTING, and a council that votes to end a programme may still need an enforcement step. AND SEPARATELY, an audit by the ILLINOIS SECRETARY OF STATE found Flock had violated state law by allowing US Customs and Border Protection access to data from its cameras. Flock disputes the finding. That is a state officer concluding a statute was broken, which is a different order of evidence from a council's objection.

Village board voted 4-3 on Aug. 5, 2025 to cancel its Flock Safety contract outright -- rejecting a 90-day-pause alternative -- and shut off 8 license plate cameras. Trustees cited privacy, distrust of Flock, and Illinois plate data being used for immigration enforcement against state law and the village's sanctuary ordinance; an audit confirmed Oak Park data was tapped in a Palos Heights search flagged as an "immigration violation." Cameras went dark Aug. 6. The vote came amid the Illinois Secretary of State's probe into illegal out-of-state Flock searches. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor found. The cause is unusually well documented for this map: an audit confirmed Oak Park data was reached in a Palos Heights search flagged as an "immigration violation," contrary to Illinois law and the village's own sanctuary ordinance, and the vote came while the Illinois Secretary of State was probing illegal out-of-state Flock searches. The board rejected a 90-day-pause alternative in favour of outright cancellation, 4-3, and the eight cameras went dark the next day -- one of the few cases on this map where the hardware stopped within 24 hours of the vote.

The Secretary of State launched an audit and Flock cut Illinois from its national lookup tool after CBP accessed Illinois data in violation of state privacy law.

Chicago ended its roughly $49 million ShotSpotter contract in 2024 after Mayor Brandon Johnson campaigned against it, citing studies showing the gunshot-detection sensors were inaccurate, drove over-policing of Black neighborhoods, and did little to reduce gun violence.

Illinois limits police use of facial recognition to serious crimes, and its Biometric Information Privacy Act tightly restricts private collection of face data.

Local DeFlock chapter DeFlock Sterling is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

Local group Get the Flock Out Indivisible HP is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

Local group Get the Flock Out Quad Cities is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

Local group Stop Flock in Woodstock is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

Local group StopFlock CU is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

THE MAYOR BACKS FLOCK; THE COUNCIL NEVER VOTED ON IT. Muncie runs 24 Flock cameras under contracts signed by the police chief in 2022 and 2023 without a council vote or public announcement, according to records obtained by the local outlet Muncie Voice, which puts the commitment at about $300,000 through December 2028. Mayor Dan Ridenour said on Sep 22, 2026 that he fully supports the cameras for their results and that officers are trained against misuse -- while at least six Indiana cities and counties voted to cancel in the previous 30 days. Muncie Voice is pushing a surveillance-oversight ordinance. NOT ESTABLISHED: any council action; the contract figures come from one outlet. Ask the council whether it will require a vote before the 2028 renewal.

CHESTERTON VOTED TO CANCEL OR NOT RENEW ITS FLOCK CONTRACT between late August and Sep 22, 2026, according to WNDU, which listed it with Fort Wayne, Chesterton and the counties of Marshall, Starke, Kosciusko and Noble as part of an Indiana surge of exits in 30 days. The station did not say which body voted, on what date, by what margin, or whether the contract was cancelled or left to expire. Recorded so the Indiana count is complete. NOT ESTABLISHED: every detail beyond the direction of the decision -- the town council minutes would settle them. THE TOWN COUNCIL VOTED UNANIMOUSLY ON SEP 14, 2026 TO END THE FLOCK CONTRACT -- AFTER ONE OF ITS OWN OFFICERS MISUSED IT. Police Chief Tim Richardson investigated a reported misuse of Flock by a Chesterton officer over the summer; the officer, reported as a former corporal, has resigned. While auditing, Richardson cut off every officer's access except his own and his command staff's. Chesterton is one of several northwest Indiana exits in the same weeks, alongside Porter County's own misuse case one level up. NOT ESTABLISHED: what the officer searched, whether the case was referred to prosecutors, and when the cameras come down.

COUNTY COUNCIL VOTED ON SEP 10, 2026 TO STOP PAYING FOR ITS 30 FLOCK CAMERAS, after a meeting of more than three hours in a room full before the doors opened. The two stations that covered it describe the result differently: one reports a pause in funding, the other says the council voted to end the contract. Both are recorded here because the difference matters -- defunding can be reversed at the next budget, a termination cannot. Resident Greg Henderson told the council the systems are not infallible, pointing to people stopped or detained on bad camera data. NOT ESTABLISHED: the vote count, whether the contract itself is terminated, and whether the cameras are off. The council's Sep 10 minutes would settle all three.

The city declined to advance an ordinance that would have let its police department buy ALPRs in 2019, following opposition from residents. SEVEN YEARS AFTER DECLINING PLATE READERS, POLICE ARE ASKING FOR MORE OF THEM. In 2019 Michigan City shelved an ordinance that would have let police buy ALPRs. By September 2026 the department runs Flock and asked the city council for $300,000 for seven more swivel cameras, a portable Flock trailer and a new drone. Assistant Chief Kyle Shiparski promised safeguards -- access only when needed, documentation of use and accountability afterward. It came in the same month neighbouring counties were voting to cancel. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether council approved the money, and when the city first contracted with Flock. UPDATE: THE $300,000 WAS TABLED TO OCT 6. At a mid-September public hearing the council heard residents object to the rainy-day-fund request -- seven pan-tilt-zoom cameras on Franklin Street, a portable Flock trailer and a drone-as-first-responder programme -- on Fourth Amendment grounds and over Indiana's requirement to share information with immigration enforcement. Assistant Chief Kyle Shiparski said the system figures in 20 to 30 cases a month; Councilman Bryant Dabney said cameras help in shootings where witnesses fear retaliation. Members tabled the appropriation to Oct 6 to review the department's proposed procedures. The request follows an officer's alleged misuse of Flock. NOT ESTABLISHED: the details of that misuse case. a Michigan City officer resigned in 2026 while under investigation after a routine audit found Flock searches with no legitimate purpose; the department forwarded the case to the LaPorte County Prosecutor. Councillors weighing the $300,000 expansion on Oct 6 can ask how many searches the audit reviewed and what else it found.

MARSHALL COUNTY VOTED TO CANCEL OR NOT RENEW ITS FLOCK CONTRACT between late August and Sep 22, 2026, according to WNDU, which listed it with Fort Wayne, Chesterton and the counties of Marshall, Starke, Kosciusko and Noble as part of an Indiana surge of exits in 30 days. The station did not say which body voted, on what date, by what margin, or whether the contract was cancelled or left to expire. Recorded so the Indiana count is complete. NOT ESTABLISHED: every detail beyond the direction of the decision -- the commissioners or county council minutes would settle them.

