DeFlock Wylie is a resident-led, nonpartisan campaign to end Flock Safety's automated license plate reader (ALPR) surveillance in Wylie, Texas. We document the City of Wylie's contract with Flock Group Inc., the Fourth Amendment and data-security concerns it raises, and how residents can ask the City Council to end it.
New here? Start Here for the overview, read The Facts, check the FAQ, or look up a term in the Glossary.
Wylie's No-Cost Exit Window Is Closing
Wylie's current Flock contract runs through October 13, 2026, and it renews automatically for two more years unless the City sends Flock a written notice of non-renewal at least 30 days before it ends.
days until September 13, 2026, the last day Wylie can decline renewal at zero cost. No termination fight. No exit fees. One letter.
Council doesn't need a legal battle or a buyout to end this. Under the contract's own terms, a notice of non-renewal sent before September 13 ends the agreement on October 13, at no cost to taxpayers. Miss the window, and Wylie is locked in until October 2028.
Leaving mid-term still costs money: when Guadalupe County terminated early this month, it paid an $8,500 early-termination charge on its way out. Non-renewal inside the open window costs nothing. The cheapest exit Wylie will ever have is the one available right now.
Update, August 19: it's on the agenda. At the request of two council members, the Flock contract is now Item 1 on the regular agenda for the Tuesday, August 25 meeting, posted in the city's own words as "discussion and direction regarding the automatic renewal terms of the Flock Safety Agreement... and take any action necessary related to the continuation or termination of the agreement." This is the public discussion the 2024 approval never got, and Council can vote that night to send the non-renewal notice. If you come to one meeting, make it this one. (Source: posted agenda, August 19, 2026)
Source: Flock Safety Order Form executed with Wylie PD, term 10/14/2025–10/13/2026 (obtained by public records request): "This Agreement will automatically renew for successive renewal terms... unless either Party gives the other Party notice of non-renewal at least thirty (30) days prior to the end of the then-current term." Renewal Term: 24 months.
Tell Council: Send the NoticeSign the Petition
We're collecting signatures asking Council to send the non-renewal notice before the deadline. Petitions with 1,000+ local signatures are the ones councils can't ignore. Signatures from Wylie addresses carry the most weight with Council.
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Sign on Change.org (takes 30 seconds)What's Happening in Wylie
Imagine the government tracking everywhere you go. Knowing when you leave for work, when you drop your kids at school, when you visit the doctor, when you go to church. Listening on public streets for sounds it deems suspicious. Building a permanent record of your life.
Sounds like something from a dystopian movie, right? It's happening right now in Wylie.
The company is Flock Safety, a $7.5 billion startup backed by Founders Fund, which also invested in Palantir (the intelligence contractor). They've installed AI-powered surveillance cameras throughout Wylie and across the US to do exactly what that scary intro described.
This isn't about politics. It's about your freedom and your family's safety.
"It only reads license plates."
You will hear this from officials, and Flock's own paperwork contradicts it. The sales letter Flock sent Wylie, signed by its CEO, advertises machine vision that identifies vehicles by "roof rack, bumper stickers, etc." and captures cars "with the absence of a license plate." Flock even trademarked the profiling: it's called Vehicle Fingerprint®.
Wylie PD said the same thing to council on February 10: searches can run on a full plate, a partial plate, "or it could be put in for some form of descriptors." A system you can search without a plate is not a system that only reads plates. This is AI image analysis, in Flock's own words: the sales letter calls it "proprietary machine vision," the marketing calls the cameras "AI-powered," and Flock's LPR Policy admits it keeps residents' images "for the purpose of improving Flock Services through machine learning": your car's photos train their AI. Every passing car is analyzed and profiled: color, make, model, damage, stickers, racks. The plate is just one field in the profile, and the newest tool (OS Investigate, below) doesn't even need the car's description, just its driving pattern.
Sources: Flock Safety Sole Source Letter provided to the City of Wylie, 2024 (signed by CEO Garrett Langley); Wylie City Council work session transcript, February 10, 2026; details in Wylie's Documents below.
Here's what most people don't know:
These aren't just traffic cameras. They're called ALPRs (Automated License Plate Readers), and they scan every vehicle that passes by: logging your license plate, your car's make and model, the exact time and location, even bumper stickers. This data is uploaded to a massive database that builds a map of everywhere you go.
No warrant required. No public vote. You never consented to this.
Flock's marketing says "it's only for law enforcement," but that's misleading. They sell to Home Depot, Lowe's, shopping centers, and HOAs. Those businesses share your data with police (and potentially with ICE for immigration enforcement) with just a few clicks.
And it gets worse: Flock has rolled out microphones in public spaces, marketed as listening for "sounds of distress." Your conversations on the sidewalk, at the park, outside restaurants. All of it potentially recorded and analyzed by AI.
Your Data Isn't Safe
All of your movement data, everywhere you've driven in the last 30+ days, is sitting in a database. And that database has catastrophic security problems.
Independent security researchers discovered:
Flock cameras with ZERO password protection. Anyone in the world with a web browser could watch live feeds, see 30 days of footage, and track anyone's movements. Including cameras pointed at playgrounds with children.
What this means for you:
- Stalkers can track you. Your ex, a creep at work, anyone at all. They could see when you leave home, where you go, when you're alone.
- Thieves can case your house. They know when you're gone, what you drive, your daily routine.
- Hackers have sold access on the dark web. Flock employee logins and police credentials have been found for sale on dark web markets.
- Foreign governments can spy on Americans. Chinese state-sponsored hackers (the Salt Typhoon campaign) compromised U.S. telecom networks of the kind Flock cameras depend on to transmit data.
- Abusive cops can misuse it. Officers have already used similar systems to illegally track ex-girlfriends and women seeking abortions.
Flock runs on discontinued Android software from 2021 with over 900 known security vulnerabilities. The cameras can be hacked by simply pressing buttons on the back. Data isn't encrypted. Some police departments don't even require passwords to access the system. That's less security than your Netflix account.
This isn't theoretical. Families have been held at gunpoint because of false alerts. Women have been illegally tracked across state lines. And your tax dollars are paying for it.
Sources for this section: the security investigations in Video Evidence below, the incident-by-incident documentation in the sections that follow, and the dated, cited entries at The Facts.
2026: The Year Flock's Story Fell Apart
Since Wylie signed its contract, Flock Safety has suffered two nationally reported data exposures, been found in violation of state law by a state audit, been caught giving federal agencies undisclosed access to local data, and lost contracts across the country, including seven Texas jurisdictions. Every item below is dated and sourced.
July 2026: Wylie's Own Congressman Says Flock Needs a Warrant Requirement
U.S. Rep. Keith Self (R-McKinney), who represents Wylie in Texas' 3rd Congressional District, introduced the PRIVACY Act in July 2026. His bill would require federal agencies to get a warrant before accessing Flock or any ALPR data, cap data retention at 30 days, create a federal registry of surveillance technology, and bar federal funds from paying for these systems.
Self's original cosponsors are Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) and Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), who called Flock cameras part of "the federal government's dangerous web of warrantless surveillance." In Self's words: "Americans' Fourth Amendment right to be secure in their privacy does not disappear just because of new technology or artificial intelligence. This bill simply restores that protection."
It's worth being straight about where law enforcement stands: groups like the Texas Municipal Police Association support ALPR technology. That's exactly why a warrant requirement is the right ask rather than an argument about whether cameras are ever useful. A warrant doesn't take the tool away from police. It puts a judge between a database of residents' movements and anyone who wants to search it. When Wylie's own congressman says this technology needs constitutional protections it doesn't currently have, the question for City Council is simple: why is Wylie feeding a system its own representative considers a threat to Fourth Amendment rights?
And Self isn't alone. Days later, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) introduced H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which goes further: it would bar federal agencies from purchasing, operating, or accessing ALPR and biometric surveillance systems outright, bar federal funds from paying for them anywhere, and make improperly obtained data inadmissible in court. Both bills come from conservative Republicans, one of them Wylie's own congressman. The guardrails argument is no longer a left-versus-right fight.
But read the fine print, because it's the whole reason this website exists: neither bill touches a city-funded system like Wylie's. Congress can close the federal side-door. Only Wylie's council can close the front door, and the free chance to do it expires September 13.
Sources: The Texan, July 2026 (PRIVACY Act); H.R. 9800, 119th Congress (bill text); Police1 on H.R. 9800
June 2026: Flock Leaked Police Searches onto Google-Style Search Engines
In June 2026, 404 Media confirmed that Flock's own system exposed law enforcement license plate search queries to the public internet, indexed by DuckDuckGo and Bing. Anyone could find real police searches containing license plate numbers, vehicle make/model/color, identifying details like "window stickers," case numbers, search reasons, and date ranges. Reporters reproduced the searches themselves.
Flock acknowledged roughly 70 indexed results from 2024–2025 and said it was working to remove cached content. This is the company Wylie trusts with a record of everywhere you drive.
Source: 404 Media, June 11, 2026
License plates exposed in January 2026, when police departments nationwide released completely unredacted Flock audit logs through routine public records requests, revealing millions of surveillance targets, including people in active investigations. The data covered tens of millions of searches by thousands of departments.
Flock's response was not to fix the flaw. Instead, Flock severely restricted what its audit logs show, gutting the very transparency tool cities like Wylie point to as their accountability safeguard, and sent takedown demands the Electronic Frontier Foundation called "bogus."
Source: 404 Media, January 13, 2026
Why this matters for Wylie specifically: Everything this website documents about Wylie PD's audit trail (the "TEST" case number, the unexplained "kuria" justifications, the 90,911-camera searches) came from Flock's audit logs. After those logs embarrassed the company nationally, Flock gutted them. The accountability mechanism Council was told would prevent abuse is being dismantled by the vendor itself. (Details and sourcing in Documented Misuse and Wylie's Documents below.)
