Flock Safety‘s data privacy controversy has escalated sharply, with the Los Angeles Police Department renegotiating its contract over concerns about how the surveillance firm stores and uses footage collected by its licence-plate cameras.
The company, which operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states, told Fortune it has raised $500 million at an $8.3 billion valuation and crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue in the first half of this year.
But that commercial momentum has collided with mounting scrutiny over what Flock does with the data it collects.
What the LAPD’s own inspector general found
The city’s Inspector General audited the LAPD’s Flock contracts this summer. The review quoted signed contract language directly: one agreement lets Flock ‘retain the right to use the foregoing for any purpose in Flock’s sole discretion,’ while a separate agreement grants rights to use anonymised footage for ‘training of machine learning algorithms.’
In July, the LAPD said it was renegotiating its Flock agreement over those data-ownership concerns.
According to CBS Los Angeles, a review of the cameras conducted in August and September 2025 showed they helped lead to 74 arrests and automatic number-plate recognition readings led to the recovery of 337 stolen vehicles. The same review found that 161 traffic stops were made based on alerts that officers later determined were not stolen vehicles.
Two privacy attorneys independently told Fortune the same data-ownership pattern appeared in their own reviews of Flock contracts in other jurisdictions.
Flock Safety data privacy concerns spread across cities
The LAPD is not alone. In March, Boston, Flagstaff and Santa Clara all dropped Flock following a Super Bowl advertisement from Amazon’s Ring, which subsequently pulled its Flock integration. Ring said the integration would require more resources than anticipated.
Privacy experts and civil liberties groups have alleged officers used the cameras to track individuals, including former partners, and that departments shared data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in violation of state law.
Vandalism has spread in parallel: people have doused cameras in paint, rammed them with cars and, in some cases, cut them down with chainsaws, with incidents documented in at least 36 states.
According to Biometric Update, the city of Evanston first contracted with Flock in 2022. A renewal approved in 2024, intended to run through 2029, covered 19 cameras, including 18 fixed devices and one mobile unit.
The broader concern flagged by privacy experts is cross-jurisdictional data pooling. Once data from one department is combined with another agency’s data, experts say, the result is a nationwide searchable network, accessible to agencies including federal immigration enforcement, potentially beyond the parameters of the original contract.
New guardrails, but cities set their own rules
Flock last week announced a new set of guardrails intended to limit misuse, including advocating for a seven-day data retention policy. Its previous default was 30 days. The company states on its website that the shorter window will still cover ‘over 90% of searches.’
The policy is a recommendation, not a binding rule. Individual cities set their own terms: the LAPD’s current contract guarantees a five-year retention period.
Flock says data is owned by its customers, including police departments, homeowners’ associations and private clients, who hold it at their own discretion. Privacy experts contest that position, pointing to the contract language the LAPD Inspector General made public.
CEO Garrett Langley told Fortune the company is ‘growing our customer base at ten times the rate of customer churn’ and stands by its record of solving crimes and locating missing people.
Flock was founded in Atlanta in 2017 by Langley, Matt Feury and Paige Todd. Andreessen Horowitz led its Series D in 2021. Its most recent funding round, in March 2025, raised $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, led again by a16z.
The LAPD’s contract renegotiation is continuing.