STARKE COUNTY VOTED TO CANCEL OR NOT RENEW ITS FLOCK CONTRACT between late August and Sep 22, 2026, according to WNDU, which listed it with Fort Wayne, Chesterton and the counties of Marshall, Starke, Kosciusko and Noble as part of an Indiana surge of exits in 30 days. The station did not say which body voted, on what date, by what margin, or whether the contract was cancelled or left to expire. Recorded so the Indiana count is complete. NOT ESTABLISHED: every detail beyond the direction of the decision -- the commissioners or county council minutes would settle them.

NOBLE COUNTY VOTED TO CANCEL OR NOT RENEW ITS FLOCK CONTRACT between late August and Sep 22, 2026, according to WNDU, which listed it with Fort Wayne, Chesterton and the counties of Marshall, Starke, Kosciusko and Noble as part of an Indiana surge of exits in 30 days. The station did not say which body voted, on what date, by what margin, or whether the contract was cancelled or left to expire. Recorded so the Indiana count is complete. NOT ESTABLISHED: every detail beyond the direction of the decision -- the commissioners or county council minutes would settle them.

OUTCOME, after four months of delay: Fort Wayne City Council voted UNANIMOUSLY on Aug 25, 2026 not to renew the $120,000 Flock contract covering 36 cameras. The vote was 8-0 with Councilman Scott Myers absent, and drew applause from the gallery. Members of both parties said they had too many concerns to proceed. The path here was a series of refusals to decide: the contract failed 5-4 in May and was tabled, the council voted again on July 14 to hold off pending stronger safeguards, and it finally fell in August -- by which point the contract had ALREADY EXPIRED earlier in the summer. WHY ONE COUNCILLOR VOTED NO IS THE SHARPEST POINT IN THE RECORD. Rohli Booker said cameras had continued going up during the review, including in the preceding weeks, and that a city cannot ask the public to trust a process while expanding the very system under review, nor ask a councillor to extend a contract while deepening reliance on the vendor before the vote is even cast. HOW FORT WAYNE GOT 36 CAMERAS WITHOUT A COUNCIL VOTE: the police department spent $25,200 in July 2024 and $92,995 in 2025 -- each below the $100,000 threshold that requires council approval. The renewal only reached the council because the cumulative figure finally crossed it. This map already records the same pattern in Denver, where an extension came in $1,500 under the threshold that would have forced a vote. UPDATE, AUG 31 2026: THE CAMERAS ARE OFF AND THE LOOPHOLE WAS DROPPED. Two days after the vote, police said they were weighing a smaller contract under the $100,000 threshold that requires council approval -- the same sub-threshold route that built the network. Hours later Mayor Sharon Tucker said the council's vote was the final say. On Aug 31 the chief (named P.J. Smith by WBOI and Indiana Public Radio, Paul Smith by 21Alive) announced all 36 readers were offline, FWPD-controlled data stored in Flock had been deleted, and every data-sharing relationship through Flock had ended. He credited the cameras with leads, stolen-vehicle recoveries and locating missing people, but said the department's relationship with elected leaders and residents mattered more than any single technology. THE GRANT: the cameras were bought with a US Department of Justice grant that WOWO reports ran through September 2027; the city says it is working out how to handle it. NOT ESTABLISHED: when the cameras physically come down -- FWPD gave no timeline and said Flock would remove them.

INDIANA HAS ALMOST NO STATE RULES ON PLATE READERS, AND A BILL IS BEING DRAFTED. The only restriction on the books is a 2025 law barring homeowners' associations from running plate readers on residents unless police operate them. Rep. Jim Pressel, who chairs the House roads committee, says he is drafting minimum standards for police use -- agency audits, annual State Police audits, retention limits and sharing limits -- for the January 2027 session, and Sen. Aaron Freeman wants a full review of who can access the data and for how long. Meanwhile the locals are moving first: in the 30 days to Sep 22, 2026, Fort Wayne, Chesterton and the counties of Marshall, Starke, Kosciusko and Noble voted to cancel or not renew. NOT ESTABLISHED: bill text, sponsor list, or any hearing date. A claim that Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith urged Fort Wayne to reject Flock could not be sourced and is not relied on here.

Monroe County commissioners voted 2-0 on July 23, 2026 to terminate the county's Flock Safety agreement and have all six automated license plate readers taken down, choosing to eat a $3,000 removal charge -- up to $500 per camera -- rather than let the contract run to its September 2027 expiry. Commissioner Julie Thomas moved to approve the termination letter, Jody Madeira gave what she called an enthusiastic second, and Lee Jones was absent. The original 2021 deal was $16,500 for six cameras at high-traffic locations, with a two-year term that auto-renewed in two-year blocks. What makes this one worth reading closely is that Thomas did not argue the cameras had failed. She said they had helped find missing people and investigate crimes, that the technology has a role, and that giving it up was unfortunate -- and then said the national record of how the data has been abused had changed the balance for her anyway. County attorney Jeff Cockerill said residents had asked the commissioners to review the contract. Sheriff Ruben Marte agreed to the termination, his office confirming it was in keeping with the values of most county residents, which removes the usual sheriff-versus-board dynamic entirely. The 2021 agreement obliges Flock to remove the cameras within a reasonable time but sets no deadline; Madeira asked whether the county could hood them meanwhile and Thomas said no, the county should not alter equipment it does not own. Thomas said she would prefer locally controlled technology that keeps the Amber and Silver Alert benefits without the national network. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor yet, but an explicitly stated appetite for one. Commissioner Julie Thomas did not argue the cameras had failed -- she said they had helped find missing people and investigate crimes and that giving them up was unfortunate -- and said she would PREFER LOCALLY CONTROLLED TECHNOLOGY that keeps the Amber and Silver Alert benefits without the national network. That is a specification for a replacement, not a rejection of plate reading, so treat this record as likely to change.

Bloomington let its Flock ALPR contract lapse on March 5, 2026 and did not renew, though the mayor only disclosed it on April 15 -- six weeks after the expiry, and one day before a city council deadline for the administration to hand over information about the system. The pressure behind it was substantial: an estimated 700 people rallied outside city hall on January 30 linking the cameras to immigration enforcement and movement tracking, and the mayor said then that cancellation was one of the options. The city's inventory ran to 11 fixed plate readers, four fixed video cameras and four mobile trailers combining plate reading, video and gunshot detection. On July 23, 2026 the mayor's office said all the plate readers had been removed and the Flock contract cancelled. Two caveats keep this from being closed. In June a local Democratic Socialists working group demanded documented proof that every device was gone, noting residents had no way to verify it, and asked that future surveillance contracts require council approval. And the city's own wording distinguishes plate readers from other kinds of cameras, which is the crux -- Flock sells devices and services beyond dedicated ALPRs, so a cancelled ALPR contract is not necessarily an exit. On July 23 a Monroe County commissioner publicly urged the city to finish the job, saying cameras were still out there and could be found online. SUCCESSOR CHECK: NO SUCCESSOR FOUND -- and note the grade of that answer. State-level and national searching surfaced nothing indicating a replacement vendor here, but no source positively confirms what the agency did next, so this is negative evidence rather than a verified exit. Two cheap ways to firm it up: Flock's own transparency portal marks departed agencies "[Inactive]" and publishes their data-sharing counts, and the Who Approved This tracker records how each contract was authorised.

