Since the start of 2025, at least 30 cities have canceled their contracts with Flock Safety, an AI surveillance company whose CEO wants to eliminate all crime within a decade by covering the country in always-on security cameras.
That shocking figure comes Courtesy nprWhich reports that concerned activists are increasing pressure on cities to cut ties with the company.
“We’re seeing a lot of momentum,” Will Freeman, a Colorado-based organizer who runs the website DeFlock.org, told the broadcaster. “I expect there will be more cities leaving the herd.”
Grassroots campaigns have successfully driven Flock out of cities such as Flagstaff, Arizona, Eugene Oregon, and Santa Cruz, California.
Flagstaff Mayor Becky Daggett said, “In the end, it was clear that this was not a technology that was being well accepted or that we could continue to use.” nprreflect on community outrage Over the equipment.
Deflock is an open-source web app designed to track license plate readers throughout the United States. While Flock is the largest, it is not the only monitoring vendor tracked by Flock, which currently has more than 77,000 AI license plate readers logged on its interactive map.
On the surface, license plate readers may seem passable, this isn’t an issue as long as you’re good. Yet, as Deflock notes, they come with many hidden dangers for ordinary residents. License plate readers create a detailed record of your location history, what caused it wrongful arrests, racial profilingAnd Follow By police officers.
In one example from October, a Denver woman was accused of stealing a $25 package, after which police used Flock to determine that she was driving nearby on the day of the theft. Ultimately, GPS data revealed that the woman had passed through the area without stopping, leading police to take the flawed data from the AI monitoring software as enough evidence to pursue charges.
Protests against Flock have since erupted, especially as the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Donald Trump have weaponized AI surveillance tools to expand their dystopian crackdown on immigrants.
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