The Nationwide Revolt Against Flock Safety Cameras

Len Phillips had just finished posting a yellow sign underneath the camera when an elderly man pulled up, exited his pickup truck, and shuffled over to take a look. “A.I. camera,” the sign read. “Your movements have just been logged into a private searchable database.” The man gazed up at the camera overhead, then back down. He paused. Then he went back to his truck and pulled out a chainsaw.

“I was like, ‘No, no, no!’” Phillips told me recently regarding the January interaction. “He’s like, ‘Why?’ I was like, ‘That’s just gonna make it worse. They’ll put four over here if you do that!’ And he put it down. He’s like, ‘We have to get rid of these things!’”

Phillips is the head of DeFlock Atlanta, one of many local groups around the country mounting campaigns against Flock Safety. The nation’s leading provider of automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, Flock has drawn ire over the past year amid revelations that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is tapping into its data as part of President Trump’s mass deportation regime.

None of the people I interviewed for this story advocated for the outright destruction of Flock equipment, but it’s not uncommon. Last October, vandals chopped down three Flock cameras in Eugene, Oregon. “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks,” said a sticker affixed to one of the metal stumps. The same month, 41-year-old Jeffrey Sovern was arrested after allegedly disassembling 13 Flock license plate readers around Suffolk, Virginia. “MY ABSOLUTE HERO!” a woman commented on Facebook, under a link to his mug shot. “I don’t know anything else about him, but I would support a GiveSendGo for his legal fees just because he destroyed a dozen unconstitutional Flock cameras!”

Sure enough, two days after the arrest, a “Jeff Sovern Legal Defense Fund” was launched on GoFundMe by one “Jeff S.” “I appreciate everyone’s right to privacy, enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” the description reads. “If this fund grows in excess of what it costs to fight this fight, I will forward any to … efforts to rollback intrusive surveillance.” To date, the page has raised more than $4,200. (The New Republic contacted “Jeff S.” through GoFundMe, but he declined to comment or provide information confirming he was Sovern, citing privacy concerns.)

The ALPRs that Sovern allegedly destroyed are simple cameras. They photograph license plates of passing vehicles and upload the pictures onto a cloud server, along with time stamps and other identifying information about the vehicle, such as its make and color. Users are encouraged to share Flock data with each other, creating AI-powered law enforcement databases where a search for something like “red Audi with broken taillight” will yield data on all cars deemed to match the description. The largest of these databases is Flock’s national search tool, which allows local police departments to query billions of snapshots and track vehicles far outside their jurisdictions.

All told, Flock represents a staggeringly powerful—and profitable—mass surveillance system. Its ALPRs are used by over 1,000 businesses and roughly one-third of 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, according to Holly Beilin, Flock’s senior director of communications. While Beilin wouldn’t provide the number of active Flock cameras in the U.S., the ACLU estimates there to be 90,000. Flock used ALPRs, along with other products like drones and gunshot detectors, to generate $285 million in revenue in 2024. Venture capital titans Andreessen Horowitz recently valued the company at $7.5 billion.

But growing in concert with Flock is an organized resistance movement which has notched more than a few wins. Its nexus is DeFlock.me, which hosts a crowdsourced map of ALPRs and warns readers that the cameras are “a serious risk to your privacy and civil liberties.” The website lists 15 local anti-Flock groups around the country, though its creator, Will Freeman, estimates there to be 30 in total. While many of these groups use “DeFlock” in their name, Freeman stressed that all operate independently of his site.

Flock CEO Garrett Langley is not a fan. In an interview last year, he called DeFlock a “terroristic organization.” Freeman was unsurprised to hear it. “They don’t like my site,” he said. “Anything that provides real transparency they don’t like.”

Langley has a habit of hyperbole. Last fall, he offered the modest prediction that Flock will eliminate almost all crime in the U.S. within a decade. The technology is indeed praised by police for making it easier to catch certain criminals. But independent studies on its effectiveness are hard to come by. Flock has also been criticized for publishing exaggerated statistics to promote its products. In 2022, the company bragged that cameras in San Marino, California, had caused burglaries to drop 80 percent over five months; Forbes later reported that burglaries had actually increased in the years after Flock installed its cameras.

Even if Flock’s cameras and tracking network do help solve some crimes, critics say it’s not worth the cost to our privacy—not to mention people’s Fourth Amendment rights. Police have been caught illegally using Flock data to locate a woman seeking abortion services, stalk and harass people, monitor protests, and aid ICE. “At minimum, this dragnet surveillance means warrantless tracking of everyone on the road,” the ACLU warned last year. “At worst, it means a digital police state wherein law enforcement officials … can track protesters, political opponents, immigrants, patients, and others not suspected of any crime and use the information to hurt them.” (Dan Haley, chief legal officer at Flock, responded that “Flock is used … millions of times a year, and the incidences of abuse are few and far between.” He added that all evidence of misuse is recorded in Flock’s software.)

Flock was founded in Atlanta in 2017, so it’s somewhat surprising that the city’s first resistance group was only formed this January. Phillips, the group’s founder, doesn’t consider himself an activist—“I’ve never gone to a protest or anything,” he said—but has been concerned about government surveillance for years. “I was the tin hat person,” he said.

DeFlock Atlanta has logged hundreds of cameras on DeFlock.me, and is erecting large yellow signs underneath them, warning residents they’re being watched. Phillips is planning an in-person protest soon, and has (unsuccessfully) petitioned private businesses to relinquish their cameras. All the while, Flock’s influence in the city is growing. Last year, DeKalb County entered a 10-year, $18 million contract with the company for cameras and drones. Fulton County public schools are also contracting with Flock, while Atlanta police were recently revealed to be using the cameras to track noncitizens.