State Audits Caught Flock Giving Federal Agencies Your Data
Two official investigations, one by a state government and one by a university research center, documented Flock granting federal agencies access to local camera data that local governments never approved:
- Illinois (August 25, 2025): A Secretary of State audit found Flock allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois license plate data in violation of state law. Flock was running a CBP pilot program that its own leadership was reportedly unaware of. CEO Garrett Langley admitted: "We clearly communicated poorly... didn't create distinct permissions and protocols."
- Washington State (October 2025): A University of Washington Center for Human Rights report found Border Patrol ran thousands of searches of Flock networks belonging to at least ten local police departments that had never authorized federal access. Flock admitted it "communicated poorly" and "inadvertently provided inaccurate information" about the program.
- U.S. Senate (October 2025): Under investigation by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Flock confirmed that Customs and Border Protection ran roughly 200 searches and ICE's investigative arm roughly 175 during pilot programs, that the Secret Service and Navy investigators also had access, and that customers were "inaccurately informed" that Flock had no relationship with DHS. Flock also told Wyden's office it does not proactively audit how its cameras are used or whether search-reason requirements are followed.
Remember what Assistant Chief Walters told Wylie's Council: "There's no way we can restrict that." These audits prove the point: even cities that thought they had restricted federal access found out otherwise, from auditors, after the fact.
Sources: Illinois Secretary of State audit announcement; UW Center for Human Rights, "Leaving the Door Wide Open"; Sen. Wyden investigation findings, October 16, 2025
It Already Happened in Texas: 83,000 Cameras Searched Over an Abortion
In 2025, the Johnson County Sheriff (about an hour from Wylie) used Flock to run two nationwide searches for a woman who had self-managed an abortion: first across 17,684 cameras, then across 83,345 cameras in 6,809 networks. The search log entry read: "had an abortion, search for female."
When the story broke, the sheriff and Flock publicly claimed it was a "missing person" welfare check. Documents released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including a detective's sworn affidavit, showed it was formally a death investigation, that investigators consulted prosecutors about charging her, and that they reviewed her private text messages.
The DA confirmed no crime had been committed. She was tracked across the country anyway, through cameras in cities that never agreed to be part of a Texas abortion investigation. Cameras like Wylie's.
Flock's response when this broke was denial, not concern. The company's own blog post about the incident, signed by CEO Garrett Langley, titled a section "Correcting Misinformation" and called the reporting "purposefully misleading." In a Forbes interview the same year, Langley went further, defending the search itself on camera: "This is everything's working as it should be... due to the political climate, this was really good clickbait." The sheriff who ran the search has since been indicted on a felony perjury charge (the case is still pending, with no conviction as of August 2026), a fact that surfaced only because journalists, not Flock, kept digging.
This wasn't isolated. Illinois's Secretary of State separately found 46 out-of-state agencies had searched Illinois Flock data without the legally required attestation not to use it for abortion or immigration enforcement. One town's system alone was queried 262 times for immigration reasons in under four months. Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and Robert Garcia (D-CA) opened a formal congressional investigation in August 2025, citing a parallel case of an ATF analyst improperly querying Richmond, Virginia's network for immigration purposes despite the city's explicit non-cooperation policy. The same pattern (out-of-state agencies reaching into a city's data without its knowledge or consent) turned up in California too, where the state's Attorney General sued the city of El Cajon in October 2025 over plate data shared with more than a hundred out-of-state agencies. Flock has since had to pull California, Illinois, and Virginia from its national search tool specifically because of repeated violations in each. Every fix followed a journalist or a state audit catching the company first, never the other way around.
Flock's CEO called this website's own movement "terrorists." In that same Forbes interview, Langley described DeFlock (the community documenting camera misuse nationwide, the same movement this website is part of) as a "terroristic organization" and said it was "closer to Antifa than they are anything else." He didn't retract it for nearly a year. In July 2026, after continued pressure, Langley posted a public apology on his own account: "Last year during an interview, I made a mistake by referring to people in the DeFlock group as terrorists. I was wrong to say that, and I should have cleared this up a long time ago. That's my fault... There are groups today that have real valid criticisms of the business." The CEO of the company Wylie is paying now admits, in his own words, that his instinct when facing this movement was to call it terrorism, and that the criticism was valid all along.
Sources: Electronic Frontier Foundation, October 2025; 404 Media (original report); Flock Safety blog, "Setting the Record Straight" (June 19, 2025); Forbes, "AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America" (Sept 3, 2025: "terroristic organization" quote, "everything's working as it should be"); Forbes, "Flock CEO Apologizes For Calling Activists 'Terrorists'" (July 17, 2026); Capitol News Illinois (46 out-of-state agencies); Congressional investigation, Aug 6, 2025
Summer 2026: Texas Officers Caught Using Flock to Track Women
- Pasadena, Texas (July 2026): A police sergeant with a documented harassment history resigned while under internal investigation after an unusually high volume of his Flock searches was traced to tracking a female fellow officer. The investigation is ongoing.
- Baytown, Texas (July 2026): An officer under both internal-affairs and criminal investigation for Flock misuse resigned; the case has been referred to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement and the Harris County District Attorney. The department has refused to say what the officer did with the system.
- Fort Bend County, Texas (2025–2026): A Sheriff's Office lieutenant admitted to improperly using Flock: searching one license plate 41 times and another 148 times over a "contentious familial relationship," entirely outside official duties. A third Texas department, an hour from Wylie.
- Nationwide (August 2026): Investigative reporting built on Flock's own audit logs has now documented between 50 and more than 70 officers accused of using Flock to track people, most often women they knew personally. Flock's "fix," an anomaly-detection feature, is opt-in, and only about 1 in 4 agencies use it. See the full documented list below.
Remember: Wylie PD's safeguard against exactly this kind of abuse is the audit log, the same audit log where a Wylie officer entered "TEST" as a case number, and the same audit log Flock gutted after it embarrassed the company nationally.
Sources: Police1 (Pasadena); ABC13 (Baytown); Cybernews (national pattern); Have I Been Flocked audit-log data
Flock hot-list alerts that were FALSE, per the Los Angeles Police Department's own Inspector General audit (July 2026). Of 498 alerts reviewed, 161 were wrong: stale or incorrect database entries that the cameras faithfully matched and pushed to officers as real-time hits on supposedly wanted vehicles.
The day after the audit published, LAPD, the second-largest police department in America, let its Flock contract expire, citing "serious concerns around civil liberties... particularly around privacy and the data being collected."
The stakes of a false alert are not abstract. That same summer, a Wisconsin woman was pulled out of her car at gunpoint twice in one week, by two different departments, on the same erroneous Flock hit that police failed to clear even after the first stop was confirmed to be a mistake (FOX6 Milwaukee; full story in Real Victims below).
Sources: TechCrunch, July 13, 2026; Biometric Update (LAPD OIG audit)
Texas School Cameras Became an ICE Back Door
Audit logs from six Texas school districts show their Flock cameras are searchable through the national network by thousands of outside agencies. One Houston-area district's 8 school cameras were searched more than 733,000 times in a single month by over 3,100 agencies, with immigration-related queries outnumbering criminal ones two to one. The districts themselves never ran an immigration search; the network did it for them.
Meanwhile, the Texas Tribune reports TxDPS Flock partnerships with local agencies jumped 69% in six months (122 agencies in February 2026 to 206 by August), and confirms Texas agencies have run Flock searches on behalf of federal immigration agents. Recall Wylie PD Policy 906 mandates sharing Wylie's data with TxDPS.
Sources: The 74 investigation; Texas Tribune, August 3, 2026
Texas Cities and Counties Are Already Walking Away
- Austin (June 2025): Let its Flock contract expire after resident and council opposition over ICE data-sharing and wrongful-stop concerns. The renewal was pulled before it ever reached a vote.
- Hays County (October 14, 2025): Commissioners voted 3–2 to terminate all Flock contracts and remove the cameras within 30 days, the first county in Texas to do it. County Judge Ruben Becerra cast the deciding vote: "Public safety depends on public trust."
- San Marcos (December 2025): Let its Flock contract expire after a deadlocked council vote, declining roughly $43,000–$46,000 per year in renewal costs.
- Bandera (May 2026): Voted to terminate its Flock contract.
- Guadalupe County (August 7, 2026): Commissioners voted unanimously to terminate. The sheriff cited "public scrutiny" and a "movement to get rid of it." The county paid an $8,500 early-termination charge to leave mid-term. A lesson for Wylie: exits inside the free non-renewal window cost nothing; exits after it come with a bill.
- Lago Vista (August 11, 2026): Council voted unanimously to remove every Flock camera and terminate the agreement, after residents organized a petition and the town's first citizen-initiated referendum. Their cameras had gone up in 2022 with no public discussion. Mayor Shane Saum named the cost of that directly: "They just started seeing them around town, and I think when the process isn't done correctly, you kind of lose that trust of the citizens."
- Hood County (2026): In April, commissioners voted 4–0 to discontinue the county's Flock contract and pursue a $126,000 refund. On August 16, the cameras were physically covered and shut down across the county at the request of commissioners and residents.
- League City (August 12, 2026): Council voted 6–1 to put the question directly to voters on the November 3 ballot, the first Texas city to do so. The ballot asks residents whether police should keep using fixed license plate readers. It's advisory rather than binding, but it establishes the principle Wylie has never been given: that residents get to answer this question themselves.
And Austin's exit revealed one more thing Wylie's Council should hear: even after Austin quit, its police department kept accessing Flock data through neighboring cities' cameras, a loophole an Austin council member called a violation of the city's own ordinance. Once your data is in the network, leaving the contract doesn't pull it back out. The only protection is not feeding the network in the first place.
Sources: KUT News; Community Impact (Hays County); Austin Chronicle (San Marcos); Government Technology (Bandera, national overview); KSAT (Guadalupe County); CBS News Texas (Hood County); Texas Scorecard (Lago Vista); Community Impact (League City referendum)
A Texas Constable Just Covered Every Flock Camera in His County
Hood County, Texas - August 16, 2026. Over a single weekend, the county's Flock cameras were switched off and physically covered. The man who announced it wasn't an activist or a privacy group. He was Constable John Shirley, an elected Texas law enforcement officer, acting at the request of county commissioners and residents.