TOWN COUNCIL REJECTED FLOCK 3-2 IN DECEMBER 2025. The proposal was a two-year subscription for plate readers on Whiteland Road at $3,000 per camera per year. Against: Tim Brown, Brad Goedeker, Joe Sayler. For: council president Richard Hill and vice president Deb Hendrickson. No contract was signed. Roll call as relayed by the Who Approved This project from Daily Journal reporting; the paper's own page could not be read for this record. NOT ESTABLISHED: the meeting date -- the council minutes would settle it.

Local group Flock Out of SW IN is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

Police suspended the programme citing privacy and data security concerns, a departmental decision rather than a council vote. SOURCING: recorded from a public-records compilation of terminated and paused Flock contracts (Aug 28 2026 edition) which supplies the agency, action type, date and the primary linked here; the primary has not been read directly in every case, so provenance is marked accordingly.

Police declined to renew the contract. With Indianola three days earlier and Coralville in February, Iowa records three separate departments stepping back inside seven months. SOURCING: recorded from a public-records compilation of terminated and paused Flock contracts (Aug 28 2026 edition) which supplies the agency, action type, date and the primary linked here; the primary has not been read directly in every case, so provenance is marked accordingly.

Coralville's City Council voted in February 2026 to cancel its existing Flock ALPR contract. SUCCESSOR CHECK: NO SUCCESSOR FOUND -- and note the grade of that answer. State-level and national searching surfaced nothing indicating a replacement vendor here, but no source positively confirms what the agency did next, so this is negative evidence rather than a verified exit. Two cheap ways to firm it up: Flock's own transparency portal marks departed agencies "[Inactive]" and publishes their data-sharing counts, and the Who Approved This tracker records how each contract was authorised.

Local group Eyes Off Cedar Rapids is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

RETENTION CUT PLANNED: 30 DAYS TO 14, THEN 7. Haysville Police Chief Jeff Whitfield plans to shorten how long the city keeps data from its eight Flock cameras, bought in 2022 -- to 14 days by the end of September 2026 and 7 days by the end of the year, the Wichita Eagle reported on Sep 20. He cited privacy concerns raised at City Council meetings and local misuse cases in which officers tracked former partners, and described it as meeting residents in the middle. The cameras stay. The change is the chief's, not a council ordinance, so a future chief could reverse it. Next door, Wichita faces a state-constitutional lawsuit over its roughly 200 cameras. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the 14-day setting is in force; Flock's transparency portal for Haysville would show it.

The police department cancelled so that residents would feel heard and respected on their concerns. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The city voted unanimously to terminate over privacy concerns. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

SUED UNDER THE KANSAS CONSTITUTION. On July 29, 2026 Wichita machinist Mason Grimmett, represented by the Kansas Justice Institute, sued the city in Sedgwick County District Court, arguing its network of roughly 200 Flock cameras -- about 900,000 vehicle photos a month -- is warrantless, suspicionless tracking barred by the Kansas Bill of Rights. He asks the court to declare the program unlawful and order it stopped. The city says policy bars comment on pending litigation and points to its transparency portal. MONEY: the $1.6 million federal grant that bought the network expired Mar 31, 2026, and in April council members asked staff to explain who pays now. Local misuse cases the suit cites: a former Kechi lieutenant convicted of tracking his estranged wife, and a former Sedgwick police chief who resigned after tracking an ex-girlfriend. Local group Sunflower Privacy Alliance is organizing against the network. NOT ESTABLISHED: any hearing date.

Lenexa is the case that proves the fight is bigger than one company: the city runs NO Flock cameras at all, yet operates plate readers from three separate vendors -- Axon, Genetec and Leonardo. Resident Canyen Ashworth's plate was recorded by city ALPRs roughly 150 times in under two years, and police used that data to investigate him after he wrote a column criticizing the department. He has since joined the DeFlock movement. Dropping Flock would change nothing here, which is why campaigners increasingly push vendor-neutral rules instead of vendor-specific cancellations.

Lawrence has bought from Axon since 2019, and in 2024 city commissioners approved a consolidated contract adding Fusus that totals about $3.2 million through January 2029. The agenda item noted more than 100 terabytes of evidence already sat in Axon's storage and that moving it would be 'overwhelming' -- the lock-in critics warn about. 'They are trying to basically make the cost to the customer to switch vendors too high a barrier,' privacy advocate Lipton said, adding that real-time crime centers 'really encourage the adoption of additional surveillance tools.' A real-time operations center appeared in the city's draft capital plan but was not recommended for funding.

COUNCIL CANCELLED FLOCK 4-1, AND THE NEXT DAY POLICE DISCLOSED TWO OFFICERS HAD MISUSED IT. Eastpointe, Michigan's City Council voted 4-1 on Sep 15, 2026 to end its Flock plate-reader contract over privacy concerns; Councilman Rob Baker was the lone no. On Sep 16 the police department said two officers had misused the system -- one for personal reasons, one breaking policy during a real investigation. Chief Corey Haines had argued to keep it, crediting the cameras with 39 solved crimes in 2024, 54 in 2025 and 46 so far in 2026, and had already cut retention from 30 days to 7. Mayor Michael Klinefelt called it a pause until proper safeguards exist -- so a return is possible. NOT established: whether the cameras are physically down, and what happened to the two officers. The city had prepaid roughly $52,000 a year through May 2027.

The Oceana County sheriff cancelled a 90-day Flock trial ONE WEEK IN, following significant negative public feedback. It is the shortest deployment recorded on this map -- shorter even than Grafton's month -- and one of a set of cancellations that happened before the technology was in service at all: Watertown and East Bridgewater Massachusetts, Weston Missouri, Siskiyou County California, Lane County Oregon, Newport Kentucky, Sumpter Township Michigan and Hartford Kentucky all stopped before or during installation. Free trials appear repeatedly in that group, which is worth noting: a trial creates the public moment that a signed contract avoids.

A local DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENCY ended its Flock contract in Dickinson County, which prompted the sheriff to cover all of the county's cameras. The mechanism is worth recording: the decision was not made by the county board or the sheriff but by a partner agency, and the county's coverage collapsed with it. Where several agencies share one deployment, any of them leaving can end it for the rest -- the mirror image of the shared-access problem this map records elsewhere, where data spreads to agencies a council never approved.

