The LAPD let its Flock contract expire, and its inspector general wants the other camera vendors paused too

The Los Angeles Police Department's three-year contract with Flock Safety expired on Saturday, and the department did not renew it. Flock runs 138 pole-mounted license plate cameras in Los Angeles. The company owns and operates them, which is the whole problem the LAPD says it could not solve at the negotiating table.

"This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras," LAPD chief information officer Dean Gialamas told reporters, in comments first reported by ABC7 and the Los Angeles Times. Gialamas told the Times the sticking point was ownership: "having very clear terms about who owns the data, what happens with the data once they collect."

So this is a fight over contract language. The cameras work about as well as they ever did. The question is who controls what they see.

What an ALPR actually does

An automated license plate reader is a fixed camera plus a plate-recognition model. It photographs every vehicle that passes, extracts the plate string, and writes a row: plate, timestamp, location, and usually a thumbnail of the car. That row goes into a searchable database. Run enough cameras and you have a queryable movement history for every car in the city. The stolen-vehicle hot list is a filter applied after collection, and the collection itself is indiscriminate by design.

Flock's model is that the company hosts the cameras and the database. Police get a login. That arrangement is cheap for a department and it is also why the LAPD cannot answer basic questions about retention, access, and downstream sharing without Flock's cooperation. You cannot audit a system you do not run.

The inspector general goes further than Flock

The Board of Police Commissioners meets Tuesday to take up a report from LAPD Inspector General Matthew Barragan, issued Friday. His recommendations do not stop at one vendor:

• Suspend installation of new ALPR cameras and sign no new ALPR contracts until the city collects public input and reassesses vendors and data-sharing practices.
• Require Police Commission approval for every ALPR vendor agreement, regardless of cost or whether any money changes hands. The "no money changes hands" clause matters, because free trials and data-sharing partnerships are how these systems arrive without a procurement vote.
• Amend policy to require annual audits of ALPR data access, and state plainly that misuse can be a fireable offense.
• Build a standardized process for documenting traffic stops that begin with an ALPR alert.

Flock is not the LAPD's only ALPR supplier. Axon Enterprise and Motorola Solutions also provide the department with plate-reader technology or related services. A Flock-shaped hole in the contract list does not turn the cameras off.

Why the false positives are the load-bearing complaint

The privacy argument gets the headlines. The engineering argument is that these systems are wrong often enough to put people at gunpoint on the side of the road. The Institute for Justice has documented a rising count of motorists pulled over, detained, or jailed because of plate-reader errors. Last week a writer for The Drive described being tracked for days and then boxed in by police because a Flock camera misread the plate on a press loaner and flagged it as stolen.

A misread plate is a lookup against a hot list, and a hot list hit is treated by responding officers as high-confidence. There is no calibrated confidence score in that pipeline as far as the public can see, which is exactly the kind of number a department should have to publish before it deploys the thing at scale.

The data-sharing history

In October 2025, the University of Washington's Center for Human Rights reported that Flock had tested an information-sharing program giving federal agencies access to plate data collected by local agencies without those agencies' knowledge or consent. 404 Media separately reported that a DEA agent used a local officer's password, without the officer's knowledge, to run immigration-related searches. Lawmakers have pressed federal regulators over Flock logins that were not protected with multi-factor authentication.

For a California department, that is not an abstract concern. State law restricts sharing plate data with federal authorities, and Los Angeles has sanctuary policies to comply with. Flock says it complies with those laws. The LAPD's position is that "Flock says so" is not an enforceable contract term.

Los Angeles is not first. Santa Cruz, South Pasadena, Mountain View, Santa Clara County, South Portland in Maine, Hillsborough in North Carolina, and Flagstaff in Arizona have all ended or suspended Flock deals. What makes the LAPD different is size. It is the third-largest police department in the country and one of Flock's biggest government customers.

Flock's response

Flock spokesperson Holly Beilin told TechCrunch the expiry came as a "surprise" and said the company was confident it could "clear up the current misconceptions" behind it. Flock would not say which misconceptions. The company works with roughly 5,000 law enforcement agencies and operates a network of at least 80,000 cameras nationwide, so a client with 138 poles is not a revenue event. A client that walks away over a data-ownership clause is a precedent, and precedent is the thing Flock actually cannot afford.

The LAPD has not ruled out coming back. Gialamas framed the move as discontinuing service "until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship." City Councilwoman Ysabel Jurado, who introduced a motion in May calling for a review of the department's ALPR use, said the pause "was never just about one vendor or one contract." The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which plans to rally outside headquarters before Tuesday's meeting, wants the technology gone entirely and says no rewritten contract will satisfy it.

What the commission decides Tuesday is the part to watch. A new Flock contract with a data-ownership clause is one outcome. A freeze on all ALPR procurement, Axon and Motorola included, is a different one, and it is the one the inspector general asked for.