HOUSTON — At a 9 a.m. Harris County Commissioners Court meeting Aug. 17, dozens of Houston residents filed into the courtroom.
The commissioners were meeting to review the region’s budget, but residents instead came to rally against the county’s use of artificial intelligence cameras, many citing privacy issues.
“You promised to protect us, but we see the abuse has come and there’s still no protections. We need to eliminate Flock,” said Christopher Rivera, a member of the Texas Civil Rights Project, to applause from the crowd.
Harris County joins numerous counties across the state grappling with community backlash against Flock cameras. Government officials said they understand the community’s concerns, but backing out of contracts with AI camera companies is much more complicated than many think since the agreements affect several agencies and jurisdictions.
Atlanta-based Flock Safety is the camera system many counties use and is the company facing the most backlash. Flock uses artificial intelligence to scan every vehicle that passes by a camera, uploading plate numbers, car models, color, and even bumper stickers to the country’s largest vehicle surveillance database. Law enforcement agencies that contract with the company — here and across the U.S. — can search the accumulated database with a few keystrokes and without a warrant.
The backlash against Flock can’t be attributed to any one concern or trend, but rather to a series of recent incidents that have contributed to growing public unease over the extent of law enforcement monitoring.
In 2025, a Johnson County sheriff’s deputy, without a warrant, used the nationwide network of over 83,000 Flock cameras to track a woman suspected of attempting to get an abortion. The woman was located, but the district attorney’s office declined to press charges after a medical examiner found the biological matter in question was a blood clot and not a fetus. The incident sparked national outrage and privacy concerns, and since then the abuse of these systems by law enforcement has been leaking out steadily.
Earlier this month, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office admitted three of its deputies had been blocked from using Flock cameras while it investigates possible misuse. In Baytown, southeast of Houston, the city’s police chief filed a criminal investigation into an officer who was accused of misusing the city’s Flock cameras. A sheriff’s deputy was suspended in Fort Bend County after looking up one person’s plate 41 times and another 148. A Pasadena sergeant resigned after allegedly using Flock to track and stalk a fellow officer, but will not face prosecution. The Deer Park Police Department posted on social media an officer had been suspended after he admitted to misuse.
“The license plate readers have thwarted kidnapping attempts, led to the quick apprehension of armed robbery crews, and helped recover countless stolen vehicles,” Gonzalez said in a news release. “But as with any powerful new public safety tool, this technology is subject to abuse.”
Nationally, Flock Safety estimates some 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 6,000 communities use its surveillance products. Advocacy groups that track camera positions across Texas estimate there are more than 13,000 cameras in Texas. The Harris County sheriff’s office manages 20 Flock Safety license plate reader networks with a combined 480 cameras, estimated to be the most in the state.
Many police departments consider Flock an invaluable crime-fighting tool. Opponents — including privacy, civil liberty and immigrant rights advocates — argue the system’s capacity for abuse is well established.
However, government officials have little power to remove Flock from their region, as most of it isn’t purchased by them or law enforcement. Retailers and homeowners associations buy their own cameras and then choose whether to share footage with law enforcement. According to HCSO, most camera networks are owned by municipal utility districts, neighborhood associations and similar organizations, with the sheriff’s office as the system administrator.
The mixture of contracts means county officials will have to somehow find every person who owns a system and get them to agree to break their contract with Flock, a daunting task.
“I share residents’ concerns about Flock and my office is working with county partners and stakeholders on a path forward,” said Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis. “Public safety and privacy are not mutually exclusive. Residents deserve both, and county policy should protect both.”
Taking action
Despite the challenge, some government officials are taking action to ease concerns around AI cameras.
U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a McKinney Republican, last month proposed legislation to require federal agencies to obtain warrants before accessing Flock camera data. Guadalupe County and more recently Hood County have formally ended their contracts with Flock. Cities like Bandera, Lago Vista and Magnolia have also dropped Flock this summer. Austin and San Marcos have moved on from the cameras, and Conroe residents are pushing for a November ballot measure to remove them, with the League City mayor floating a similar idea.