The township cancelled before installation after community backlash. NOTE ON THE SOURCE: IJ's database lists this jurisdiction TWICE -- once as Sumpter Township and once as Sumpter County, Michigan, which does not exist -- with different outcome categories. Even the most structured source available on this subject carries duplicates, which is why every count of these cancellations, including ours, should be read as a floor rather than a census. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The city council adopted a resolution to terminate ALL of the city's Flock contracts -- the plural matters, since a city can hold several agreements covering different products, and ending one leaves the others running. SOURCING: recorded from a public-records compilation of terminated and paused Flock contracts (Aug 28 2026 edition) which supplies the agency, action type, date and the primary linked here; the primary has not been read directly in every case, so provenance is marked accordingly.

THE RENEWAL SURVIVED A RECONSIDERATION. Warren has run Flock ALPR since 2021, and on Jul 14, 2026 the City Council voted 4-3 to extend the contract for a second two-year term at $132,000. The sequence is the record: Councilwoman Melody Magee had been part of a 4-2 majority approving the extension in June, then asked to reconsider her own vote, and voted against it on the retake along with Angela Rogensues and Henry Newnan. Mindy Moore, Gary Boike, Dave Dwyer and Jonathan Lafferty carried it. Magee said she accepted the cameras can aid public safety and reduce pursuits but concluded the agreement lacked sufficient privacy safeguards for residents. Ferndale Councilwoman Laura Mikulski travelled to speak against it, telling Warren that her own city cancelled after outside agencies searched its network giving vague reasons. Police Commissioner Eric Hawkins said he respected the opposition arguments but maintained the technology has great value. Lafferty framed his yes vote as buying the council an audit opportunity and said they would watch the access logs. A council member publicly reversing herself on ALPR and still losing the vote is why this is recorded as an outcome rather than left as an open campaign.

Westland let its Flock Safety contract lapse in July 2026 rather than renew it, with the existing cameras to come down when the contract expires. A councilmember said months of public meetings raised questions about privacy, government surveillance, transparency and oversight, and called the outcome proof that resident voices shape city decisions. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. Note the mechanism, which differs from every other Michigan case -- Police Chief Kyle Dawley simply DECLINED TO BRING the expiring contract to the City Council for renewal, so no vote was ever held. Dawley said the council was "deeply split," and the city expected to be without cameras by the end of July 2026. A chief letting a contract lapse to avoid a losing vote is a different political route than a council defeating one, and it leaves no roll call to point at.

Bay City commissioners voted 6-2 not to move forward with a Flock Safety contract after the ACLU testified about the lack of statewide ALPR safeguards in Michigan -- another Michigan community declining the cameras before they ever went up.

City Council voted down renewal of the city's four-camera Flock program. A police officer resigned in protest at the meeting. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. The renewal -- two years at $12,000/yr for four fixed cameras at city entry points -- failed on a 3-3 tie on May 5, 2026 after roughly two hours of testimony and a Q&A with Flock representatives; a tie is short of a majority, so the contract simply died. Peltonen, Slowinski and Speshock voted no; Moffitt, O'Rourke and Tinlin voted to renew. The aftermath is the part worth keeping: two Clawson officers threatened to quit at the council meeting, and the school resource officer, Lindsay Brozich, slapped her badge down on the podium and left it there as she walked away; Sgt. Paul Korb said he was considering leaving. Chief Kellie Bauss declined to say whether anyone actually left. DATE CONTRADICTION, UNRESOLVED: the council vote was May 5, 2026, but the Who Approved This contract tracker records Clawson as canceled July 14, 2026 -- possibly a separate formal termination. Sources disagree and no primary document was found.

Oakland County's Board of Commissioners voted 13-4 in April 2026 to approve Flock's 'Project Prove It' program -- seven autonomous drones responding to 911 calls across Michigan's second-largest county. Residents testified against it until midnight over data-security and immigration-sharing fears; the board voted before public comment, adding only a data-ownership amendment.

Menominee, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula across the river from Wisconsin, cancelled its Flock Safety contract in early 2026, joining a cluster of nearby northeast Wisconsin communities that dropped the license-plate-reader vendor over privacy concerns. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor found. Reported as cancelled by March 31, 2026 -- the earliest of the Michigan departures.

Milford is among the Michigan communities that decided not to renew their contracts with Flock Safety, joining Westland, Ferndale and Clawson as license-plate readers faced growing scrutiny across the state over privacy and data sharing. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor found. Milford voted to cancel after the beginning of May 2026, one of four Metro Detroit cities to leave Flock since November. Police Chief Scott Tarasiewicz declined to comment until the contract debate was "fully resolved."

CORRECTED CLASSIFICATION. Ferndale decided not to renew its Flock Safety contract, one of several Michigan cities -- alongside Westland, Milford and Clawson -- to walk away from the vendor amid privacy and data-sharing concerns. But the council then took up a contract with AXON for licence-plate cameras instead. The plate reading did not end; it changed logos. This record was previously marked `removed`, which was wrong on its own text: a city that replaces one vendor's plate readers with another's has switched, not stopped, and calling it a removal overstates what residents achieved. Found by re-reading our own records rather than by any new search.

After three wrongful arrests of Black men, Detroit adopted some of the nation's strongest limits on police facial recognition. A 2019 Board of Police Commissioners policy added oversight and weekly reporting, and a 2024 settlement in Williams v. City of Detroit barred arrests or lineups based solely on a face match, required corroborating evidence, mandated training, and forced an audit of every case since 2017. Detroit police use of the technology fell about 91% from 2023 to 2025.

ITASCA COUNTY TOOK ITS FLOCK CAMERAS DOWN ON SEPT 10 -- MOST WERE ALREADY GONE. Commissioner Terry Snyder said the county removed its plate readers and cancelled its contracts, citing residents' privacy worries and not knowing what Flock does with the data. State BCA figures put the county at more than a dozen readers, but only about five were still standing: others had been cut down or vandalized, and Flock wanted the county to pay to replace them. Sheriff Joe Dasovich called the contract easy money to cut. The county's exit does not make the area Flock-free: the Grand Rapids Police Department runs nine readers of its own inside city limits, and those are the city council's call. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the county board voted in public, and what the contract cost.

