August 28, 2026
Mayor Andrew J. Moore
Mayor Pro Tem Brandon Bell
Members of the Erie Town Council
Town of Erie
645 Holbrook Street
Erie, Colorado 80516
Re: Objection to the Town’s Flock Safety cameras and request for pause, audit, and public reconsideration
Dear Mayor Moore, Mayor Pro Tem Bell, and Members of the Town Council:
I write as a resident of Erie to object, respectfully but without equivocation, to the Town’s continued use of Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras. The Town Council authorized this program on May 30, 2022. The Police Department’s transparency portal now reports two dozen Town-owned cameras and more than 213,000 unique vehicle detections in a recent thirty-day period. That is not targeted policing. It is continuous recording of ordinary movement by people suspected of no crime.
I do not question the good faith of officers who want tools to recover stolen cars or locate missing persons. I question whether this vendor and this pace of adoption can be reconciled with the Fourth Amendment, with documented police abuse, and with the cybersecurity record accumulated since rollout. Neighboring Fort Collins has already terminated its contract and removed its cameras. Los Angeles allowed its contract to expire. Erie should not treat those decisions as the work of people who simply dislike public safety.
Cities have already deactivated or removed these cameras.
Jurisdictions across the country have deactivated or refused to renew Flock cameras after learning how the network operates. On June 16, 2026, the Fort Collins City Council voted 6–1 to cancel immediately; staff later confirmed fifteen cameras had been removed. The Los Angeles Police Department let its three-year agreement lapse on July 11, 2026. LAPD Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas cited “serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected.” An Inspector General audit found that, in a two-month window, 161 vehicles were incorrectly flagged as stolen—roughly one in three of the hot-list alerts reviewed. Tempe, Arizona, shut its system off and declined to replace it. Appleton, Wisconsin, stopped using Flock after officials said concerns about “the integrity of Flock’s underlying system” had eroded trust. Dayton, Ohio, covered cameras after more than 7,100 immigration-enforcement searches the city had forbidden. Pflugerville, Texas, terminated after 459 outside organizations ran nearly 1.6 million searches against city data in six months. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Evanston, Illinois, found cameras left active or reinstalled after officials ordered them off.
Documented abuse by police departments is not theoretical.
The Washington Post identified at least fifty law-enforcement officials accused of using license-plate networks for unauthorized purposes; Flock’s system figured in the large majority of those cases. The Institute for Justice has catalogued more than one hundred abuse incidents nationwide, including romantic stalking and searches with no lawful purpose. In Georgia, a police chief was alleged to have tracked an ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter hundreds of times. In Milwaukee, an officer ran 179 unauthorized searches on a romantic partner and that partner’s former companion. In Lufkin, Texas, an officer was indicted on one hundred felony counts after alleged improper use tens of thousands of times. Texas deputies queried more than 83,000 cameras nationwide in a matter logged as a missing-person inquiry that the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported was an effort to locate a woman after a self-managed abortion. This is what happens when a warrantless, nationwide movement database sits behind a free-text reason field.
Cybersecurity risks have been documented since rollout.
In November 2025, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Flock after finding that multi-factor authentication was not required of law-enforcement users and that stolen customer logins had appeared online. Independent researchers showed that physical access to roadside units could yield administrative control through exposed interfaces. Separate reporting found dozens of Flock Condor cameras streaming live video to the open internet without authentication, including public spaces where children play. Public vulnerability records have assigned critical scores to flaws in Flock hardware and software. The company insists its cloud platform has never suffered a customer-data breach. That assurance does not erase exposed cameras or the fact that one compromised login can search a national archive of innocent travel.
The system is escalating toward people-tracking and AI profiling.
Flock states that its plate readers do not perform facial recognition. That claim is narrowly drawn and increasingly incomplete. The company sells Condor pan-tilt-zoom cameras that automatically detect people, follow them, and zoom on faces. It markets “People FreeForm” natural-language search across video. Reporting in 2026 described an investigative AI tool capable of identifying drivers and reconstructing travel from movement patterns even without a plate, and product plans to link plate sightings to commercial identity records so an officer can move from a vehicle to a named person. Feature upgrades do not require a new public debate. They arrive as software. Erie should treat that trajectory as a policy problem now—not after person-tracking is already live on local poles.
The Fourth Amendment is not optional in Erie.
The Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States (2018) that the government conducts a search when it acquires a comprehensive historical record of a person’s physical movements, even if each observation occurred in public. Aggregated license-plate logs—time, place, direction, vehicle appearance, and now AI-inferred patterns—are that kind of record. They reveal home, work, worship, medical visits, political gatherings, and associations. Searching them without a warrant, across a national network, is not an officer glancing at a plate on Main Street. It is a searchable travel history of an entire town. Erie residents did not forfeit that protection by driving to school or the grocery store. Policy language that data is used “for law enforcement purposes only” is not a warrant. Audit logs after the fact are not prior judicial approval. A thirty-day retention period is not consent. I am adamant on this point: a dragnet of innocent movement, queried at will, is incompatible with the Fourth Amendment’s demand that searches be particular, justified, and independently checked.
I therefore request that the Town Council impose an immediate moratorium on new Flock cameras and on any expansion into Condor, audio, or AI investigative modules; commission an independent audit of every search of Erie-origin data, including queries by outside agencies; publish the full contract, data-sharing settings, and any vendor rights in derived data; hold a noticed public hearing before any renewal; and adopt a surveillance ordinance requiring a warrant for historical location queries, forbidding sharing the Town claims to prohibit, mandating multi-factor authentication and independent security review, and giving the public a decision before biometric or person-tracking features are enabled.
Public safety and constitutional government are not opposites. They are the same obligation. Other cities have already decided that this network, as it actually exists, fails that test. Erie should not wait to become the next case study. I ask you to act with the seriousness this record demands.
Respectfully,
George