"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."
"To Flock Safety systems: come get your garbage out of my county."
— Constable John Shirley, Hood County, Texas
This wasn't one official acting alone. Earlier this year, Hood County commissioners voted 4–0 (unanimously) to discontinue the county's Flock contract and pursue a $126,000 refund. Shirley's post announcing the shutdown drew more than 64,000 likes.
Why this matters for Wylie: Hood County is Granbury: conservative, rural, about ninety minutes from here. This is not a big-city story or a partisan one. When an elected constable calls warrantless tracking incompatible with a free society, and his commissioners court backs him unanimously, the question isn't whether opposing Flock is a fringe position. It's why Wylie is about to auto-renew for two more years without ever taking a vote.
Sources: CBS News Texas, August 16, 2026; WFAA; Hood County News (commissioners' 4–0 vote)
Even Elected Officials Are Hitting Pause, Left and Right
This isn't a partisan cause. In fact, it may be the only issue in America where the two ends of the political spectrum are saying the same sentence:
From Bernie Sanders to Rand Paul: the Entire Spectrum, One Message
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), August 18, 2026, about Flock by name: "Going to the doctor? Flock knows. Dropping your kid off at school? Flock is tracking you." He called Flock's network mass surveillance and demanded it stop.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the same month, about the same company: "This isn't crime fighting. This is mass surveillance of every American, and a violation of our 4th Amendment rights."
Think about the last time Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul agreed on anything. When the furthest-left and furthest-right senators in the country describe one product in the same words, that isn't politics. That's the Constitution.
Sources: Sanders statement, August 18, 2026; Daily Caller, August 19, 2026 (Paul statement)
And it goes beyond statements. Two officials in the same week proved it with action:
Knox County, Tennessee: Mayor Glenn Jacobs (Republican). In late July 2026, Jacobs called for a pause on his own county sheriff's plan to add roughly 270 new Flock cameras; installation was halted. On August 9 he went on national television to call for a nationwide pause on Flock deployment until there are constitutional guardrails. His framing could be Wylie's own:
"This is not about depriving [law enforcement] of the tools. It's about figuring out how these tools can be used in an appropriate manner that is consistent with the Constitution." — Mayor Glenn Jacobs
Connecticut: Governor Ned Lamont (Democrat). On August 7, 2026, Lamont asked Connecticut towns to immediately pause installing new cameras pending a statewide policy review, giving the state's police standards council 30 days to produce recommendations. A Democratic governor and a Republican mayor, same week, same ask: pause, then add guardrails. And on August 18, Rhode Island's Governor Dan McKee became the second governor to act, ordering a 60-day statewide review of license plate readers, pausing new state installations, and asking every municipality to freeze new cameras until uniform standards exist. (WPRI, August 18, 2026)
Sources: WVLT (Jacobs); Fox News (Jacobs, nationwide pause); CT.gov (Lamont)
The national picture: this page documents at least 30 cities, counties, and agencies by name that have ended their Flock or ALPR contracts, and DeFlock's national tracker now counts 106 communities that have acted against these systems: 46 contracts canceled, 20 rejected, 19 deactivated, 8 with cameras physically removed, 12 paused, and 1 outright ALPR ban (as of August 21, 2026). And the tracker runs behind the news. At least a dozen exits documented on this page with sources, including LAPD and five of the Texas jurisdictions above, are not yet logged there, which puts the true number above 115. Communities in 23 states have acted in 2026 alone. The summer 2026 wave: LAPD (July, non-renewal over data-ownership and privacy disputes), Stanford University (August), Harrisonburg, Virginia (July 29, citing Fourth Amendment concerns and damaged trust in police), Monroe County, Indiana (July, paying to remove cameras early), Stoughton, Wisconsin (July, unanimous), and Littleton, Massachusetts (July 30, terminated after Flock reactivated cameras without notifying the town, the same breach of trust that ended Cambridge's contract). Dane County, Wisconsin rejected new Flock spending 32–1. Cambridge, Massachusetts removed its cameras after Flock installed two without authorization.
And the exits accelerated again in the very week before Wylie's vote. Between August 14 and 21 alone: Hopkinton, Massachusetts terminated after a town legal review concluded the Flock agreement violated state procurement law, ordering cameras off immediately. Four Rhode Island towns voted to terminate, Narragansett choosing to pay early-exit costs rather than wait for its contract to expire. The Pulaski County, Missouri sheriff canceled despite no local misuse, saying the "trust of the people" mattered more, and pointedly declined to replace Flock with Axon. Auburn, New York terminated unanimously. And six Arkansas cities have dropped Flock since late July, with complaints ranging from false stolen-vehicle alerts to camera angles that had captured residents' private property. On August 21, Santa Barbara, California gave its non-renewal notice too, and said it would only consider a replacement vendor without cross-agency search access: the exact control Wylie's department says is impossible on Flock's platform. Wylie wouldn't be going out on a limb by ending this contract. It would be joining the mainstream of the same month.
Sources: DeFlock USA cancellation tracker; Newsweek map of rejected and deactivated Flock cameras; Washington Examiner (23 states acting in 2026); Shrewsbury Post (Littleton); WHSV (Harrisonburg); IPM (Monroe County); CBS Boston (Hopkinton); Boston Globe (Narragansett); KBIA (Pulaski County); WRVO (Auburn NY); Arkansas Advocate (six cities); 5NEWS (Farmington AR); Santa Barbara Independent, August 21, 2026
Flock Has Never Been Proactive. Not Once.
In August 2026, under mounting pressure, Flock announced new "safeguards": cutting data retention from 30 days to 7, requiring case-number codes for searches, and mandating misuse audits. It's worth asking the obvious question: why weren't these there from the beginning? The answer is Flock's entire track record. Every privacy protection the company has ever added came after an abuse it was built to quiet, never before it.
- March 2025: Shut off national data-sharing for California, after audits caught out-of-state and federal agencies illegally querying California data.
- August 2025: Paused its federal CBP/ICE pilot programs, after reporting revealed Customs and Border Protection had backdoor access to 80,000+ cameras, and an Illinois state audit found the access violated state law.
- January 2026: Added a one-click "turn off federal sharing" toggle, after the immigration-access stories piled up.
- February 2026: Added warning disclaimers about abortion and immigration law, after a Texas sheriff used Flock to search 83,000 cameras for a woman who had had an abortion.
- Spring 2026: Restricted employee sales demos to "public areas" only, after Dunwoody, Georgia's own records showed Flock employees had viewed that city's camera feeds more than 1,000 times since 2023, including a children's gymnastics room camera used as a sales demo. Flock acknowledged the access while disputing that it was improper.
- April 2026: Made its misuse-detection feature available, after officers nationwide were caught using Flock to stalk women.
- August 2026: The retention cut and mandatory audits above, after a summer of officer-stalking resignations and a wave of cities canceling contracts, announced days before a national week of action.
None of it existed at the start. If a warrant requirement, shorter retention, and real audits are good ideas now, they were good ideas in 2021 when Flock began. For years, privacy advocates said exactly that and were waved off. None of this abuse was hard to predict. People warned about all of it. Flock built the surveillance network first and bolted on protection only when the outcry grew loud enough to threaten the business.
Wylie's own police confirmed the pattern. At the February 10 work session, describing the "select a crime plus a case number" safeguard, Assistant Chief Walters said it plainly: the requirement "was done honestly in response to some of the questions over abortions." Even Wylie's department acknowledged, on the record, that Flock adds protections reactively: because of outcry, not foresight.
Why this matters for the September 13 deadline: Flock's August "changes" don't take effect until January 1, 2027, after Wylie's renewal deadline, and after the contract would lock the city in for two more years. Wylie wouldn't be renewing the "new" Flock; it would be renewing the old one, betting that a company whose entire history is reactive will suddenly protect residents proactively. It never has yet. And even the revamped version still doesn't require a warrant, the one protection that actually matters. The Institute for Justice called the changes "window dressing" for exactly that reason.
Read the fine print on the "7-day retention" headline, because it's a trap for exactly Wylie's situation: confirmed reporting states plainly that existing customers keep their current retention period unless they affirmatively opt in to the new 7-day standard. It is a new-customer default, not a retroactive cut. Multiple Texas agencies (Bexar County, City of Denton) are confirmed still on 30-day retention today, unaffected by the announcement. If Wylie renews its existing contract as-is, "Flock now deletes data in 7 days" will not be true for Wylie's cameras. The city would have to negotiate that in explicitly, in writing, as a condition of any renewal. A press-release policy that doesn't apply unless a city asks for it is not a safeguard; it's a talking point.
Sources: Associated Press (Flock platform changes, Aug 2026); Illinois Secretary of State audit; 404 Media (CBP pilot); Bexar County Flock transparency page (30-day retention); KERA News (Denton, 30-day retention); 404 Media (Dunwoody employee access); Wylie City Council work session transcript, February 10, 2026.
Documented Misuse: The Officers Caught Using It
Wylie residents are told an audit log prevents abuse. Here is what the audit logs at other departments actually revealed: a partial, sourced list of officers caught using Flock and similar systems to track people for personal reasons. This page alone documents 27 officers across 18 departments in nine states, plus 10 more under investigation at a single North Carolina department, and the list grows almost weekly: a dozen of the officers below surfaced in August 2026 alone. Investigative tallies nationwide run from 50 to more than 70 cases. These are the ones with names and departments attached.
- Fort Bend County, TX: a Sheriff's lieutenant searched one plate 41 times and another 148 times over a "contentious familial relationship," outside any official duty (admitted 2026).
- Pasadena, TX: a sergeant resigned mid-investigation after his searches were traced to tracking a female fellow officer (July 2026).
- Baytown, TX: an officer resigned under internal-affairs and criminal investigation for Flock misuse; referred to the Harris County DA (July 2026).
- Mooresville, NC: Officer Elizabeth Snowman was arrested Aug 5, 2026 for accessing the system 31 times to track her boyfriend's ex-wife. Ten more officers in the same department are under investigation.