ST. PAUL IS PULLING ITS TWO FLOCK CAMERAS -- BUT THE SHERIFF'S READERS INSIDE THE CITY STAY ON. On Aug 26, 2026 the City Council voted 7-0 for a resolution, sponsored by Anika Bowie after Council President Rebecca Noecker proposed it, urging both the city and Ramsey County to end their Flock contracts. The same day Mayor Kaohly Her and Police Chief Axel Henry said the city's two cameras would come down, citing concern that other jurisdictions accessed data during Operation Metro Surge, and asked the Legislature for statewide privacy standards. Noecker said the council never saw the contract when it was approved in February. The county is outside the council's reach: the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office still operates multiple plate readers countywide, including within St. Paul, and the sheriff has publicly defended them. The ask for residents is therefore at the county board and sheriff, not City Hall. NOT ESTABLISHED: the removal date and any county response. THE COUNCIL ALSO BLOCKED A POLICE DRONE EXPANSION. Two weeks after voting 7-0 to end Flock, on Sep 10, 2026 the council pulled a resolution to accept a $200,000 federal grant to grow the police drone programme, which has flown Skydio drones since 2023. Opponents raised Skydio's ties to ICE and the Israeli military and the lack of public input when the programme began; members said they will not back expansion until police answer their questions. The existing drones keep flying. NOT ESTABLISHED: the fleet size and whether the grant can return.

ALL EIGHT CAMERAS WERE STOLEN, AND POLICE DECIDED NOT TO PUT THEM BACK. Between Jul 29 and Aug 1, 2026 every Flock camera in Winona was cut down and taken from its pole along Highways 61, 14 and 43 -- about $24,000 of equipment. On Aug 12 Winona Police said they would not replace them, citing community trust as the foundation of policing while still saying the cameras had value. Recorded without endorsement: the theft is a crime under investigation with no suspects named, and it is the destruction plus local opposition, not a council vote, that ended the programme. King William County, Virginia made the same call after vandalism the same month.

NORTH BRANCH COUNCIL CANCELLED FLOCK UNANIMOUSLY ON AUG 12, 2026 -- THREE MONTHS AFTER APPROVING IT 3-2. The May 2026 approval authorized seven readers; three were mounted but never switched on, because activation stopped once residents pushed back. Council members Jim Ibinger and Patrick Meacham rejected describing the step as a 'pause', and the final vote ended the arrangement outright. The equipment is leased, so the city administrator is working with Flock on removal, and the timing is the company's. Mayor Kevin Schieber said the city needs to build trust before any such tool returns. A useful case for anyone tracking how fast approvals unwind: a split council vote in May became a unanimous reversal by August without a single camera going live. NOT ESTABLISHED: how each member voted in May, the contract cost, and the date the three readers come down.

POLICE DROPPED FLOCK AND KEPT PLATE READING. Duluth Police notified Flock on Aug 3, 2026 that it would not renew a 12-month, grant-funded contract, which ended Sep 7, 2026. The city's own release says the department will continue to use automated plate-recognition applications and credits ALPR with helping solve significant crimes. Recorded as a switch rather than a removal for that reason: Duluth changed tools, not policy. The city gave no reason for leaving Flock; a public-records compilation attributes it to vandalism and community concern, which the release does not say. NOT ESTABLISHED: how many Flock cameras there were, and which plate-reading tools remain in use -- a records request for current ALPR vendors would settle it.

The Isanti County sheriff cited BUDGET CONSIDERATIONS rather than controversy for cancelling the county's Flock contract, and the reporting drew that distinction explicitly. Cost appears repeatedly across this map as the stated reason -- Kingston Tennessee on financial concerns, Killingworth Connecticut deciding the cameras were not worth it, Greenfield Massachusetts running out of funds, Clearwater County Idaho citing utility and funding, Winston Oregon amid budget cuts, Salida Colorado over a lack of results. Recording it accurately matters in both directions: it would be wrong to count these as privacy victories, and equally wrong to leave them out, since a programme that cannot justify its cost is a real outcome for residents who argued it was not worth the money.

The sheriff cancelled BEFORE THE TRIAL PERIOD ENDED over community concerns. With Oceana County MI at one week and West St. Paul, the free-trial route keeps producing early exits: a trial creates the public moment a signed contract avoids. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The city manager cancelled the city's trial contract after community pushback. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

ST. LOUIS COUNTY'S SHERIFF ENDED A 10-CAMERA FLOCK PILOT IN AUGUST 2026 -- AFTER HALF THE CAMERAS WERE STOLEN. Sheriff Gordon Ramsay said the results did not justify the cost and that opposition came from across the political spectrum, including concern that immigration agents could reach the data. The county had installed ten readers from December 2023; five were stolen over summer 2026, per CBS Minnesota. Flock was to remove the remaining units at the end of August. Ramsay did not reject the technology itself: he said there is a need for it and that the county, the public and vendors should settle what is acceptable -- so a successor system is possible. It follows Duluth, the county seat, which ended its own Flock contract the same month. NOT ESTABLISHED: the exact decision date (reports conflict between Aug 10 and Aug 14), the contract cost, and whether the stolen cameras were recovered.

Minneapolis police asked the City Council for a 75-day, no-cost trial of Skydio 'Drone as First Responder' aircraft: two marked drones based at Fire Station 14, launched on 911 calls in the Fourth Precinct -- which covers much of North Minneapolis and is majority Black -- to reach scenes before officers and stream live video to dispatch. The department put the case on response time, a median of seven minutes and 48 seconds on the northside against a projected two, and Mayor Jacob Frey supported it. On July 16, 2026 the council deadlocked 6-6 and the contract failed. The mechanics matter: the deciding vote was cast by Council Vice President Jamal Osman, a co-sponsor, who switched sides over Skydio's drone sales to the Israeli military and its Department of Homeland Security immigration work -- a concern with local weight, since ICE had run Operation Metro Surge in the city roughly six months before. Forty residents testified against the pilot at the July 8 committee hearing and none in favour; more than a hundred filled the chambers and overflow room on the day. Police released thermal footage four days earlier showing a drone locating a missing 82-year-old veteran in nine minutes after a three-and-a-half-hour ground search failed, and it changed nothing. Two caveats against filing this as settled: a motion to keep the proposal off future agendas failed on the same 6-6 count, so it can come back, and the vote does not end other police drone use here. St. Paul, Minnetonka, Rochester, Brooklyn Park and Duluth all run or are building the same programme on the same vendor's hardware, which leaves Minneapolis the exception in its own metro rather than the start of a trend.

City Council voted unanimously to remove all of the city's Flock cameras after privacy concerns; several had already been taken down before the final vote. SUCCESSOR CHECK: NO SUCCESSOR FOUND -- and note the grade of that answer. State-level and national searching surfaced nothing indicating a replacement vendor here, but no source positively confirms what the agency did next, so this is negative evidence rather than a verified exit. Two cheap ways to firm it up: Flock's own transparency portal marks departed agencies "[Inactive]" and publishes their data-sharing counts, and the Who Approved This tracker records how each contract was authorised.

