From Bandera:
After months of discussion and outrage from residents, the city council of the tiny town of Bandera, Texas voted 3-2 to immediately end its contract with the surveillance company Flock. In the aftermath of the vote, one of the dissenting council members crashed out and said he would be introducing measures to ban cell phones, the internet, cameras, and nearly all technology in the town of roughly 900 people.
Bandera had a state grant to install eight Flock Safety AI license plate reader cameras in the tiny town. The technology proved to be incredibly controversial, with residents repeatedly turning out to city council meetings to say that they did not want government surveillance in the town; the poles that the cameras were installed on were repeatedly destroyed by vandals in protest, leading the town to have to replace them at their own expense. Last week, the town formally decided to abandon its contract with Flock entirely.
After the vote, Councilmember Jeff Flowers, a staunch Flock supporter, said that if people in the town wanted privacy then the city council should basically ban all technology, essentially calling people who did not want government surveillance hypocrites. Flowers said he would propose a series of new regulations at an upcoming city council meeting, which he is calling the “Bandera Declaration of Digital Independence.” In a letter posted by the local newspaper, the Bandera Bulletin, Flowers said that in the name of preserving privacy he would suggest the city go back to the days of 1880.
“For months, I have listened to the outcry regarding License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology. I have seen the eyerolls, and I’ve even been met with ‘Nazi rhetoric,’ the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism,” Flowers wrote. “Comparing a neighbor’s desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges; it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.”
Flowers said that at the next city council meeting he will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we are to be truly ‘private,’ we must leave our smartphones at the city line.” He will also propose “a total ban on outward facing cameras,” and “a total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping. We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only.”
[…]
Bandera had eight Flock cameras installed. At the meeting last week where the town voted to end the Flock contract, residents noted that Bandera has one of the lowest crime rates in the state. Other residents noted that people in the town kept cutting down the poles the Flock cameras are installed on, leading the town to continually spend money and time to replace them. Residents said they felt like they made it clear that they do not want the cameras in the town, but that the town had dragged its feet on actually ending the contract.
“This is the fifth meeting [about Flock]. How many more meetings are we going to have to have before we get to the idea that we don’t need the Flock system?” one resident said in the meeting last week. “How many more meetings is it going to take before we understand the community didn’t vote for this? They don’t want it. How many more times are the cameras going to have to get cut down before somebody realizes it’s not worth the money? It’s coming to a point where we’re going to have to have meetings until we’re all dead […] By putting the cameras back up [after they’ve been cut down], you’re basically baiting someone else to come cut them down or shoot them down, you’re basically causing an issue because we didn’t vote for it.”
Another resident said Flock “doesn’t pass the vibe check. Bandera is the cowboy capital of the world. We don’t need to implement mass government surveillance in our town.”
See here for previous blogging on Flock. A tad bit defensive is CM Flowers, I’d say. I don’t condone cutting down the cameras – that could be dangerous to yourself and to others, and however justifiably mad one may be at the foot-dragging in this case, it’s a terrible precedent to set. I’m glad the residents of this tiny town northwest of San Antonio finally got what they were demanding.
From Troy, New York:
The civic uproar began quietly, when a mom walking her newborn spotted a strange black contraption at the end of her block: a camera topped with a solar panel.
Dierdre Shea researched the camera and learned that it was an artificial-intelligence-assisted license plate reader — the type that have caused privacy concerns across the country in recent months, leading to laws limiting their use in more than a dozen states.
She emailed her neighbors, sparking fierce debate in this town of 52,000 overlooking the Hudson River. Residents called for the devices to be taken off the streets, and the Republican mayor, who supports the cameras, clashed with the Democratic city council, which tried to halt funding for them.
Last month, Mayor Carmella Mantello, flanked by officers in blue, accused the city council of “defunding” the police and declared a state of emergency to keep the cameras running, a designation usually reserved for floods and blizzards.
“I will not put our city in jeopardy and take these cameras away,” she said.