- Albany, GA: five officers arrested July 6, 2026 on 21+ oath-of-office violations for searching plates of people they personally knew; all terminated, GBI investigating.
- Reynoldsburg, OH: two officers resigned Aug 5, 2026 before internal-affairs interviews; one had searched a partner's plate 50+ times over six months. Caught by a proactive audit.
- Greer, SC: two officers fired (June 2026), caught by Flock's own new AI audit tool; one logged personal searches as "welfare checks" and "city planning."
- Milwaukee, WI: Officer Josue Ayala ran 179 searches on an ex-couple while on duty; the victim discovered it by looking herself up on haveibeenflocked.com. He resigned and pleaded guilty.
- Menasha, WI: an officer charged with felony misconduct for tracking his ex-girlfriend; resigned, trial pending (2026).
- Kechi, KS: a lieutenant used Flock to track his estranged wife, was convicted, and lost his police certification (2026).
- Middle Georgia: five officers in the span of eight August days: three former Bibb County deputies arrested on stalking-related and oath-of-office charges for running plates of people they knew personally; a Milledgeville police major (head of criminal investigations) arrested and fired; and a Houston County school-resource deputy suspended pending termination, referred to the DA.
- Stow, MA: an officer accessed data on someone he personally knew at least five times with no law-enforcement purpose; he faces criminal charges, and the town responded by cutting ties with Flock entirely and disabling its cameras (August 2026).
- New Bedford and Lynn, MA: a New Bedford officer allegedly used the system to track her ex-girlfriend (the department suspended its Flock use); two Lynn officers were placed on leave the same week after an audit found "a concerning pattern" in their searches (August 20, 2026).
- Apache Junction, AZ: an officer used the plate readers to track his wife for personal reasons and resigned before he could be fired (2026).
- Lufkin, TX: an officer was arrested by the Texas Rangers on two felony counts (abuse of official capacity, tampering with a government record) over Flock misuse; a second officer is on leave, and the department suspended its own Flock use pending the investigation (August 20, 2026). The fourth Texas department on this list.
Two things about this list. First, most of these officers were caught only because someone ran an audit or a victim looked herself up, meaning the ones we know about are the floor, not the ceiling. Second, the pattern is overwhelmingly domestic: officers using a national surveillance network to follow women in their own lives. That is the exact abuse Wylie's "audit log" is supposed to prevent, the same audit log where Wylie officers wrote "TEST" as their reason for searching.
Sources: Washington Post (Aug 2, 2026); Techdirt / InvestigateTV catalog (70+ cases); ABC13 (Fort Bend); WSOC (Mooresville); Newsweek (multi-state roundup); Institute for Justice; 13WMAZ (Middle Georgia); Boston Globe (Stow); Boston.com (New Bedford, Lynn); FOX 10 Phoenix (Apache Junction); KTRE (Lufkin)
When the System Gets It Wrong, Innocent People Suffer
These aren't theoretical concerns. License plate readers like Flock's are already putting innocent people (including children) in terrifying, dangerous situations.
Documented incidents from CBS News investigations:
Interstate 94, Wisconsin - August 2026
Amber Newell was surrounded by Brookfield police on I-94, held at gunpoint and handcuffed on the interstate while bystanders filmed, because a Flock alert flagged her car as wanted. The alert was stale: Milwaukee PD had closed the investigation but never removed her vehicle from the system. It was the second time in one week she'd been stopped at gunpoint on the same dead alert; the first time, police towed her car and released her without ever explaining why.
Brookfield's police chief said his officers acted "consistent" with the information available. That's exactly the problem: officers treat every alert as real, so when the database is wrong, an innocent driver meets drawn guns.
Source: FOX6 Milwaukee, August 2026
Aurora, Colorado - 2020
A mother and her 6-year-old daughter were pulled over at gunpoint and forced to lie on hot pavement. Police had guns drawn on a kindergartener because an ALPR system confused their Colorado car license plate with a stolen Montana motorcycle.
The city paid a $1.9 million settlement in 2024 for the trauma inflicted on this family.
Española, New Mexico
A 12-year-old was handcuffed when the ALPR system misread a license plate digit, confusing a "2" for a "7."
One month later in the same town, a 17-year-old honors student was detained at gunpoint based on another mistaken vehicle match.
Oakland, California - 2018
Brian Hofer was held at gunpoint after his vehicle was incorrectly flagged as stolen by an ALPR system. He wasn't a criminal, just a privacy advocate who had testified against surveillance systems.
Why these errors happen:
- OCR software misreads letters and numbers - A "2" becomes a "7", an "O" becomes a "0"
- Camera glare and misalignment - Weather, dirt, angles all cause false reads
- Database matching errors - Wrong vehicle types matched (car vs. motorcycle)
- Administrative failures - Stolen vehicle reports not updated when cars are recovered
With billions of license plate scans happening daily across America, even a small error rate means thousands of innocent people pulled over at gunpoint, handcuffed, traumatized, all because a computer made a mistake.
Beyond the mistakes, there's outright abuse:
In Kansas, law enforcement officers used ALPR systems to stalk their former romantic partners. Two separate documented incidents of cops tracking ex-girlfriends using the same technology Wylie is deploying.
Your family could be next. When Wylie police get an alert, accurate or not, they respond with guns drawn. A misread license plate. A database error. A digit confused. That's all it takes to put your child on the pavement at gunpoint.
Sources: CBS News ALPR Investigation, AOL News Report
Government Overreach Without Accountability
Here's something most Wylie residents don't know: You never got to vote on this.
On August 13, 2024, Wylie City Council approved the Flock Safety contract in the "consent agenda", a list of items passed together without individual discussion. The vote was 6-0. No debate. No community input. No discussion about whether Wylie residents want to be surveilled 24/7.
The consent agenda is typically reserved for routine, non-controversial items like approving meeting minutes. Mass surveillance of every resident was buried in paperwork and rubber-stamped.
The 4th Amendment requires a warrant for the government to track your location. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that tracking someone's location violates their Fourth Amendment rights without a warrant. But Flock Safety sidesteps this by being a "private company," even though it's paid by your tax dollars and used exclusively by government.
This is what the Supreme Court said about location tracking:
"Timestamp data provides an intimate window into a person's life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations."
If police need a warrant to ping your cell phone once, why don't they need one to track everywhere you drive for 30 days straight?
The courts are circling this exact question. In January 2026, a federal judge ruled that Norfolk, Virginia's 176-camera Flock network doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment yet, but his own opinion is a warning to every city expanding its network: "ALPR surveillance could become too intrusive... at some point." The only reason Norfolk's program survived was that the gaps between camera hits were too large to reconstruct a person's full daily routine. The case is now fully briefed before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A 2026 Supreme Court ruling on digital location tracking (the Chatrie geofence case) unsettled precedent Norfolk's defense relied on, weakening the city's position on appeal. Norfolk is expanding to 230+ cameras anyway.
Wylie is walking straight into that legal risk. Council has already directed staff to expand from three cameras to eight, at the intersections nearly every resident drives through daily. One council member invited "one on every street, corner and alley." The denser the network, the more complete the tracking, and the more clearly it crosses the constitutional line the Norfolk judge drew. Every camera Wylie adds increases the city's litigation exposure.
Source: WHRO coverage of the Norfolk ruling; Institute for Justice, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk (on appeal)
The profit motive: Flock Safety is a $7.5 billion startup preparing to launch an IPO (stock market offering), not a public service. Among its major investors is Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio is littered with privacy scandals:
- Facebook during the Cambridge Analytica scandal (a record $5 billion FTC privacy settlement)
- Coinbase (exposed data of 69,000 customers)
They're not protecting Wylie. They're extracting wealth from taxpayers while building a surveillance empire to profit from tracking your every movement.
Flock Isn't a Camera Company. It's a Surveillance Platform.
The phrase "license plate reader" makes this sound like a single gadget. It isn't. The camera is the entry point to FlockOS, a platform built to pull every surveillance feed in a jurisdiction onto one live map. Flock's own developer documentation describes a "vendor-agnostic" system designed to tie together "vehicles captured by ALPR, video cameras, patrol vehicles, body-worn cameras, and more," plus third-party alarms, drone-detection systems, GPS trackers, and 911 computer-aided dispatch.
Flock's product line now spans license plate readers, audio and gunshot detection, live pan-tilt-zoom video (Condor), drones marketed as "Drone as First Responder," a people-search product (Nova) that links plates to identities, and this integration layer that ingests outside tracking feeds. New capabilities arrive by software update: no new camera on a pole, and no new council vote.
And the platform just grew again, six days before Wylie's vote. On August 19, 2026, WIRED revealed Flock is testing an AI tool called OS Investigate (internal name: Nightshift) that lets officers search for people by how they drive: no license plate, no name, no crime required. Through a chatbot interface, it can flag "potential witnesses" by how often a car passes through a neighborhood, surface a driver's "associates" from the cameras they pass together, and pull in commercial identity databases. For years, Flock told the public its cameras "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals." This tool is built to do both, and reporters found it in files exposed on Flock's own login pages.
Why this matters for the decision in front of Wylie: contracting with Flock is not buying a camera. It is subscribing to a surveillance-platform company whose capabilities expand on its own timeline. A city can reasonably decide what surveillance it wants, but it should decide that with eyes open about what the vendor actually is, and it should decide it in public. That is the entire reason to end this contract and start any future conversation with a bid, a hearing, and a warrant requirement.
Sources: Flock Safety Developer Platform documentation (Inbound Alerts API; Platform Concepts), captured and archived August 11, 2026; Engadget on WIRED's OS Investigate investigation (Aug 2026); Gizmodo. Quotations describe Flock's product platform, not the specific equipment deployed in Wylie.
It gets worse: Flock's AI now decides if you're suspicious.
Flock recently added artificial intelligence that analyzes your driving patterns and automatically flags you to police if it thinks you're acting "suspiciously." Not because you committed a crime, but because an algorithm decided your movements look weird.