The police department let its roughly $24,000 Flock contract expire, citing customer-service complaints and cases where outside agencies queried its data without meeting Minnesota's case-number and reasonable-suspicion requirements, and moved to Axon license plate readers without the data-sharing function.

The City Council voted to shut off its lone license plate reader until an audit of the data could confirm how and with whom the information was being shared, amid resident concerns heightened by the federal immigration surge.

Minneapolis banned police use of facial recognition, the city where George Floyd was killed the previous year.

Statewide group Minnesota Privacy Project is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

COUNCIL SENT THE FLOCK REVIEW TO COMMITTEE 5-3 -- NO DEADLINE UNTIL MID-2027. At its September 2026 meeting the City Council voted to refer Councilman Brandon Jenson's resolution seeking information on the city's plate-reader cameras to the Plans and Policies Committee rather than hold a public hearing. Mayor Jeff Schrag, who moved the referral, said a committee could follow up on questions as they arise; Jenson said it took away the public's chance to weigh in at the start and that he learned of the motion three hours beforehand. Flock Out SGF's Isaac Protiva said a member had described committee as where bills go to die. Two people were cited for disrupting the meeting. NOT ESTABLISHED: the full roll call, the camera count, and when the committee first takes it up.

MISSOURI'S GOVERNOR PUT A 30-DAY DELETION RULE ON PLATE READERS BY EXECUTIVE ORDER. Gov. Mike Kehoe signed Executive Order 26-18 on Sep 16, 2026, directing the Department of Public Safety to set safeguards for state agencies and state-funded police: most plate data deleted within 30 days, vendors barred from selling or sharing Missouri data, use limited to criminal-justice and lifesaving purposes, no facial recognition bolted on, and misuse reported for possible loss of an officer's licence. Flock is named. Kehoe tied it to constitutional rights; his public-safety director still calls the readers valuable. THE LIMITS: other local agencies are only asked to comply voluntarily, no compliance date is stated, and an executive order can be rescinded by the next governor -- which is why it asks the Legislature to write it into law. Rep. Jeff Vernetti, who filed a statewide ban in 2025, expects dozens of bills in 2027. Ask DPS when the rules issue and which agencies they bind.

LOUISIANA, MISSOURI SWITCHED OFF ITS 7 FLOCK CAMERAS ON AUG 21, 2026 -- AND THE COUNCIL HAS NOT DECIDED WHAT COMES NEXT. Police Chief Josh Baker covered the cameras after St. Charles County disclosed that one of its employees had used Flock for personal, non-police purposes, and said safeguards such as monthly audits are needed. At a packed public hearing on Aug 24, with a Flock representative present, two proposals were on the table: Baker's plan to keep five of the seven cameras under tighter privacy rules, and Councilmember Woodrow Polston's ordinance to remove all seven. After two hours the council made no decision. The case is a direct knock-on from a misuse finding in another county, not a local one. What to ask: when the Polston ordinance is scheduled for a vote. NOT ESTABLISHED: any vote since Aug 24 and whether the cameras are still covered.

SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCED IT WOULD STOP USING FLOCK in the week of Aug 20, 2026, after community opposition. A public-records compilation of terminated contracts and the Institute for Justice both say the department will cover the cameras and will not move to Axon. CORRECTION: an earlier version of this record said Pulaski would keep reading plates with another vendor and quoted a Sheriff Frisz. That was wrong -- the quotes belong to Police Chief Kurt Frisz of the St. Charles County Police Department, reported in the same KCUR article, and are now on the St. Charles County record. NOT ESTABLISHED: camera count and removal date; the department's own Facebook announcement is the primary.

POLICE DROPPED FLOCK AFTER A CIVILIAN EMPLOYEE'S MISUSE -- AND KEPT PLATE READERS FROM ANOTHER COMPANY. St. Charles County Police covered all 28 Flock cameras (20 in parks, 8 on streets) and told Flock it was discontinuing service in the week of Aug 20, 2026. Police Chief Kurt Frisz said he learned of the searches two days after Flock showed him an audit tool, called the misuse egregious, and promised audits of every user including himself. He also said the county still runs plate readers from another, unnamed vendor, which he described as better quality with more checks, and credited plate readers with 30 to 50 felony arrests a year. Recorded as a switch: the county changed suppliers after a misuse case, it did not stop reading plates. NOT ESTABLISHED: the replacement vendor, and whether the employee faces charges.

Bolivar voted unanimously to cancel its Flock contract AND TO BAN automated licence plate readers outright. Sedona, Arizona did the same in September 2025, permanently ending its programme and prohibiting ALPRs. A ban is materially different from a cancellation: it forecloses the vendor switch that this map records again and again, where a council ends one contract and the department returns with another company's cameras months later.

The sheriff said the county would not renew when the contract expires in MARCH 2027, after community feedback. One of the few forward-dated exits here: the decision is made, the cameras keep running until then. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the expiry proceeds as announced. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The police chief said the contract would not be renewed following backlash. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority moved to put AI facial-recognition cameras on buses -- checking riders' faces against banned-rider, missing-person, and law-enforcement watch lists -- via SafeSpace Global. After funding delays and privacy pushback (a board member and the ACLU and EFF object), the pilot was postponed but the agency plans to expand it to as many as 30 buses in fall 2026.

The Dutchtown Community Improvement District voted to end its contract for eight Flock cameras when it expired in June 2026 and sought a partial refund, after a resident petition citing the company's data-sharing relationship with ICE. SUCCESSOR CHECK: NO SUCCESSOR FOUND -- and note the grade of that answer. State-level and national searching surfaced nothing indicating a replacement vendor here, but no source positively confirms what the agency did next, so this is negative evidence rather than a verified exit. Two cheap ways to firm it up: Flock's own transparency portal marks departed agencies "[Inactive]" and publishes their data-sharing counts, and the Who Approved This tracker records how each contract was authorised.

Weston's Board of Aldermen canceled the town's Flock contract about five months after voting in December 2025 to buy two cameras for $45,000, following resident organizing; the mayor said no money was paid. SUCCESSOR CHECK: NO SUCCESSOR FOUND -- and note the grade of that answer. State-level and national searching surfaced nothing indicating a replacement vendor here, but no source positively confirms what the agency did next, so this is negative evidence rather than a verified exit. Two cheap ways to firm it up: Flock's own transparency portal marks departed agencies "[Inactive]" and publishes their data-sharing counts, and the Who Approved This tracker records how each contract was authorised.

Seneca ended its Flock programme after LESS THAN 90 DAYS, citing security concerns. It belongs with the very short deployments this map records -- Oceana County cancelled a trial one week in, Grafton deactivated after a month, Stoughton after three, Oshkosh rescinded within 24 hours of approving. Short deployments undercut the argument that communities need years of data to judge these systems: several decided within weeks of switching them on.

