Flock facts

For the record and to respond to the many uninformed commenters and posters:

The cameras are leased, not bought. $2500 to $3000 per camera per year.

The salary of one patrol cop, not including benefits, would cover the cost of 18 to 43 Flock LPR cameras per year, depending mainly on the cop's salary. Possibly more for a large number of cameras on a volume-discounted contract. The LPR models most think of as Flock cameras are pretty cheap, low-end gear that even HOAs can afford, which is why they are popping up like weeds. Flock offers better cameras, software that can connect to your cameras, and even drones.

The early termination or removal fee for a Flock Safety License Plate Reader (LPR) camera is typically $500 per camera.

Flock offers a zero-replacement plan for stolen and vandalized cameras.

The primary use for these cameras is to flag when a suspect plate is seen, not to query it. Querying the DB would mainly be to see which plates left a crime area for leads, like with any other security camera. Any query for a plate's location history is extremely suspect without a warrant tied to a case. And audit logs and role-based logins are part of the system.

The LPR cameras have a 15-foot-wide field of view at 65 feet, and are therefore only useful for monitoring narrow targets such as a lane of road, a doorway, or a path. 65 feet is the advertised maximum useful distance.

The Flock poles are breakaway models, so if you see ones that aren't, they aren't official. However, they are breakaway in that the poles are thin-walled aluminum, so it might not be obvious. The poles are the worst way to mount the cameras because they can be taken down so easily. Mounting on traffic light or street light poles is much better if available. Odds are, if the camera is on one of the thin 12-foot poles, it is either owned by someone without rights to city assets or someone fairly clueless about security. You often see posts where the town doesn't claim ownership of any Flock cameras, yet many Flock cameras are on these cheap poles in those towns.

The cameras have 2GB of soldered RAM. Not the 64GB of DDR5 RAM people are posting about.

Flock is just one maker of these kinds of cameras, and their LPR model is on the bottom end.

What is the maximum penalty for damaging a Flock camera in Texas? Yes, there could be years of jail time.

No, Flock Safety cameras do not have built-in radar or sensors to measure or detect vehicle speed. In theory, a camera can estimate your speed by tracking how far you move between frames, but that would require a high frame rate and precise installation at an exact angle to the road. Even then, the accuracy would be low. A sonic or laser sensor could be added, but radar would be more likely, since it is a simple add-on we already see in school zones and similar areas.

Flock Safety just cut its data retention from 30 days to 7 and added mandatory audit tools. The ACLU reviewed the changes today and called them "a thinly veiled PR attempt" with "largely hollow security promises."

Is this the start of Pre-Crime as in Minority Report?

The area monitoring cameras, not the LPR models, monitor for suspicious behavior, including crowds gathering. The LPR cameras have too narrow a view to be of any real use for this other than possibly on a trail watching for people that have fallen or objects left behind. Or someone waving their arms in a way that indicates they are trying to get someone's attention. One of the "LPR models" on a trail is most likely there in the mode of a security camera to provide video of anyone following someone who has been attacked or just to discourage attacks. Realistically, to be a real deterrent, there would need to be no blind spots on the trail.

The real point of contention in real life and, to an extent, in that movie, was that cops arrested people with insufficient evidence. In the movie, you will notice the minority reports were ignored. That was the system's flaw. Hence the title of the story. Same with the cameras. A confidence percentage is part of the data that is ignored. And it is never 100%. Deploying cops when a camera reports suspicious behavior is no different than deploying them when someone calls in. They have to check it out, but they also have to keep in mind it might be nothing, so they don't arrive guns blazing. With all the swatting calls these days, the cameras might be more believable than person reports, but that day is still a good while off. One report shows 40% of stops in one town were in error. In a recent incident circulating, a family was surrounded in a parking lot and removed from their SUV at gunpoint because their plate number was reported stolen. The plate was for an out-of-state motorcycle. Clearly, the cops did not confirm any details before approaching the vehicle, which should be standard procedure. Especially with kids in the target vehicle. Another similar case: a vehicle was stopped on a partial plate match of just 2 digits. There are also cases of people detained on facial IDs despite it being easily provable they were nowhere near the crime area. In a Florida case, 300 miles away. Lawsuits against those police departments are, of course, pending.  

Oddly, the movie Mercy (2026) is probably a better fit for where this tech is headed. Yet to see a post suggesting that though.

Other info:

Flock's 6 Myths About License Plate Readers and Security Systems

Dave's Garage: The Controversial Flock Cameras Tracking Every Car — Full Breakdown

Flock's FAQ

Deer Park TX PD Transparency Portal An example of details of the volume and types of data collected and what it was used for.

Flock 2020 patent for Method and system for capturing and storing significant surveillance images. This seems like what most NVRs have been doing long before 2020, so I'm not sure how they got a patent for it.

 You can look into tools like Have I Been Flocked? to see public tracking of known ALPR audit logs and searches.

deflock.org is a crowdsourced DB of Flock cameras.

In Chatrie v. United States, decided on June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they acquire a user's cell-phone location data through a reverse-location "geofence" warrant, even if a third party holds the data. This is often cited as making Flock cameras illegal, or at least requiring a warrant to search the DB for plates in the area where a crime was committed. But it is hard to say right now,

Texas Privacy Coalition has links mainly to anti-Flock posts.