What triggers the AI:
- Drive across state lines? Flagged for potential "human trafficking" or "narcotics trafficking"
- Frequently see the same car? Both of you flagged as "linked vehicles" - the government tracking your relationships
- Visit multiple locations? Flagged for appearing in "suspicious patterns"
The ACLU warns this is "pre-crime" surveillance: "The government shouldn't watch its citizens all the time just in case they commit crimes." Flock won't reveal how the algorithm decides who's suspicious, what data it was trained on, or its error rates. You're guilty until the AI says otherwise.
Does it even work? The honest answer from peer-reviewed research: nobody knows, and the best evidence is mixed. Start with what the cameras actually find: when the ACLU reviewed scan data from nearly 300 police departments, its example agencies showed hit rates as low as 0.01% (Rhinebeck, NY) and 0.08% (High Point, NC). In Maryland's statewide data, just 47 of every million plates read were potentially tied to a stolen car or serious crime. Everyone else is simply logged. A 2025 study in the Justice Evaluation Journal evaluating Atlantic City's major ALPR expansion (cameras on every road on and off the island) found it did not reduce violent crime (it found some association with reduced auto theft and shootings, in a single-city study co-authored with a police official). The study's authors themselves note that rigorous ALPR research "has not kept pace" with how fast the technology is spreading. And when the hits do fire, they're often wrong: a police-run study in Vallejo found up to 37% of fixed-camera hits erroneous, and LAPD's 2026 Inspector General audit found 1 in 3 alerts false. The studies claiming big clearance-rate gains? Commissioned by Flock. Even that one admits it can't prove the cameras solved anything. Wylie is paying for, and accepting all the risks of, a technology whose crime-reduction benefit has never been independently demonstrated.
Sources: ACLU scan-data review; Justice Evaluation Journal (Atlantic City); Vallejo erroneous-hit study; LAPD OIG audit, July 2026
We Read Flock's Own Crime Study, Too
When Flock and city officials say the cameras "solve crime," they are almost always pointing at one document: Flock's 2024 white paper, "An Initial Evaluation of Effectiveness in Aiding Police in Real-World Crime Clearance." It's the source of the "9.1% increase in clearance rates" number you'll hear at council meetings. We read all 21 pages. Here's what the marketing leaves out.
It was written by Flock, for Flock. Both authors are Flock Safety employees. It was self-published as a "white paper," not peer-reviewed, and the underlying data can't be independently checked because it was collected on the condition that it only ever be shown in aggregate.
The data is Flock's customers grading their own homework. It's a survey of Flock customers, asked "How many arrests have you made that can directly be attributed to the use of a Flock Safety camera?": self-reported, self-attributed, from the agencies most invested in the answer. Of 477 contacted, only 123 data points survived into the model.
And the study itself admits it cannot prove the cameras solved anything. In its own words:
"…it must be established that these are crimes that otherwise would have remained unsolved in the first place. Given the state of data collection on this issue, it is unlikely to be solved at scale via quantitative analysis."
That is the whole question. Would these crimes have been solved anyway, by ordinary police work? Flock's own study concedes it hasn't answered that, and probably can't with numbers. The paper calls itself "preliminary," "exploratory," and says its findings only "suggest a positive impact." Even the celebrated 9.1% comes with fine print the marketing drops: it's per additional camera for every single officer, and it measures the "ALPR-assisted clearance rate" (the share of cases the agency itself credited to a camera), not a drop in crime.
So the strongest evidence for Flock, produced by Flock, does not claim the cameras reduce crime, and admits it can't show they solve crimes that wouldn't have been solved otherwise. The independent study that did test it (Atlantic City, above) found no drop in violent crime. Read Flock's paper yourself:
Source: Flock Safety White Paper, 2024 (full PDF, archived). Snow & Charpentier, Flock Safety. Quotations verbatim from the paper's abstract, Data Validation, Results, and "Avenues for further research" sections.
Even the outside academic Flock leaned on to lend the study credibility has since said the data wasn't good enough to use. The white paper credits two outside consultants for lending it academic weight: Johnny Nhan, Ph.D. (Texas Christian University) and Richard C. Helfers, Ph.D. (UT Tyler). 404 Media investigated and found Nhan now disowns the result: "I personally would have done things much differently," he told reporters, saying the police-collected data was "too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis." Records 404 Media obtained show Flock steered which departments Nhan contacted, and an email in which Nhan asked a department for data showing a "big swing" in clearance rates before and after adopting Flock, sourcing that looks results-oriented, not neutral. Nhan has since stopped doing further research for Flock.
And there's now a real-world test of the paper's central claim (more Flock cameras should mean higher clearance rates) in the single largest Flock deployment in the country. Atlanta's camera network grew from 3,300 to 28,626 cameras between 2021 and 2026, per the Atlanta Community Press Collective's analysis. The same analysis, built on FBI-verified crime data, found clearance rates across most major crime categories stayed flat or fell over that same span: homicide clearance dropped from 53.4% to 48.0%. Atlanta's police chief separately claimed a 77.55% clearance rate for 2025; the FBI's own numbers for the same year show 48%.
Additional sources: 404 Media, "Researcher Who Oversaw Flock Surveillance Study Now Has Concerns About It"; Atlanta Community Press Collective, July 28, 2026
There Was No Crime Wave to Stop
Cameras like these get sold as an answer to rising crime. So it's worth asking what crime was doing in Wylie when the contract was signed on August 13, 2024. The answer, using only the city's own numbers: falling. Wylie had just been named the 12th safest city in Texas, its best ranking ever, "up 6 spots from 2023" in the city's own words. Months later, Wylie PD's annual report confirmed 2024 crime per 1,000 residents was down 4% and calls for service were down almost 10%. That report doesn't mention Flock once, because no camera had been installed yet.
And what did the city say the cameras were for? The purchase records answer that too. The $32,800 buy was a line item inside a routine budget amendment on the May 28, 2024 consent agenda, paid from seized funds. The entire written justification in the August 13 packet is one paragraph calling the cameras "a valuable tool in identifying vehicles involved in various criminal activity." No crime statistic appears anywhere in either document. Not one number, before or after. A city at its safest point on record bought a mass surveillance system without ever writing down what problem it was solving.
Two years later, there is still no data. The first cameras went live in late 2025, so no annual before-and-after comparison even exists yet, and the city has never published one. If the cameras were the reason Wylie is safe, someone would have to explain how the city earned a decade of safest-city rankings without them.
Sources: City of Wylie, Recognitions & Awards (SafeWise rankings as claimed by the city itself); Wylie News, "Wylie police report 4% decrease in 2024 crime" (Feb 13, 2025); 05-28-2024 City Council Agenda Packet, Item H (Ordinance 2024-16); 08-13-2024 City Council Agenda Packet, Item B (obtained by public records request, on file).
Times Flock's own status page admits the "hotlist" alert pipeline was delayed or down, in 18 months. The real-time alert is the entire sales pitch: the stolen car, the AMBER Alert, the recovery "in under ten minutes." Flock's public incident log (50 incidents from March 2025 through August 2026) shows that exact feature failing about once a month, including an April 2026 pause of hits from the FBI's NCIC database, and two 2026 degradations of the audit and transparency portals cities rely on for oversight.
Notice what never goes down: the scanning. The collection is reliable. The safety features are not.
Source: status.flocksafety.com incident history, captured August 11, 2026 (archived). Details on the Fine Print page.
Potential misread records created every month, using Flock's own numbers. Flock advertises 96% character-level read accuracy "under optimal conditions." Flock's network runs roughly 20 billion scans a month. Take the company entirely at its word and do the arithmetic: 4% of 20 billion is up to 800 million wrong records a month, wrong plates attributed to real cars, sitting in a database police search as truth. And that is the conservative reading: 96% is character-level accuracy, and a plate has about seven characters, so the share of whole plates read perfectly is necessarily lower still.
And "optimal conditions" is the best case. When Roseville, California audited its actual Flock cameras over two years, 71% of reads were wrong. Flock blamed camera placement and aging hardware. That's the point: the advertised accuracy depends on deployment conditions nobody audits. A misread isn't a harmless glitch. A misread is how a Colorado mom's sedan became a stolen Montana motorcycle, and how Amber Newell ended up handcuffed on I-94.
Sources: Flock Safety's published accuracy specifications, as reported in "Flock Says Its Cameras Are 96% Accurate — Police Found 71% of Alerts Were Wrong"; Roseville, CA field-accuracy analysis; ~20 billion scans/month network volume
The "100% Homicide Clearance Rate" Story Flock Tells Every City, Fact-Checked
Flock's sales materials repeatedly point to two cities that hit a 100% homicide clearance rate (Tulsa, OK and Cobb County, GA) as proof the cameras work. Both numbers are real. Neither holds up as evidence Flock caused them.
Tulsa cleared all 50 homicides it investigated in 2024, and the department's own announcement confirms it. But independent investigative reporting found Tulsa's homicide clearance rate had "consistently exceeded 90%" for the entire decade before any Flock camera was installed there in 2022. Tulsa hit 100% once before, in 2018, four years pre-Flock. A Duke University criminologist quoted in the piece attributes the city's persistently high rate to its homicides mostly being domestic disputes with a known suspect, not to any technology. Tulsa PD's own official statement credits "community support, new technology, and the hard work of detectives." It does not name Flock. The rate fell back to 94% the very next year.
Cobb County's 62-for-62 homicide record (March 2021 into early 2023) is also genuine, and traces to the department itself, not Flock. But the police chief's own quote to local press credited the result to a combination of tools (real-time crime center cameras, facial recognition, license plate readers) plus, in his words, "detectives who sacrificed hours and hours... and exhausted all leads without fail." Flock's marketing compresses that multi-factor, department-credited outcome into a single-technology success story implying its cameras were the decisive factor.
The best available check on self-reported "we solve everything" clearance claims comes from the same metro Cobb sits in: Atlanta, where the police chief's claimed 2025 homicide clearance rate ran nearly 30 points above the FBI's verified figure (see the crime-study section above).