Local DeFlock chapter DeFlock Joplin is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

Local DeFlock chapter DeFlock STL is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

Local DeFlock chapter DeFlock U City is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

Ord voted unanimously to remove its Flock cameras following backlash -- reported as the FIRST NEBRASKA CITY to do so. A town of roughly 2,000 people, and the only Nebraska entry in IJ's cancellation database. First-in-state cancellations are worth marking because the pattern this map keeps showing is regional: Massachusetts, Arizona, Texas, Arkansas and Wisconsin each moved in clusters, and a cluster starts somewhere.

MONROE VOTED 5-0 TO TAKE DOWN ITS 23 FLOCK CAMERAS. On Sep 22, 2026 the five council members present voted unanimously to remove the city's plate readers, with Mayor Keith Funk and Vice Mayor Christina McElfresh excused. The city had already paid $73,000 on a contract that runs to June 2027. Police had pointed to the cameras' role in heading off a potential murder and finding a teenager in crisis; members weighed that against privacy, data-security and constitutional concerns, and one called it his hardest vote on council. Earlier the council had moved to approve every Flock invoice itself. NOT ESTABLISHED: the removal date and whether any prepaid money comes back.

MOUNT VERNON WILL LET ITS FLOCK CONTRACT RUN OUT ON 25 OCT 2026 AND THEN BAR PLATE READERS FOR A YEAR. City Council gave first reading on 15 Sep to legislation, supported by the police and the administration, that lets the contract expire unrenewed and starts a 12-month moratorium on plate-reader cameras, including anyone else's camera on city property. Safety-Service Director Tanner Salyers cited public opposition, constitutional concerns, uncertain federal grant money and the expectation that Ohio will legislate on plate readers in 2027. The city ran eight Flock cameras; the county sheriff had already turned down 17 grant-funded ones in August. NOT ESTABLISHED: the final council vote, whether stored plate data will be deleted, and whether police can still query private Flock cameras. Watch the second reading.

THE COUNTY TRIED TO CANCEL AND COULD NOT. Lucas County commissioners voted 2-1 on Jul 22, 2025 to rescind a Flock contract they had approved a week earlier. Sheriff Mike Navarre had already signed it, called the move retaliation over a jail dispute, and threatened court. Three days later Prosecutor Julia Bates ruled the rescission void because the contract was already approved and executed. The cameras stayed, on a contract running to 2029. A year on, Commissioner Pete Gerken reopened it: on Aug 17, 2026 he said county data had been searched more than 900,000 times by about 3,200 agencies in a single month, and asked for a pause and an independent audit. The sheriff refused and called the readers a game changer. Recorded as contesting. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether any audit has been commissioned.

COUNCIL VOTED DOWN THE FLOCK AMENDMENT 4-3 ON AUG 11, 2026. Against: Clark DeVitis, Christopher Meager, Jeff Noble, Justin Speight. For: Chris Humphrey, Gerard Neugebauer, Richard Brandenburg. The money at stake was $41,000 a year, $92,100 over the contract. THE CITY DOES NOT OWN THE CAMERAS: Green is policed under contract by the Summit County Sheriff's Office, and the 14 Flock cameras sit in that contract. The majority wanted a clause letting Green out if Flock changes hands; Summit County Council refused it. That makes Green another case where a contract-policed city argues over surveillance it does not control. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the cameras keep running -- the law director referred the result to the county, and the local paper said the effect on camera use was unclear. Ask Summit County whether Green's cameras are still active.

KNOX COUNTY'S SHERIFF TURNED DOWN 17 GRANT-FUNDED FLOCK CAMERAS BEFORE ANY WENT UP. On Aug 5, 2026 Sheriff Daniel Weckesser declined a $54,000 state Project Safe Neighborhoods grant for the cameras. His reasons were practical as much as principled: the risk of hacking and data being sold, thin safeguards, the staff time public-records requests would demand, and roughly $1,000 per camera if residents vandalised them. He called it a pause and said the office could revisit the idea if the technology's data protections improve. The county seat is not Flock-free: the Mount Vernon Police Department runs 8 Flock cameras of its own, unaffected by the sheriff's decision. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the grant money was redirected, and whether Mount Vernon's contract is under any review.

The sheriff had the cameras removed after gathering community feedback. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

The sheriff ordered removal after losing community support for the programme. Recorded from the Institute for Justice cancellation database, which links the primary cited here; the primary has not been read directly, so the summary is IJ's.

OXFORD, OHIO ENDED ITS FLOCK CAMERA PROGRAMME IN AUGUST 2026. City council terminated the contract, FOX19, Local 12 and Ohio public radio station WYSU reported on Aug 19, amid growing criticism; WYSU paired it with residents elsewhere in Butler County protesting for the same thing. Oxford is the Miami University town, north of Cincinnati. NOT ESTABLISHED: the meeting date, the vote count and how many cameras the city ran. Ask the city clerk for the Aug 2026 minutes.

Cleveland kept its cameras -- for now. The Safety Committee first voted 3-1 against renewing the roughly $250,000 Flock contract on June 17, 2026, and the deal expired June 29 though the cameras stayed on; the committee then reversed course on July 8, and on July 15 the full City Council approved a six-month, $125,000 extension by 9-6 after a heated debate. Council deliberately halved the term to press Mayor Justin Bibb to find a new vendor faster, and added contract fines. Guardrails now bar immigration-related and vague 'other' searches, and only Cleveland officers can search the data -- outside departments must sign individual agreements. That leaves City Hall until late December to either switch vendors or stay with Flock. Update, July 2026: after the safety committee voted 3-1 against renewing the $250,000 contract and it expired June 29, the roughly 100 cameras did not go dark -- they remained on, with police still using them days past expiry. Cleveland joined Cambridge and Eugene on the list of cities where terminating a Flock contract and actually ending the surveillance turned out to be two different things; the vote only counts if the cameras obey it. Update, July 15, 2026: after the safety committee's June vote to end the $250,000 contract, full council reversed and renewed Flock through December 29 -- but only six months, and with an amendment barring the DHS-managed Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center from the city's camera data. Police said Flock helped find suspects in 25 of Cleveland's 53 homicides this year and that ICE database access was disabled in fall 2025. The wrinkle that made national news: after the earlier committee vote to shut the cameras down, the 100+ cameras stayed on and police kept using them -- the same cameras-don't-die pattern seen in Cambridge and Eugene.

Bucking the national trend, Colerain Township's three trustees voted unanimously July 2026 to approve $70,000 for a Flock (or comparable) license-plate-reader trial -- reversing the township's earlier opposition, where prior attempts to buy the cameras never even reached a vote. A reminder that the wave runs both directions: as dozens of cities drop Flock over data concerns, others are signing on for the first time.

