LAPD's 138 Flock License Plate Cameras Are Off While the City Rewrites the Contract

The Los Angeles Police Department let a three-year deal with Flock Safety lapse over data ownership. A month later, Flock's chief executive told The Verge the company got the abuse question wrong.

The Los Angeles Police Department has stopped using the 138 pole-mounted automatic license plate reader cameras it ran under a three-year contract with the surveillance company Flock Safety. The Verge reported on July 13, 2026 that the deal came to an end over the preceding weekend, citing the Los Angeles Times, which quoted the Los Angeles Police Department's chief information officer saying the department ended the arrangement while working on a new contract with "very clear terms" about who owns the data collected and what happens to it.

An unnamed spokesperson for Flock Safety told media outlets that unspecified "misconceptions" led to the pause, according to the same Verge entry.

Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, photograph passing vehicles and use artificial intelligence to identify them by plate number, make, model and color, and the cameras are networked so that a single vehicle can be followed across a day and across the country. The Verge counts more than 120,000 Flock cameras installed across the United States. Los Angeles is one of dozens of communities that have canceled contracts for the cameras or switched them off while officials press for limits on what the cameras collect, who can search it and how long it lives.

What the audit trail has shown

The data-ownership question in Los Angeles sits on top of a documented misuse problem elsewhere. The Verge, summarizing a June 10, 2026 report by 404 Media, wrote that more than a dozen cases around the United States involved police using Flock to illegally stalk victims. Flock said it was aware of 15 incidents and claimed "each surfaced because of the transparency and accountability features deliberately built into our platform." The Verge noted that some victims instead learned of searches through the outside website HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which Flock has tried to have taken down.

On August 13, 2026, Flock chief executive Garrett Langley told The Verge that he had changed his mind about how much responsibility the company bears for what law enforcement does with its tools, saying, "We got this one wrong." Over the following weeks, according to The Verge, Flock will make mandatory a previously optional feature called Audit Assistance, which flags "abnormal search behavior" and locks out a suspicious user until an administrator reviews the activity. Every user will also have to enter a case code before running a search. An administrator can override the requirement in an emergency, such as a search for a missing child, and those overrides are automatically flagged for review.

The reliability question

Accuracy is a separate matter from abuse. The Verge pointed on July 18, 2026 to a report by Joel Feder at The Drive describing how Flock cameras tracked him in Minnesota and sent police after him over "stolen plates" that were not stolen. Flock said its cameras worked "correctly" in the lead-up to the encounter. The Verge's entry noted that these were the same cameras recently suspended by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Backlash has taken other forms. Ring, owned by Amazon, canceled a planned Flock integration on February 12, 2026 after public criticism, saying the project "would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated" and that no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock. In Newport Beach, a lecture series called The Saturday Salon posted a photograph of what appeared to be a cease-and-desist letter from Flock demanding it stop hosting conversations about the company's surveillance technology; Schuyler Lifschultz told The Verge by direct message that the group "found this letter taped to our front door."

What the Los Angeles Police Department's replacement contract will say about search logs, retention and outside access has not been reported in the material available here.