Sources: Tulsa Police Department; The Frontier, "Tulsa's Surveillance Gamble"; KTUL (2025 rate: 94%); FOX 5 Atlanta (Cobb County); Atlanta Community Press Collective (77.55% claimed vs. 48% FBI-verified)
The Same Anecdote, Copy-Pasted Onto Companies With No Confirmed Flock Relationship
Flock builds individualized sales landing pages for target companies, each showing "results" as if that company already uses Flock. Checked against Flock's own official customer list, several of these named targets, including Nike and Disney, appear nowhere on it, and no independent reporting confirms either company has ever had a relationship with Flock. The pages read as cold outreach ("Talk to Sales," "mitigate PR risks for Disney"), not case studies.
What sells the pitch is one recycled statistic: a "100% reduction in parking lot crime," lifted from a single real case (a Memphis cancer center that installed three cameras, no stated timeframe, one hit-and-run solved) and pasted as a generic stat tile onto unrelated pages built for Disney, an electric utility, and a paper company. A second stat, a "97% success rate" at an unnamed "Alabama retailer" (a single undisclosed storefront, one 90-day quarter, three theft cases solved), is copy-pasted across personalized pages for Nike, Walmart, Burlington, and Publix, relabeled inconsistently between copies.
If a Wylie council presentation or a Flock sales rep cites a specific "case study," the pattern above is worth remembering: the same handful of small, short-window anecdotes get reused everywhere.
Sources: Flock Safety official customer list; West Cancer Center case study; "Alabama retailer" case study. The personalized sales pages for Nike, Disney, Walmart, Burlington, Publix, and others were captured and archived by this campaign on August 14, 2026, and remain available on request.
What Wylie's Own Documents Show
This isn't theoretical. After a Wylie resident filed a Texas Public Information Act request, the city was ordered by the Texas Attorney General to release internal Flock records. What those documents reveal, combined with verbatim quotes from City Council work sessions, is far worse than the public has been told.
Every claim in this section is sourced from official documents: Wylie PD's own audit logs, Council meeting transcripts, Wylie PD Policy 906, the vendor's own Sole Source Letter, and the Texas AG's ruling against the City.
The Audit Log Says What the Police Won't
On February 10, 2026, Assistant Chief Walters told City Council that officers can't misuse the system, claiming Flock now requires officers to "select a crime plus a case number" and "can't just make up" a reason for searching.
One month of Wylie PD's own audit logs (January 7 – February 6, 2026) tells a different story. Justifications officers actually entered include:
- The case number entered literally as "TEST" on a "Robbery - follow up" search, in a live system tracking real Wylie residents
- "kuria", an unexplained entry appended to the justification on more than one search (for example, "Drugs/Narcotics - kuria")
- "case is from 2021, looking for recent hits", a five-year-old case triggering a nationwide camera search
- Generic, untraceable reasons like "investigation", "suspect", "theft", with no further detail
Source: Wylie PD Audit Log, FOIA release PIR-2026-78, covering 1/7/2026 – 2/6/2026.
The number of cameras a single Wylie officer's "hit and run" search reached. One query, 6,119 networks, 90,911 devices nationwide. This was not an unusual entry. Multiple Wylie searches in the audit log scanned tens of thousands of cameras across the country for routine local cases.
The Council was told this is a tool for "vehicles entering and exiting our city." The audit log shows it's being used to scan a national surveillance network on the basis of a single Wylie file number. And the network runs both ways: when Lucas County, Ohio audited who was searching its cameras, it found Houston PD alone had run more than 71,000 searches against the county's data in a single month, with no clear explanation. (13abc, August 22, 2026)
Wylie's "30-day retention" claim doesn't survive its own documents.
Walters told Council: "We are only able to go back and pull 30 days." But the same audit log shows Wylie searches with date ranges starting in October, September, August, and even July 2025, all run during the January–February 2026 audit window.
Wylie PD's own Policy 906 (Section IV.E) makes the limit even thinner: it mandates that Wylie share its data with the Texas Department of Public Safety LPR Database, where the data "will be maintained according to TXDPS policy", not Wylie's. Once your plate is captured in Wylie, the city no longer controls how long it's stored.
"There's no way we can restrict that."
When Mayor Pro Tem Mulliqi asked, on February 10, whether out-of-town officers searching Wylie's data have to enter a Wylie case number or notify Wylie PD first, Assistant Chief Walters answered on the public record:
"If it's not our case number that they're working on, they do not have to call our agency... There's no way we can restrict that. We either make a decision to share or we make a decision not to."
Wylie has chosen to share. That means thousands of officers in agencies Wylie has never vetted, in any state, can pull up the movements of every car that drives through Wylie, with zero local oversight, zero notification, and zero requirement to tie the search to a Wylie case.
Source: Wylie City Council Work Session transcript, February 10, 2026.
How They Paid for It Without You Noticing
The contract was buried in a consent agenda, and the $32,800 initial cost never appeared as a line item in the City budget you vote on. Chief Henderson confirmed the funding source himself: "We used SEEs funds to allow us to purchase these license plate readers."
"Seized funds" are restricted forfeiture proceeds: money taken from criminal cases that sits outside the General Fund. Using them for surveillance infrastructure bypasses the public budget process, the public hearings, and the public scrutiny that any normal six-figure procurement would face. Wylie residents had no opportunity to weigh in because the spending was never visible.
Sources: 05-28-2024 City Council Agenda Packet (Ordinance 2024-16); 08-13-2024 Police memo; February 10, 2026 work session transcript.
The City Tried to Hide the Contract. The Texas AG Ordered It Released.
When a Wylie resident filed a Texas Public Information Act request for the Flock contract, pricing, policies, audit logs, and data-sharing agreements, the City of Wylie did not simply respond. The City asked the Texas Attorney General for permission to withhold the records, claiming they were Flock's "trade secrets."
Three things came out of that fight:
- The City didn't make its own legal case. The City's letter to the AG admitted it had not provided the required factual evidence. It just assumed Flock would.
- Flock didn't bother defending the secrecy. The AG's ruling (OR2026-016393, April 23, 2026) stated plainly: "we have not received comments from Flock explaining why the submitted information should not be released." Flock let the deadline pass.
- The City may have used a template from someone else's case. The City's submission to the AG referenced a "Park Request" instead of the actual requestor, suggesting copy-paste, not individualized legal review.
The AG ordered the City to release the records. Other Texas cities never tried to hide theirs in the first place. Houston ($6.39M Flock contract), Temple, and Fort Bend County have all published their Flock agreements openly. Fort Bend's contract even contains explicit language stating: "the terms and conditions of the Agreement are not proprietary or confidential information."
Wylie's instinct, when asked what it was doing with public money to surveil the public, was to fight to keep it hidden.
Sources: City of Wylie request to AG (Feb 12, 2026); Texas Attorney General Ruling OR2026-016393 (April 23, 2026); resident's counter-brief filed under § 552.304.
Quiet Plans to Expand the Network
Public attention has focused on the original three cameras. But on February 10, 2026, Chief Henderson asked Council for direction to install five more cameras at intersections most Wylie residents drive through every day:
- Country Club Road & East Parker Road
- East FM 544 & Vinson Road
- West FM 544 & McCrary Road
- South Highway 78 & Sanden Boulevard
- North Highway 78 & Wylie East Drive
Council gave that direction. One council member's response on the record was: "if you want to put 510, 1,500, I don't have a problem with it. Y'all can put one on every street, corner and alley if you want to."
Source: February 10, 2026 City Council Work Session transcript.
Wylie Signed a Contract With an Unlicensed Vendor
The timeline matters:
- July 10, 2024: Texas DPS issues a cease-and-desist letter to Flock for operating in Texas for five years without the private security license required by state law.
- August 13, 2024: Wylie City Council approves the Flock contract on the consent agenda.
- October 10, 2024: Flock finally obtains a valid Texas license, two months after Wylie signed.
- August 2025: Flock's Texas license is suspended. DPS cited failure to maintain proof of required liability insurance. The suspension was lifted November 12, 2025 after Flock cured the lapse; the current DPS record shows the license active through September 30, 2027.
When this was raised at Council, Assistant Chief Walters dismissed the August 2025 suspension by saying it was just "for failure to provide a proof of liability insurance. It wasn't for any kind of a violation." Flock is licensed today, but the pattern stands: five years operating unlicensed, a cease-and-desist, a contract signed during the unlicensed window, and a suspension for lapsed insurance paperwork. That's the compliance track record of the vendor holding a record of everywhere Wylie drives.
Why this matters beyond the legalities: evidence collected by an unlicensed private investigator can be challenged and excluded in court. Every case Wylie PD built using Flock during that unlicensed window is potentially compromised, including any cases that led to arrests of Wylie residents.
Sources: Texas DPS records; Houston Chronicle reporting; February 10, 2026 work session transcript.
What Wylie Actually Bought (in Flock's Own Words)
Council and Wylie PD have repeatedly described Flock as "just a license plate reader." The Sole Source Letter Flock provided to Wylie (signed by Flock CEO Garrett Langley) describes a very different product. These are the vendor's own admissions about Wylie's specific package:
- Integrated Audio & Gunshot Detection: microphones using machine learning to "recognize audio signatures" of crimes in progress.
- Tracking by appearance, not just plate: proprietary machine vision that identifies vehicles by "roof rack, bumper stickers, etc." and can capture vehicles "with the absence of a license plate."
- "Visual Search": upload any digital image of a vehicle from any source and the system finds matching vehicles.
- Live video integration via Flock Safety Condor™, providing officers "instant replay of downloadable live on-scene video with PTZ controls and 25X optical zoom."
- Integration with Axon's Evidence.com, mobile patrol-car ALPRs, and an "ever-increasing" network of HOA and private business cameras.
And documented in court filings: Flock Patent US 11,441,654 B1 describes classifying people by race, gender, height, and weight in searchable databases. This is the vendor's product roadmap, not speculation.
Source: Flock Safety Sole Source Letter, signed by CEO Garrett Langley, provided to City of Wylie 2024.
