Flock CEO Garrett Langley has acknowledged that his company’s cameras have become increasingly vulnerable following Florida’s recent directive to remove license plate readers from state highways. This decision has led to a rise in cancellations for Flock’s services, impacting their operational landscape significantly.
Garrett Langley’s company has roughly 120,000 licence plate cameras bolted to poles across the United States, and 2026 has turned into the year Americans started pulling them down. Florida’s transport department revoked permission for police to operate automated licence plate readers on state highway rights of way, giving agencies 30 days to take them down. Texas ordered state agencies to stop funding the cameras days earlier, after an officer in Lufkin was indicted on 100 felony counts over unauthorised database searches. A Wisconsin mayor had every camera in Menasha covered, and a Tennessee sheriff paused 70 readers. An Oakland advocacy group counts 214 cities and counties that have dropped Flock since 2021, with 93 of those in August alone, four times July’s number. A spokesperson said new city partnerships have outpaced non-renewals by about ten to one this year, and the company claims more than 5,000 communities as customers. In August the company cut default data retention from 30 days to seven, said it will require every law enforcement customer to switch on its abuse detection tool by the end of the year, added automatic lockouts for abnormal searches, and made case codes mandatory.
Because his cameras are visible in a way that most surveillance is not, he said, “it’s easier to pick a villain that’s a company like us.
Its director said the chart had “gone parabolic”. Langley puts the ratio closer to seven to one, and says cities that skip his cameras are choosing to be less safe. The ACLU wants an outside evaluator and has asked whether the tool is “a real security measure or just window dressing”. He has said “we’re not Big Brother” and warned officers who abuse the system that “You will get caught, plain and simple.
Councils are voting contracts out. Residents in several states have covered lenses, wrapped poles, and in a few cases removed the hardware entirely. In Ohio last month, a grand jury declined to indict a man who had been filmed destroying a Flock pole. The Flock Safety chief executive has spent the past three weeks apologising, conceding and rewriting his product defaults. Asked whether the safeguards should have arrived sooner, he agreed they should have. But he also thinks the anger has found a convenient target. The order covers the entire category, including cameras from rivals Axon and Motorola, and cites misuse reports and privacy concerns. Jacksonville’s sheriff dropped the technology across Duval County immediately, and Pasco and Manatee counties have moved to ban or remove the devices. Flock’s own framing is that arrivals outnumber exits. Langley wrote that abuse of the technology, at any level, is unacceptable. Critics are not sold. A civil liberties lawyer noted that an officer can simply enter any case number and keep searching. Retention can be extended anyway through a setting called Evidence Mode. Langley’s answer to all of it is compromise, his word, between safety and privacy. The people currently cutting his poles down are not waiting to find out. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.
Governor Ron DeSantis had flagged the move days earlier, saying “I think it’s capturing way more information than they’re letting on.