The Los Angeles Police Department suspended its use of about 138 Flock Safety license-plate cameras after the three-year contract expired in July. The city is now negotiating new terms that would restrict who gets the data.

LAPD Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas told ABC7 in July that the department walked away over "serious concerns around civil liberties" tied to data ownership. The proposed new deal would block Flock from sharing plate scans with third parties, keep all data under city control and require the company to report security breaches, Our Weekly reported Sept. 2.

The city is also pushing for civil penalties if Flock shares information with agencies that violate local and state law, Fox 11 reported. That provision targets Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A 2025 CalMatters investigation found Southern California police departments, including LAPD, shared Flock data with ICE and Customs and Border Protection more than 100 times, according to Knock LA.

California law already prohibits local agencies from giving automated license plate reader (ALPR) data to federal or out-of-state agencies.

Scale of the network

Flock is one of three ALPR vendors the city uses. Across all vendors, LAPD cameras logged more than 1.13 billion plate reads in 2024, producing 301,655 hits on plates flagged in law-enforcement databases, according to the New York Post. The department operates about 1,500 squad-car-mounted readers and roughly 160 fixed cameras, mostly on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.

An inspector general audit released in July found that 161 of about 498 stolen-vehicle alerts from Flock cameras over a two-month span were wrong. That is an error rate of roughly 32%, according to Latin Times.

The same audit uncovered contract language giving Flock the right to retain collected data for five years and to use anonymized footage to train machine-learning algorithms, Fortune reported. LAPD has since drafted new terms that would bar any vendor from using city data "to train, fine-tune, or improve any algorithm or artificial-intelligence system."

Officials and activists weigh in

Mayor Karen Bass told a reporter in May, as the New York Post reported in July, "I think those cameras are important, but I think that it is completely unacceptable for them to send that information then to federal officials. We do not want to see that happen."

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition wants the program scrapped entirely. Grace Zhang of the coalition said at a July 14 press conference, as Knock LA reported July 20, that the department's pause amounts to "…damage control in response to the political heat that our communities have created. We refuse to let them steal our demands and turn shutting down the stalker state into reform."

Flock Safety said in a July 11 statement that it was confident ongoing discussions would resolve what it called misconceptions and that it hoped to resume the partnership. CEO Garrett Langley told CBS News on Aug. 14 that California customers are explicitly told the technology cannot be used for immigration enforcement.

No timeline for a new contract has been announced. U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley separately sent Flock CEO Langley a letter Aug. 26 demanding a full accounting of the company's data practices, with a Tuesday, Sept. 8 deadline to respond.