Flock's Documented Pattern of Acting Without Authorization
Wylie's leadership has placed extraordinary trust in Flock as a vendor. That trust isn't supported by Flock's record with other cities, facts that come from official government statements, not advocacy groups:
- Mountain View, California: Flock unilaterally enabled a nationwide data-sharing setting without the police department's knowledge, exposing local data to federal agencies.
- Cambridge, Massachusetts: Flock installed cameras after the City Council ordered them deactivated. The contract was terminated for breach of trust.
- Washington State: Border Patrol accessed data from ten local departments that had never agreed to share with federal agencies.
- February 2026: Flock unilaterally rewrote its standard customer contract with 147 changes, including deleting the clause that read "Flock does not own and shall not sell customer data."
- Amazon's Ring ended its partnership with Flock just weeks before Wylie's February 2026 work session, citing concerns about how the data was being used.
A vendor that has reactivated cameras after a city ordered them off, enabled hidden data-sharing without notice, and quietly stripped its customer-data protections from its contracts is not a vendor any city should be expanding its surveillance footprint with.
We Read Flock's Fine Print. You Should Too.
Flock's public FAQ promises it will "never share or sell" your data, and won't even "access" it. Flock's actual contract takes a "limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license" to use customer data for Flock's own product development. Its LPR policy reserves the right to hand data to "government officials and/or third parties" on Flock's own "good faith belief." Its liability, if everything goes wrong, is capped near one year of fees (about $27,000) under Georgia law, in private arbitration. And its own policy tells officers that plate reads "may be incomplete or inaccurate."
We archived every document with cryptographic hashes on August 11, 2026, so the record survives the next revision. Read the side-by-side:
Read the Fine PrintSources: Public statements from Mountain View PD, Cambridge MA City Council, Washington state agencies, and contract comparison filings cited in Wylie public testimony, February 24, 2026.
Watch the Investigation
Don't take our word for it. Independent security researcher and musician Benn Jordan investigated Flock Safety and found disturbing vulnerabilities. His findings led to:
- Official investigations by U.S. Senators and Representatives
- Cities canceling Flock contracts and removing cameras
- Over 60 published security vulnerabilities
- Major media coverage exposing the dangers
Watch this 35-minute investigation to see how easily Flock cameras can be hacked, how your data is being sold, and how false alerts have put families in danger:
How I Hacked Every Camera in Wylie (And Your City Too)
This investigation exposed 60+ Flock cameras with no passwords, dark web credential sales, and how the technology can be used for stalking.
Flock's audio surveillance: It's not just cameras. Flock recently rolled out high-powered microphones throughout cities that record your conversations. They call it "distress detection." But according to civilian oversight commissions, over 99% of Flock alerts don't result in any police action, and the microphones capture everything you say in public.
Flock Safety Is Now Recording Your Conversations
High-powered microphones listening to your conversations, voice data revealing your health and emotions, and a chilling effect on free speech.
At what point does "safety" become oppression? When does protection become a prison?
Ending Flock Is Step One, Not the Finish Line
Canceling the Flock contract is necessary, but on its own it fixes nothing permanently. Without rules in place, the city could drop Flock on Monday and sign an identical deal with a different surveillance company on Tuesday: no public vote, no warrant requirement, same warrantless tracking of every resident. The problem was never just the logo on the camera. It's the absence of any law protecting you from what the camera does.
These vendors are already lined up, selling the exact same capabilities:
- Axon (Fusus) markets Axon Outpost, a camera that in its own words "unifies livestreaming, ALPR, and vehicle attribute recognition into one device," deployable on "existing poles, new poles, buildings, vehicles, trailers, or trees" and folded into Axon's broader intelligence platform. (axon.com)
- Leonardo's ELSAG sells fixed, mobile, and covert license plate readers, concealed inside "traffic barrel cameras, toolbox cameras," cargo carriers, and radar trailers, capturing "plate numbers, photos of the car, GPS coordinates and date/time stamps" day and night. (leonardocompany-us.com)
If Wylie ends Flock but leaves the door open, one of these is the next knock. That's why our ask has always been two things, not one: end this contract, and put protections in place so no vendor (Flock, Axon, Leonardo, or one that doesn't exist yet) can track residents without a warrant and a public process.
What "protections" means, concretely: a warrant (or a recognized emergency exception) required before any camera data is searched; competitive bidding and a public hearing before any surveillance system is adopted; a real, enforceable retention limit the city actually controls; and a public vote on the record, never again buried in a consent agenda.
This Is Why the Bills in Congress Matter
Local action ends Wylie's contract. But the warrantless-search loophole is national, and closing it takes law. Two bills, both introduced in July 2026 and both from across the political aisle from Wylie's usual privacy allies, would do exactly that. If you care about this beyond one contract, they're worth your support:
- The PRIVACY Act: introduced by Wylie's own congressman, Rep. Keith Self (R-McKinney). Requires a warrant before federal agencies can access ALPR data, caps retention at 30 days, and bars federal funds for these systems. Original cosponsors: Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) and Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA).
- H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act: introduced by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN). Goes further: bars federal agencies from purchasing, operating, or even accessing ALPR and biometric surveillance systems, and makes improperly obtained data inadmissible in court.
Contacting your representatives about these bills takes two minutes, and it's the difference between winning one fight in Wylie and actually closing the loophole. Cameras chosen by the community, governed by the Constitution. That's the whole platform.
Your Voice Matters
Wylie City Council can end this contract for free, but only until September 13, 2026. One written notice of non-renewal, sent before that date, ends the agreement on October 13 at zero cost. After that, Wylie is locked in until October 2028.
Cities across America are waking up to the dangers. DeFlock's running tracker counts 106 communities that have canceled, rejected, deactivated, paused, or banned Flock and ALPR programs, and it hasn't yet caught up to a dozen more documented on this page, putting the real number above 115, with communities in 23 states acting in 2026 alone:
- Hays County, Texas: first Texas county to terminate, cameras removed (Oct 2025)
- Guadalupe County, Texas: terminated unanimously (Aug 2026)
- Hood County, Texas: commissioners voted 4–0 in April to end the contract and seek a $126,000 refund; in August a constable covered every camera in the county
- Lago Vista, Texas: voted unanimously to remove every camera after a resident petition and citizen-initiated referendum (Aug 2026)
- League City, Texas: voted 6–1 to put the question on the November 3 ballot and let residents decide directly (Aug 2026)
- Austin, San Marcos, and Bandera, Texas: all let contracts lapse or voted to terminate (2025–2026)
- Harrisonburg, Virginia: canceled over Fourth Amendment concerns; residents argued the cameras were damaging trust in police (July 2026)
- Monroe County, Indiana: canceled after national reporting on plate-data misuse (July 2026)
- LAPD: America's second-largest police department let its contract expire over "serious concerns" about civil liberties, after its own audit found 1 in 3 Flock alerts were false (July 2026)
- Denver City Council voted 12–0 against a $666,000 renewal (though the mayor bypassed them)
- Oak Park, Illinois voted 5–2 to cancel after Illinois opened a data-sharing investigation
- Cambridge, Massachusetts removed its cameras after Flock installed two without authorization
- Dane County, Wisconsin rejected new Flock spending 32–1 (April 2026)
- U.S. Senators and Representatives have launched federal investigations, and Wylie's own congressman, Rep. Keith Self, has introduced the PRIVACY Act to require warrants for federal access to ALPR data
But this only happens when residents speak up. When they demand accountability. When they refuse to trade freedom for empty promises of "safety."
Two minutes, two actions: sign the petition, then email the council below. Signatures show the numbers; emails show up in their inbox with your name and your street.
This isn't about being anti-police. It's about being pro-Constitution. Law enforcement deserves better tools: tools that actually work, that don't violate civil rights, and that aren't controlled by profit-driven corporations with terrible security.
To be clear about what we're asking for. We are not against police technology, and we are not even against license plate cameras in principle. A camera program that requires a warrant for searches, adopted through competitive bidding and a public vote, is a conversation Wylie could reasonably have. What we oppose is Flock: a vendor with documented security failures, unauthorized federal data-sharing, and a nationwide misuse record. It was installed here with no bids, no budget line, and no public process, in a network Wylie cannot restrict. And this isn't about one company: other ALPR vendors (Motorola, Axon, Leonardo) raise the same warrantless-search questions, which is why the safeguard has to be in the contract, not the brand. End this contract first. If Council believes ALPRs are worth having, make the case in public and put warrant protections in writing.
📧 Wylie City Council
Email All Council MembersMayor: Matthew Porter
Council: David Duke, Dave Strang, Todd Pickens, Scott Williams, Sid Hoover, Gino Mulliqi
📞 (972) 516-6010 | 🏛️ 300 Country Club Road, Building 100, Wylie, TX 75098
🏛️ Collin County Commissioners
Contact Your CommissionerCollin County shares Flock Safety data regionally. Your commissioner needs to hear that this surveillance system threatens residents' safety and privacy.
🏛️ Show Up: The Meetings That Matter
Emails can be skimmed. A resident at the podium cannot. Council meets on the second and fourth Tuesdays at 6:00 PM in the Council Chambers, 300 Country Club Road, Building 100, and there are two regular meetings left before the September 13 deadline:
- Tuesday, August 25: the decision meeting. The Flock contract is Item 1 on the regular agenda, and Council can vote that night to end it
- Tuesday, September 8: the last regular meeting before the non-renewal window closes, if August 25 ends without action
How public comment works: show up before the meeting starts, ask the clerk for the speaker sign-up form, and fill it out. That's it. You'll be called during the citizen comment period and get up to 3 minutes to address the Council directly. (Can't make it? The city live-streams its meetings, but a name on the sign-up sheet is what gets counted.) You don't need to be an expert. A version of this is plenty:
"My name is ____ and I live on ____. Item 1 is on your agenda tonight, and I'm asking you to vote to send Flock the notice of non-renewal. Under the contract's own terms it costs the city nothing and ends the program October 13. If you believe cameras are worth having, bring that back with competitive bids, a public hearing, and a warrant requirement. We never got a public process on the way in. Tonight you can give us one. Thank you."
Confirm dates against the city's posted agendas before attending. Special meetings and cancellations happen. Bring a printed copy of the draft resolution to hand to a council member.
