The vandalised cameras, distinctive black ovals mounted on metal poles with solar panels, were found with a red sign reading "Notice. 24/7 video recording". Similar sabotage has occurred in Minnesota, California and Georgia.
Flock Safety, founded in 2017, has become one of the country's largest makers of Automatic Licence Plate Readers (ALPRs). The AI-powered cameras photograph the rear of every passing vehicle, with footage retained for a specified period. The company does not publish exact deployment numbers but says it works with more than 7,000 communities and estimates approximately 100,000 cameras are in use.
Proponents argue the cameras have made communities safer and dramatically increased crime-solving rates. However, critics see them as overly broad investigative tools that treat civilians as suspects. Christopher Rivera of the Texas Civil Rights Project told the BBC he worries authorities could use "these databases to search our everyday routines, which ultimately scrapes out our routes to..." [source text cuts off].
Records obtained by the BBC provide a glimpse into the network's scale. Houston's METRO Transit Authority owns 35 cameras but has access to around 20,000 devices in the Flock network, including some as far as Albany County, New York. In the Cypress-Fairbanks independent school district, a typical licence plate lookup in April 2024 searched around 270 networks. By April 2025 that had nearly doubled to about 500 networks, and a year later 20% of searches were conducted across more than 6,000 networks.
This national network concerns critics more than individual cameras, as it could allow authorities to track routines on a massive scale.