Flock cameras became the center of a City Council debate in June 2026 over whether the data could aid federal immigration enforcement.

City Council rejected a Flock camera system for the second time in nine months. The first refusal killed an $80,000 proposal for 15 cameras; the second turned down a scaled-back version of four cameras at two points along Barber Road, even though a local auto dealership had offered to pay for the system outright for two years after a run of vehicle and catalytic-converter thefts. Council members said business support was broad but residents remained opposed. Councilwoman Charlotte Whipkey said she lacked confidence the systems would not be abused; Councilman Doug DeHarpart said that as a business owner he backed them but his constituents did not. The free-to-the-city funding offer is what makes this record useful -- cost was not the obstacle, and removing the price still did not carry the vote.

403 IMMIGRATION AND CIVIL SEARCHES RAN THROUGH A CITY THAT FORBIDS THEM. The activist group Shake Off Flock found that between December 2025 and April 2026 outside agencies searched Shaker Heights' Flock data 273 times citing 'immigration' and 130 times citing 'civil/administrative' reasons, Cleveland Scene reported on May 12, 2026. The city acknowledged the searches broke its existing policy against helping with civil immigration enforcement and changed its terms: no jurisdiction may run immigration or civil searches of Shaker Heights data, and outside agencies must acknowledge that before getting access. The 18 cameras stay. Shake Off Flock says a ban on the word 'immigration' only hides the same searches under other labels. NOT ESTABLISHED: which agencies ran the searches, and how the city will detect a search logged under another reason.

Indefinitely suspended its ALPR program, covered all 72 cameras with trash bags pending removal, and canceled a planned 27-camera expansion, after finding about 7,100 immigration-related searches. The commission has not yet voted to cancel the contract; residents are demanding full removal.

KENT STATE CANCELLED A TRIAL AGREEMENT with Flock Safety after public pushback, reported by The Portager on May 8, 2026. It was a trial, not a full contract. It came six months after Kent City Council voted down a separate Flock contract for the city police in November 2025. NOT ESTABLISHED: who at the university made the call, how many cameras the trial involved, and whether any were installed. Campus police forces are a category this map barely holds: a university runs its own contract under its own governing body, separate from the city around it.

The local group DeflockUA is organizing against the city ALPR program, which expanded from 6 to 20 cameras. Active local pushback, no council reversal yet.

KENT CITY COUNCIL SAID NO TO A FLOCK CONTRACT ON NOV 5, 2025. The council voted against letting the Kent Police Department sign with Flock Safety, after first delaying the decision and extending its timeline as residents raised concerns and council members cooled on the system following reports about how Flock data is shared. It was one of the earlier Ohio rejections of the 2025-26 wave, and it preceded Kent State University's decision to cancel its own Flock trial in spring 2026 -- two separate bodies in the same town reaching the same answer. NOT ESTABLISHED: the vote count and how each member voted, how many cameras and what cost the police proposal carried, and whether the department has since sought another vendor.

Dayton decided to stop using ShotSpotter, part of a wave of cities concluding the technology did not reduce gun violence enough to justify the cost.

Local DeFlock chapter DeFlock Lakewood is organizing against ALPR surveillance.

THE SHERIFF SUSPENDED FLOCK ACROSS FIVE AGENCIES ON SEPT 4 -- OVER RECORDS RELEASES, NOT PRIVACY. Winnebago County Sheriff's Office halted use of Flock plate readers for the agencies that run through it, including the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh police, whose camera at the Algoma Boulevard lot entrance is now bagged until further notice. The sheriff's reason was that Flock had released data in bulk in response to public-records requests in other states, which it said could expose investigative data and personal information and even alert a suspect before an arrest. UWO Chief Chris Tarmann said campus work will take longer. It follows Oshkosh's own council rescinding its Flock renewal in April. NOT ESTABLISHED: the other four agencies, how many cameras are covered, and whether the suspension ends.

POLICE COVERED ALL 15 CAMERAS AND ASKED COUNCIL TO END THE CONTRACT, SAYING FLOCK BROKE IT. On Aug 26, 2026 Police Chief Kurt Zempel and the city administrator recommended ending Sheboygan's Flock agreement after finding in July that the company had taken actions that violated the city's contract; they have not said what those were. Zempel said the cameras helped solve crimes but that internal controls and community trust come first. The Common Council vote was set for Sep 8. NOT ESTABLISHED: the Sep 8 result, and the nature of the contract violations -- ask the city for the breach notice. SEP 8: the Common Council voted unanimously to terminate the contract effective Dec 31, 2026; WHBL reports a Flock representative had tried to sell the cameras' data to the city's own public works department.

A PRIVATE BUSINESS PULLED ITS FLOCK CAMERAS DESPITE THE CONTRACT. Eagle Sports Range, a Cudahy gun range, took down its three Flock cameras in early August 2026. It had asked to remove them in February and was told it was bound by contract; after a video about the cameras spread online, it removed them anyway, the general manager saying customer privacy outweighed the contract. Cudahy police did not say whether officers could search the range's cameras. Recorded because private cameras are the part of the network no council votes on -- see the Avondale record -- and this is one of the few documented private exits. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether police had access, and Flock's response to the early removal.

City Council voted to terminate its Flock Safety contract seven months into a two-year, $25,000 agreement, after months of residents packing council meetings in opposition. The resolution has the city pay a $12,500 buyout to exit early, remove all cameras as soon as possible, and delete the data already collected. The police chief defended the original decision as a public-safety measure never intended to invade privacy, and said Flock would not permit the city to buy only the first year -- but confirmed the cameras could come down the next day. Residents argued the program conflicted with the town's values and raised the recording of children without consent. This is the seventh entity in Dane County to end or decline to renew with Flock.

Mayor Jake Woodford moved to stop the city using Flock cameras, requesting removal no later than July 31, 2026, with the Common Council voting July 15 on ending payments and adopting public oversight. Crucially, Appleton also passed Resolution 9-R-26 -- requiring that ANY future ALPR or AI-driven mass-surveillance technology be reviewed and approved by the Common Council before a trial or contract, regardless of vendor. The police department publicly confirmed it has not sought an Axon contract or recommended replacing Flock with Axon. That vendor-neutral review requirement is the guardrail that keeps a Flock removal from quietly becoming a vendor swap. SUCCESSOR CHECK -- NOT AN EXIT. Appleton officials are working to establish new ALPR standards BEFORE INSTALLING NEW CAMERAS, so the city intends to keep automated plate reading with a different supplier and better terms. Reporting on the wider Fox Valley wave says the same of several of its members: they will not work with Flock, but many are working to find a new ALPR vendor. Read the northeast Wisconsin cluster as a rejection of one company plus a procurement reset, not as a region abandoning the technology.