As Backlash Against Flock Cameras Grows, Texas Demand Millions for Public Records

As bipartisan backlash against Flock Safety's AI-enabled license plate camera systems grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees — in some cases tens of thousands or even millions of dollars — before releasing records on how police departments use, and potentially abuse, the technology.

The Texas Tribune reported Monday that officials in North Richland Hills, a Fort Worth suburb, asked one advocacy group for $2.3 million to fulfill a public records request for Flock-related data. To justify the figure, officials claimed that searching roughly a terabyte of communications about errors, misuse, and the effectiveness of the Flock system would take about 14 years of labor at $15 an hour.

Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune the fee seemed "ludicrous" and designed to stifle his group's public records searches. Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies nationwide and said there is no way to predict how cities will price a request: some have handed over more than 400,000 pages for free, while others have charged $5,000. A Houston television station, KPRC, has been quoted fees as high as $121,000 for Flock records, according to the Tribune.

The records being gatekept have, in other cases, triggered audits, arrests, and changes to how departments deploy the cameras, including decisions to remove them altogether. Advocacy groups say officers have repeatedly been caught using Flock systems to track strangers and people in their personal lives, and the company has yet to introduce meaningful reforms to address what critics call its stalker-cop problem.

Texas offers a case study in why transparency matters. Last week, former Texas police officer Zachary Anthony Klein pleaded guilty to 100 felony counts of misusing official information, a plea he agreed to in exchange for the state not pursuing separate stalking charges. Klein's abuse of Flock data — along with that of another officer — came to light only after USA Today filed a public records request that prompted an investigation and ultimately his arrest. Texas Governor Greg Abbott responded by halting state Flock funding and freezing new permits, the Tribune reported.

Other requests have simply been denied. The Tribune reported that the Texas Department of Public Safety asked the state Attorney General's Office for permission to withhold the entirety of Flock data the newspaper had requested — even though the agency had already turned over an identical request covering prior weeks.

Flock maintains its automated license plate readers are built for public safety, and courts have generally held that police can search Flock databases without violating the Fourth Amendment. But that consensus may be cracking. A federal judge in Oklahoma, Sara Hill, ruled last week that an officer conducted an unconstitutional search by querying the Flock database simply because a car's license plate was from California, according to 404 Media. Hill wrote that Flock's network amounts to "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance" and that its dragnet-style design should require a warrant to search.

A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media the company was not a party to the case and expects the ruling to be an outlier that will likely be appealed and overturned. The decision sets no binding precedent, but it is among the first to find Flock searches can be unconstitutional. 404 Media reported reviewing audits showing more than 100,000 warrantless searches of the Flock system occur every month nationwide — searches that have sometimes swept up innocent people, including one man jailed for a month based on a Flock alert that, he argued, should itself have shown investigators he was five miles from the crime scene.

For members of the public trying to scrutinize the cameras, basic facts remain elusive: where cameras are posted, who can view the footage, how often the data is accessed, and how long it is retained. Public records requests, and voluntary "transparency portals" that Flock offers agencies, are the main ways such information becomes public. Flock spokesperson Andrew Smith told the Tribune the portals "give agencies a public-facing way to publish information about their programs, including policies, usage, and access rules, to help communities better understand how the technology is being used."

Few agencies use them. Of the hundreds of Texas agencies running Flock cameras, only 59 operate transparency portals, and just 16 of those actually share data publicly, the Tribune found.

Advocates warn that without courts mandating warrants or officials requiring greater transparency, Flock's camera network will keep tracking people's movements in ways the public doesn't fully grasp — and that AI could widen the risk. Michael Soyfer, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice who is litigating several Flock-related Fourth Amendment cases, told 404 Media that a lack of transparency could let the company automate the very practices that have drawn criticism, such as flagging "suspicious" travel patterns.

"We're seeing that repeatedly with police flagging whatever they'll call suspicious patterns of movement. Federal agents were using ALPRs to monitor cars making day trips across the border and back to manufacture a basis to stop them, interrogate the drivers, and search them," Soyfer said. "I think Flock is going to automate that, using AI where cops can set alerts for those kinds of travel patterns."