Sounds like Council Member Flowers has a kindred spirit in upstate New York. The article is behind a paywall and the excerpt above is from the email newsletter I get from the WaPo, so that’s all I have on that. A bit of googling shows that a compromise has been reached on Flock’s data collection, so that’s something. It’s wild to me how much some public officials – as well as members of the public – seem to think these things will make a meaningful dent in crime. Putting aside all of the extremely amoral and despotic things that Flock’s cameras have been used to do to non-criminals, what evidence is there that the use of these cameras has a significant effect on the crime rate? I don’t see it.
Not everyone is under the spell. Here’s San Marcos City Council Member Amanda Rodriguez on how that town turned around on Flock.
ALPRs are cameras that capture and store license plate information in a database, which can then be accessed by law enforcement. With coverage in 49 states across a network of over 90,000 cameras, Flock Safety is one of the most prolific ALPR companies in the country. Flock not only provides the equipment but also the software and database that law enforcement agencies can run license plates against. Each time a law enforcement agency runs a search, it should be logged and tagged with the reason for the search, but the company’s lax policies mean that doesn’t always happen.
Recent investigative reporting has found all kinds of dubious justifications unrelated to crime prevention, from No Kings protest attendance to out-of-state travel by a Texas woman seeking abortion care and immigration enforcement. Here in Texas, our state police were early adopters of Flock and other surveillance technology for immigration enforcement purposes as part of Texas’s abusive and deadly mass deportation apparatus, Operation Lone Star.
Recent reporting has also revealed troubling lapses in data security after a number of police departments revealed their logs, publicly identifying millions of surveillance targets. You can check to see if you are one of them at HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a website Flock has fervently tried to take down. After months of bad publicity, many Flock customers decided they’d had enough. Even Ring chose to end its Flock partnership after the disastrous, out-of-touch Super Bowl ad.
Last June, my colleagues and I on the San Marcos City Council did the same, voting to let our Flock contract lapse in December 2025. So why did we make that decision, and how were we able to overcome the pushback in the name of public safety?
While the world witnessed mass immigration sweeps and blatant law enforcement collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in large cities throughout 2025, the situation in San Marcos was different but still not entirely insulated from the national landscape of horror. My community was afraid that the violence we saw on our screens could soon be replicated here. The council decided to be proactive and look for tangible ways to deprive the mass deportation machine of the local infrastructure on which it so heavily relies.
Nothing happens on our city council without first hearing from the community. When we started probing the contract renewal, we heard from both sides. We heard from those who shared concerns about the indiscriminate collection of personal data that could be accessed by law enforcement nationwide, Flock’s shoddy business practices, the erosion of probable cause and due process, and, of course, Flock’s collaboration with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
We also heard from our local police department with concerns about how they would keep residents and businesses safe without Flock. Flock was viewed as just one tool in the department’s toolbox, and they asked us to trust that they would protect our data, when even the company could not provide those guarantees. However, the community’s concern was not just with the local departments’ use of the Flock system but more broadly with Flock’s historically poor management of the data with which it is entrusted.
It should go without saying that everyone wants our community to be a safe place to build a life. We carefully considered all of this feedback on the council and ultimately decided to end the contract. Critically, Flock had been in the news for months, receiving almost exclusively bad press thanks to the dogged efforts of investigative journalists across the country. That coverage and other communities’ persistent fight against Flock showed what our critics falsely called hyperbole as reality. Responding to the horrors already taking place with this software allowed us to reframe the issue around our residents’ due process and privacy rights, speaking to concerns beyond Flock’s collaboration with ICE or the potential misuse of the system.
In short, our motivations may have varied, but the council ultimately coalesced around a belief that renewing the Flock contract was not in our city’s best interest.
Good for them. Maybe there’s a case for these things, with proper safeguards in place for civil liberties and data privacy. That’s not how they’ve been presented, and that’s not been the experience. There’s no reason to trust as a result. Keep on pushing back.
I reviewed the campaign websites of both candidates for County Judge and could find no mention of issues related to the Flock system. It’s interesting to me that relatively small communities are experiencing turmoil over this while Harris County is not, aside from what has been reported about County Judge Hidalgo’s concerns