Make Your Voice Heard:
- Be personal. Explain how constant surveillance makes YOU feel unsafe, not more protected.
- Mention your family. "I don't want my children's movements tracked by a corporation."
- Reference the evidence. The June 2026 search-engine leak, the 2.3M-plate audit log exposure, the Texas abortion search, LAPD's 1-in-3 false-alert audit, and Wylie PD's own "TEST" search justifications.
- Demand action. Ask Council to send the notice of non-renewal before September 13 (the free exit) and to hold a public hearing.
- Personalize the template. Before sending, add your own story or concerns - even small changes make your email more powerful.
- Copy friends and neighbors. Forward this site. The more voices, the stronger the message.
📧 Prefer to Email Manually?
If the button above doesn't work, you can copy the email addresses and template below:
Council Member Email Addresses:
Email Template:
Subject: Terminate Flock Safety Contract - Wylie Resident Dear Mayor Porter and Council Members, I am a Wylie resident and I am deeply concerned about the Flock Safety surveillance contract approved on August 13, 2024. I never consented to being tracked everywhere I drive. I never got to vote on whether our city should implement 24/7 surveillance. This was buried in the consent agenda without public discussion. Independent investigations have documented catastrophic failures and real harm: - June 2026: Flock leaked actual police license plate searches onto public search engines (DuckDuckGo/Bing), confirmed by 404 Media - January 2026: Unredacted Flock audit logs exposed 2.3 million+ license plates nationwide; Flock responded by restricting the audit logs cities rely on for oversight - State audits in Illinois and Washington caught Flock giving federal agencies access to local data that cities never approved - A Texas sheriff used Flock to search 83,000 cameras nationwide over a legal abortion, logged as a "missing person" case - A 6-year-old child held at gunpoint due to a false ALPR alert (Aurora, CO - $1.9M settlement) - July 2026: LAPD's own audit found 1 in 3 Flock alerts were false; LAPD let its contract expire days later - Summer 2026: Texas officers in Pasadena and Baytown resigned amid investigations into using Flock to track women Texas communities are already acting: Hays County (Oct 2025), Guadalupe County (Aug 2026), Lago Vista (Aug 2026), and Hood County (a unanimous 4-0 vote in April 2026 to end the contract and seek a $126,000 refund; cameras covered in August) have terminated their Flock contracts, and Austin, San Marcos, and Bandera have all dropped Flock. League City voted 6-1 to put the question on the November ballot so residents decide directly. Our own congressman, Rep. Keith Self, has introduced the PRIVACY Act to require warrants for federal access to this data. This puts my family at risk. Our tax dollars are funding a system that exposes our data, shares it with agencies we never approved, and makes us LESS safe. I urge you to: 1. Vote at the August 25 meeting, where this is Item 1 on your regular agenda, to send Flock a written notice of non-renewal - it costs taxpayers nothing and ends the agreement on October 13. Missing the September 13 deadline locks Wylie in until October 2028. 2. Hold a public hearing so residents can voice concerns 3. Require community consent - and a warrant requirement for searches - before any future surveillance Wylie deserves better. Sincerely, [Your Name] [Your Address]
Remember: Personalize this template before sending! Add your own story, concerns, or experiences to make your email stand out.
Write From Your Own Corner of Wylie
A council member reading fifty identical emails counts them once. Fifty different voices count fifty times. Pick the one closest to you:
🧒 If you're a parent
Dear Mayor Porter and Council Members,
I'm a Wylie parent, and I want you to know what this system means from where I sit. These cameras log my kids' school runs, practices, and friends' houses into a database searchable by thousands of agencies we've never vetted. Security researchers found Flock cameras exposed online with no passwords, some pointed at playgrounds. And this summer, officers in two Texas cities resigned amid investigations into using Flock to track women. The system's protection against that is an audit log Flock itself has weakened.
I'm not asking you to be anti-police. I'm asking you to vote under Item 1 on August 25 to send the notice of non-renewal while it's free, and to require a warrant for any camera program you ever bring back. My family shouldn't be in a national database because we drove to school.
Sincerely,
[Your Name], [Your Street]
🏪 If you own a business in Wylie
Dear Mayor Porter and Council Members,
I run a business in Wylie, and I look at the Flock contract the way I'd look at any vendor: security record, liability, and value. This vendor leaked police search records onto public search engines this year, exposed 2.3 million plates in unredacted logs, operated in Texas without the required license when Wylie signed, and rewrote its customer contract to delete the line saying it doesn't own customer data. If one of my vendors did that, they'd be gone the same week.
The city has a free exit: written notice of non-renewal before September 13. After that, we're locked in until 2028, and Guadalupe County just learned what leaving mid-term costs. As a taxpayer and business owner, I'm asking you to vote under Item 1 on August 25 to take the free exit, and to run any future camera program through competitive bidding like every other procurement.
Respectfully,
[Your Name], [Your Business], [Your Street]
👮 If you support the police and just want a warrant
Dear Mayor Porter and Council Members,
I back our officers, and I'm not against police technology. I'm asking for one safeguard: a warrant. Police already need one to track a phone (the Supreme Court settled that in Carpenter) and the same data is what these cameras collect. Rep. Keith Self's PRIVACY Act would apply exactly that standard at the federal level. A warrant requirement introduced by our own conservative congressman is not an anti-police position.
Every legitimate use (the stolen car, the AMBER alert, the felony warrant) survives a warrant requirement. What doesn't survive is the searches with no case behind them, which is where every documented abuse lives. Please vote under Item 1 on August 25 to send the non-renewal notice, and if you bring cameras back, put the warrant requirement in the contract.
Respectfully,
[Your Name], [Your Street]
📞 Prefer to call? A 30-second phone script
Call (972) 516-6010 during business hours and ask to leave a message for the Mayor and Council:
"Hi, my name is ____ and I live on ____ in Wylie. I'm calling to ask the Council to send Flock Safety the written notice of non-renewal before September 13. It's free before that date and locks us in until 2028 after it. I'd support cameras that require a warrant, adopted with public input, but not this contract. Thank you."
Calls get logged and tallied. A two-minute call from a resident often counts more than an email.
You're Not Alone
Wylie is just one of over 6,000 communities being surveilled by Flock Safety. But residents across America are fighting back, and winning.
The Movement Has Reached DFW
Wylie isn't going first, and it isn't going alone. As of summer 2026, organized resident campaigns are active across the metroplex and Texas:
- DeFlock DFW: the metroplex-wide umbrella project uniting the city campaigns, documenting ALPR programs across Dallas, Fort Worth, Denton, Frisco, Carrollton, and McKinney. Holds regular community meetings across the metroplex
- DeFlock Carrollton: 600+ petition signatures demanding removal of the city's roughly 70–95 Flock cameras (about $261,000/year)
- Richardson: resident petition launched July 2026 demanding removal of existing units and a public Fourth Amendment commitment from the mayor and council
- DeFlock Tyler: countywide petition against all ALPR vendors in Smith County, with public info meetings underway
- El Movimiento DFW: running know-your-rights workshops on ALPRs and immigration enforcement across Dallas–Fort Worth
- Texarkana, College Station, and Harris County: residents packing council and commissioners meetings to demand cancellation
Nationally, DeFlock.me now maps roughly half of Flock's ~100,000-camera network, and an estimated 30 local DeFlock-style groups exist across the country. The National Week of Action Against ALPRs runs August 16–22, 2026, with residents in 75+ cities showing up to council meetings, canvassing neighborhoods, and demanding contract cancellations.
Sources: KERA News (Carrollton); Dallas Observer (DFW overview); KLTV (Tyler); KBTX (College Station)
📣 Stay in the loop locally: DeFlock Wylie is now on Facebook. Follow for council meeting dates, new records releases, and campaign updates. Share it with a Wylie neighbor.
🔍 Were you flocked? When police departments released unredacted Flock audit logs this year, millions of searched plates became public. Have I Been Flocked lets you check whether your own license plate appears in leaked search records. This isn't hypothetical surveillance. You can look yourself up.
📋 See Wylie's Surveillance Contracts: The Atlas of Surveillance has documented exactly what surveillance technology Wylie Police Department has deployed. View Wylie's full surveillance profile
Join the movement: DeFlock.me is a community-driven effort to map surveillance cameras and organize resistance. See where cameras are in your neighborhood, report new ones, and connect with others who refuse to accept constant surveillance.
The Cameras Around Wylie, Mapped
This is DeFlock's live community map, centered on Wylie. Every marker is an ALPR camera reported and verified by residents. Zoom out to see how the network connects across the metroplex, and the country.
Map hosted by the DeFlock project (deflock.org) and loads from their servers. Spot a camera that isn't mapped? You can report it directly on the map.
Open the Full Map at DeFlock.meWhy This Matters
This isn't about left or right. Republican or Democrat. It's about freedom versus control.
Maybe you trust today's government with this power. But what about tomorrow's? What about five years from now?
This surveillance system can be used to:
- Track women seeking healthcare across state lines
- Monitor people attending protests or political rallies
- Build cases for immigration enforcement (already happening)
- Stalk domestic violence victims
- Create dossiers on journalists, activists, or anyone the government deems "suspicious"
The Supreme Court has ruled that tracking your location violates the Fourth Amendment. But Flock Safety exploits a loophole by being "private," even though they're paid by government and used exclusively by law enforcement.
Privacy is power. It's control over your own life. Once you give it up, you don't get it back.
Your children will grow up in a world where every movement is logged. Where AI analyzes their emotions and conversations. Where corporations profit from tracking their lives.
Unless we stop it now.
What "stopping it" means to us, and what it doesn't. It doesn't mean stripping police of tools. It means four things: end the Flock contract before it auto-renews September 13. Give police tools the city actually chose, through bids, hearings, and a vote, not a consent-agenda rubber stamp. Require a warrant to search any camera data the city ever collects. And change the laws that let warrantless mass searches happen in the first place, which is why we back the warrant bills now moving in Congress. Cameras chosen by the community, governed by the Constitution: that's the whole platform.