Some in DeFlock Atlanta have proposed more aggressive resistance. “When they had the rush of people starting to pay attention, everybody went, ‘Let’s just get Sawzalls and cut them down,’” Phillips said. But he advocates for a lighter touch. “If people realize how much they’re being watched, we won’t have to cut anything down,” he said, suggesting public pressure will force officials to remove the cameras themselves.

Some communities have already proved this point. Austin, Texas, paused its Flock program after local pushback last June; Evanston, Illinois, terminated theirs in August. According to NPR, at least 30 localities “have either deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled their contracts since the beginning of 2025.”

Ithaca, New York’s anti-Flock group is close to doing the same. Flock Off was founded last summer after the city installed 22 ALPRs in 2024. There are now more than 50 in the whole of Tompkins County. The cameras were funded by a state grant for combating gun violence, which allocated $69,300 to the city and $160,650 to the county for Flock cameras. But researchers question whether the equipment has actually reduced violent crime. “There’s no basis in the argument that the cameras have contributed to any sort of decline in gun violence in the area,” said Eric Simmons, a student studying at Cornell Law School’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Clinic. News outlets such as the Ithaca Journal and 607 News Now report that police have used the cameras to find car thieves and a lost elderly man, but do not mention violent crime. Ithaca Police Chief Thomas Kelly did not respond to a request for comment.

Through petitions, public comments, and the press, Flock Off has somewhat stymied its namesake. In October, the county sheriff’s office stopped sharing Flock data with counties that partner with ICE. That didn’t placate Flock Off, which held a protest outside Ithaca’s City Hall on February 4. A resident named Dirk Trachy donned a sinister-looking camera costume that stretched nine feet tall, while a local musician released an anti-Flock song: “These birds ain’t like the others / they steal your data and your family’s too,” the lyrics read.

After the protest, local police reduced the number of departments with which they shared data. “In a lot of ways, this is showing that at the local level, democracy can still work,” organizer Aaron Fernando said. Flock Off’s next goal is to end the city contract altogether. Organizers are confident; two council members were spotted participating in their recent protest. “We have a good shot,” Fernando said.

Like Ithaca, Tucson is a college town, and students at the University of Arizona were quick to form a resistance group last August after the college quietly installed 62 Flock ALPRs around campus. The group has since expanded to combat surveillance across the whole of Pima County, said an organizer who was granted anonymity because she has participated in civil disobedience.

DeFlock Tucson has petitioned the county to remove its Flock cameras for months, attending council meetings and even filing a cease and desist letter with the Department of Education. A separate Tucson group, which the organizer declined to name, has gone a step further by wheat-pasting posters and stickers to camera poles. “Mass surveillance ≠ safety—get the Flock out of Tuscon,” one sticker reads. “Obey the system,” reads another. “They’ve been wondering how far wasp spray can spray,” the organizer added. “I don’t know, maybe it will spray far enough up high to spray onto the camera.”

DW Nance describes himself as the “de facto” leader of DeFlock Birmingham in Alabama—he and a friend are the only official members. Nonetheless, Nance has created a sleek website for his cause and garnered 400 local signatures on a petition demanding an “immediate moratorium” on cameras and “mandatory deletion” of existing Flock data.

Over 600 ALPRs have been logged in Birmingham, and Nance is planning on creating digital billboard advertisements informing residents of Flock’s misdeeds. He has received online backlash to his campaign, particularly among Trump supporters. “There’s a lot of people that are real awful,” he said. A comment on one of his Facebook posts reads: “Aww, you almost had my support. Then you mentioned ICE as a villain. Now you sound like a domestic terrorist.”

But Flock’s critics don’t fall neatly in one political camp. While anti-Flock groups generally sprout from liberal enclaves, some Republican-led states have also taken steps to restrict ALPR surveillance. Libertarians in particular object to Flock: Reason has published multiple articles criticizing the company, which the magazine has accused of running an “Orwellian mass surveillance program.”

Organizers, while alarmed at the relentless growth of the surveillance state, are also encouraged by the growing resistance to it. Small victories continue to pile up: Dunwoody, an Atlanta suburb and early adoptee of Flock, paused their contract on February 25. Eight days earlier, DeFlock Tucson celebrated after South Tucson canceled theirs. “We don’t have to hide or shield ourselves from the world,” said Arian Chavez, an organizer at the University of Arizona. “We shouldn’t be afraid to still go out, even though we know we’re wrongfully being watched every single second. There’s more of us than there are of them.”

The reaction to the recent Super Bowl commercial from Amazon-owned Ring suggests that momentum is on the resistance groups’ side. The ad showed an online network of Ring’s AI-powered doorbell cameras being used to locate a lost dog. A heartwarming story—until you consider the privacy implications of a network of cameras that can identify anything that walks past every Ring-enabled home.

The backlash was swift, with many people comparing Ring’s surveillance dragnet to Flock’s. “As soon as that commercial came on, I just sat there with the biggest smile on my face,” said Phillips. “My girlfriend was like, ‘What are you smiling about?’ I’m like, ‘You don’t understand how bad they just messed up.’”

Four days later, Ring scrapped a planned partnership with Flock that would have allowed Ring users to share footage with Flock’s police databases. “Even for a creepy surveillance company that’s Amazon-owned,” Fernando said, “Flock is too toxic.”