“These cameras were constantly scanning and recording regular folks just going about their day. That kind of permanent, warrantless tracking doesn’t belong in a free society,” said Hood County Constable John Shirley in a post on social media.
While government officials try to ease public concerns, some Texans are taking matters into their own hands.
The Dallas Police Department began formally tracking incidents of vandalism to Flock cameras earlier this year and has logged roughly 25 incidents in five months, mostly camera poles being cut down. In Houston, there have been incidents of camera lenses being spray-painted or camera poles being cut down. Burnett County removed all its cameras after two vandalism incidents.
Other Texans have taken to organized protest, showing up at county meetings such as the one in Harris County, putting up yard signs against Flock and reaching out to state lawmakers about the issue.
Kenneh Feagins, a member of DeFlock DFW and chair of the Collin County Libertarian Party, said communities across the political spectrum have banded together in the North Texas metroplex because of their shared concerns about the devices.
“We can go our separate ways and be enemies again after this, but this really is something that I’m seeing that’s reunifying a bunch of people that normally would not work together,” Feagins said. “In our current political landscape, that’s rare.”
Feagins said elected officials should be more communicative about the policies they have in place for the cameras and explain their approach to how they are used, especially after Flock Safety has begun adjusting its own policies nationally.
“Why are we not having those open discussions as to why we’re having to change these policies?” Feagins said. “You don’t just change something because you feel like changing it. Not something like this.”
Flock won’t fly the coop
While counties deal with the blowback, some government officials and law enforcement agencies are doubling down on Flock, believing the system’s usefulness in solving crimes outweighs the privacy concerns.
Earlier this year, Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia, a former sheriff, defended the use of the Flock system during a business court meeting after the county decided to renew its contract until 2027.
“I have great confidence that this tool is used for the maximum benefit of our community, especially those victims of crimes,” he said at the meeting.
Texas Municipal Police Association liaison John Wilkerson reached out to the Midland Reporter Telegram earlier this year defending the use of Flock, citing public safety benefits and saying recording in public is a protected right. He also criticized the vandalism of these cameras.
“These are put out into public places where everybody has the right to record them anyways; if you’re standing on the sidewalk, you can pull out your phone and record every car that drives by there,” he said. “I really hope the individuals out there, destroying the camera systems, never become a victim of a crime themselves.”
Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux has also defended the use of 650 Flock Safety license plate reader cameras installed around the city, saying the technology is helping solve crimes.
Flock responded to the mounting pressure in the past couple of weeks by shortening default data retention from 30 to 7 days, requiring a case code before any search, and adding an “Evidence Mode” for active investigations. However, Dallas police plan to keep Flock Safety license-plate camera data for a full year, saying they need more time for investigations and showing their growing commitment to the surveillance system.
The Texas Department of Public Safety approved a $26 million contract with Flock last year to surveil state roads and support Operation Lone Star, the state’s multibillion-dollar effort to curb unauthorized immigration and fortify the border.
If government officials want to end their contract with Flock, ACLU Georgia reported earlier this year that the company changed contracts making it harder to get out of these deals.
The new terms also give Flock a perpetual right to use customer data even after a government has terminated its relationship with no expiration date.
Even if county officials vote to end a Flock contract, it wouldn’t necessarily get rid of all the cameras since municipal districts, homeowners associations, cities, retail stores and more have their own agreements with the company, and getting them all on the same page can be difficult.
Many of the Flock contracts are multi-year deals. For example, Harris County’s contract runs through June 2027 with a roughly $869,000 price tag, while East Aldine’s package was budgeted at nearly $1 million over five years.
The mix of restrictive contract terms, sunk multiyear costs, law enforcement support and fragmented ownership limits what any single government official, county or vote can accomplish, despite the backlash. Even so, some Texans aren’t willing to give up their fight for privacy.
“We’re just not going to show up to a couple of city council meetings, get these things removed, and that’s the end of it,” Feagins said. “We have counties that are deploying it. We have the state funding those counties to deploy it [and] you’ve got the national level that’s getting integrated into all of this.”
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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