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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone had success getting their city to take down the Flock cameras? Ours just added them maybe a year and a half ago. They popped up in multiple nearby municipalities around the same time, I'm not sure if it was coordinated action or somehow pulled off at the county level.

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I was one of the main organizers of a community group that successfully got Flock contracts canceled in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon. I have also presented several times to city officials in and around Portland, am currently helping groups in other cities around Oregon and elsewhere get started, and I'm working with a state legislative workgroup to begin getting some reasonable legislation in place.

The extent to which Flock manipulates police departments is really incredible. Here's a fun little factoid: Lexipol is a company which sells various pre-written policies to police departments, including an ALPR policy; Lexipol is also a parent company of Police1, which helps police departments find public grant money to purchase Flock subscriptions, and Flock in turn is heavily featured on Police1.

So, if you're a police department, you go to Police1 (Lexipol) for news and product info, they pitch you on Flock, you fill out a form, you sign a contract, and then later you need an actual ALPR policy for your department, and Lexipol sells you that, too. The policy of course is extremely friendly towards vendors like Flock.

Flock exerts a lot of influence with the police departments that subscribe to their platform. We've repeatedly had to respond to the same talking points from PDs (and some city officials) that are very clearly getting all of their info from Flock, and in some cases coached by them.

And YCombinator startup Flock Safety is extremely misleading in many of their product, service, and business statements.

It's coming up at the Los Altos Hills city council meeting next week. I would love to know what I should say to try and let our contract expire.

Email me at contact@eyesoffeugene.org. Things are a bit busy the next few days, but we can discuss what's worked for us. Getting a win in one meeting is a long shot, but you never know -- Bend, Oregon also got theirs canceled just the other day!

I'm also spinning up a new team that will be able to more actively help people get efforts started (or keep them going). Their first meeting is coming up this week too.

The people at DeFlock are also very helpful with local support: contact@deflock.me

A success in Redmond, WA:

https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2025/11/a-preliminary-v...

Montlake Terrace WA did https://www.heraldnet.com/news/mountlake-terrace-cancels-flo...

My hope is that https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules... will make Flock get the fuck out of Washington state.

It's good that MLT did cancel them, but there's still a ton up that way. Mill Creek, Lynnwood, Marysville, just for a few examples.

Flagstaff, Arizona. https://www.azfamily.com/2025/12/20/flagstaff-cancels-contro...

apparently a bunch of cities across oregon and washington are not renewing.

https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/08/bend-flock-cameras-ai...

I eagerly clicked the link but they're just looking for another vendor that does the same thing. It's like boycotting Marlboro only to buy from Camel.

And what are the chances of a smaller vendor being any more secure?

With a bar this low? Pretty good.

Them being more secure would be good, but it's still mass surveillance of citizens without much justification.

Decentralized surveillance. Only mass if it’s all cohesively accessible by one entity.

Which is definitely the case for flock and likely for other companies.

I mean, the product makes their jobs easier and cheaper (for investigations). People may debate that, but these things come down to efficiency.

So, whether it's vendor A or Vendor B municipalities don't care. What they want is the capability. The municipalities have the backing of the communities -with few odd exceptions because most people in most communities want LE to "catch the perps."

Both Austin, Texas and San Marcos, Tx are non-renewing Flock . . .

Maybe Flock sales was going door-to-door in your area.

Sedona (with a handy timeline of how they accomplished it) https://livefreeaz.com

Bend, OR https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/08/bend-flock-cameras-ai...

Hays County, TX https://www.kxan.com/news/hays-county-votes-to-terminate-flo...

Lockhart, TX preemptively rejected them https://www.kxan.com/news/local/caldwell-county/lockhart-cit...

Working on it in our city. Flock has been their own worst enemy—once people know the name of the company, they start seeing it in the news regularly. Start talking to people, show up at city meetings.

Hillsborough, NC https://www.hillsboroughnc.gov/Home/Components/News/News/856...

Evanston, IL did

Thanks, that’s really relevant.

https://www.cityofevanston.org/Home/Components/News/News/667...

First thing to understand, at least in my case, is that the “city” does not manage the contract. The local PD does. Good luck reasoning with them.

Great.

Thanks for that tip, though.

One first step, is to ask the PD if they have the “national search” functionality enabled. As far as I can tell it’s a binary switch that allows data to be shared with other PDs in cooperation with ICE. I think it’s turned on by default and many PDs simply aren’t aware of exactly what it is.

See Denver for example: https://coloradonewsline.com/2025/08/06/immigration-denver-f...

This is low hanging fruit and if you can get them to shut that off it’s a quick win. Mine had already shut it off. Denver turned it off after above news story got traction.

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