In a country increasingly divided along political ideologies, partisan politics are coming together to answer the age old dynamic between privacy and security.
On Wednesday, the blue-leaning Tempe, Ariz. turned off its Flock automated license plate readers and said the city would not seek another company to replace the system. Three hours later, the nearby red-leaning town of Cave Creek did the same. The same day in Washington, D.C., Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, opened a formal investigation into the company, while independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders posted a lengthy statement pledging to introduce legislation against it.
Tempe’s police department had used Flock’s cameras to help solve crimes, and the city said its own audits, conducted monthly, turned up no misuse. But that wasn’t enough to keep the system running. “These cameras have helped our police officers do their jobs, and we don’t discount that,” Tempe Mayor Corey Woods said in a statement shared with Fortune. “But the risk of misuse is too great. We have to be able to provide public safety in a way that maintains the trust of our community. For Tempe, that means taking these cameras down.”
Tempe Councilmember Bobby Nichols said the decision was a matter of legal principle. “Any law enforcement tool used by the City must not pose a risk of infringing on residents’ civil liberties,” he said. “We have a responsibility to ensure that these technologies are only employed if they present a narrowly tailored solution to a compelling government interest.”
The city’s contract with Flock was worth $80,000; its cameras will remain in place until Flock removes them, though they have stopped collecting data. Any data that was previously collected is stored temporarily and then deleted automatically unless it’s tied to an open case. Tempe already cut off automatic data sharing with other law enforcement agencies earlier in August and launched a public transparency portal, which will now be discontinued.
“Every day, police departments across the country are solving countless serious crimes and making a measurable public safety impact with Flock technology, including as the city shared, in Tempe,” a Flock spokesperson told Fortune.
“When a tool that is actively helping solve violent crimes, locate suspects, and find missing people is removed, public safety moves backward. That has real consequences: cases will take longer to solve, organized retail theft crews will operate with fewer obstacles, an Amber Alert may not be returned home, and victims may wait longer, or indefinitely, for justice.”
The spokesperson added that misuse of Flock’s technology is unacceptable, and that every search is logged and reviewed through the company’s Audit Assistance tool, which flags unusual activity for administrators to review.
Cave Creek’s decision, three hours after Tempe’s, cited privacy concerns, cases of misuse elsewhere in Arizona and around the country, and the theft of one of its own Flock cameras from an intersection. Public works crews removed the town’s remaining cameras for safekeeping after the theft.
But the town’s core objection was structural: Flock’s networked design allows outside law enforcement agencies to search data collected locally, and town officials concluded there was no way to guarantee residents’ privacy once their information left Cave Creek’s jurisdiction.
The town manager and town attorney are set to formally address the decision at a Sept. 1 council meeting. Officials from Cave Creek have not yet responded to Fortune’s request for comment.
Reading between the [partisan] lines
Tempe leans Democratic: roughly 63% of its voters back Democrats, making it one of the more reliably blue cities in a state that has been a purple battleground lately. Cave Creek, a small, affluent town north of Phoenix, leans Republican by comparison. The two towns landed in the same place, becoming at least the ninth and 10th Arizona municipalities to drop or restrict Flock in the past year, following Chandler, Surprise, Pinal County, Sedona, Flagstaff, Sierra Vista, South Tucson and Apache Junction.
In the nation’s capital, Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, sent a letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley announcing an investigation into the company’s “collection, retention, and dissemination” of data gathered by its cameras.
The letter argued that Flock has built an “unprecedented national surveillance network” of more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states, scanning more than 20 billion vehicles a month, and that “Congress never authorized the network your industry has built.” He gave the company until Sept. 8 to turn over documents. A Flock spokesperson told reporters the company intends to cooperate.
Hours later, Sanders posted a statement of his own on X, describing Flock as part of a system that risks tipping the country into what he called totalitarianism. He also pointed to the number of Flock’s cameras, adding that newer versions of the technology can match images of people and vehicles against databases of phone numbers, relatives and court records.
“We must come together to stop Flock and AI mass surveillance,” Sanders wrote. “That is why I will soon be introducing legislation to do just that.”
Hawley and Sanders sit at opposite ends of the Senate’s ideological spectrum. Their statements arrived within hours of each other, echoing the same split-screen convergence playing out in Arizona.
Flock’s rapid expansion, and the scrutiny now following it, has moved fast. The company’s cameras have helped close roughly a million police investigations and locate about 10,000 missing people over the past year, by its own account.
But an August Washington Post investigation found more than 50 law enforcement officers had been accused, charged with, or convicted of misusing automated license plate readers, including cases where officers used the systems to track former partners. Anti-surveillance group DeFlock says more than 90 cities have moved to cancel or reject Flock contracts as of Wednesday.
Flock has since reduced its default data retention window from 30 days to seven and now requires officers to enter a case code before accessing stored data. Langley told Fox News the country needs “compromise” between privacy and safety concerns. Whether that compromise arrives before more cities, and more members of Congress, act on their own remains to be seen.
