“I Personally No Longer Have Confidence in This Particular Vendor.”

“I personally no longer have confidence in this particular vendor. Like many of you, I was deeply disappointed to learn that Flock Safety did not meet the City’s requirements regarding our data access control and transparency… I, in turn, gave assurances to the community that I now know were not grounded in the Flock system’s actual practice.”

— Mountain View Police Chief Mike Canfield, February 2026

New Hanover County signed with the same company. So whether Flock Safety can be trusted to describe its own product accurately is not an abstract question here — it is the vendor now holding the 2,980,082 searches the Sheriff’s Office ran through its cameras. What follows is why a growing number of the company’s own customers — police chiefs among them — have concluded the answer is no.

What this is, and what it is not

This is not a claim that anyone at Flock set out to deceive. Intent is the hardest thing to prove, and nothing here rests on it. What follows is narrower: a set of things the company said, placed next to the government records, court orders, audits and congressional letters that contradict them — with Flock’s own explanations included, and the accusations that did not survive checking deliberately left out. Every episode below traces to a primary source: a North Carolina court order, an Illinois state audit, a United States senator’s letters, city council records, and Flock’s own published statements. The complete, source-linked record sits behind this piece; a link is at the end.

A judge found the company operating without a license — after being ordered to stop

The most formally established chapter happened in North Carolina. In January 2022 the state’s Alarm Systems Licensing Board ordered Flock to “immediately cease and desist” installing camera systems it was not licensed to install. Flock’s position was that the licensing law did not reach its business. That was a legitimate legal argument, and the company was entitled to press it. It lost. On October 30, 2023, Wake County Superior Court Judge Vinston M. Rozier, Jr. found that Flock “is fully aware that a license is required,” that it “has continued to advertise, solicit contracts, contract for installation, and install its system” while unlicensed, and that it “has — and continues to — violate the laws of the State of North Carolina even after being advised of the license requirements and ordered to Cease and Desist.” The Board’s investigator recorded that “Flock Safety has never held a license in NC.” A Flock-affiliated license issued the next year.

Weeks before that injunction, the Board’s own lawyer wrote to Flock’s counsel that municipal and police attorneys had told him Flock representatives were saying “the lawsuit is settled and it is licensed to do business; it is not.” One contract he cited had been signed with the Town of Apex days earlier. We flag the limit on that document: the lawyer was relaying what other attorneys reported, not something he witnessed. But it is a dated, written account by a state agency’s lawyer, in a public file since 2023.

“We have no federal contracts”

In the summer of 2025, as reporting mounted that federal agencies were reaching locally-collected plate data, Flock CEO Garrett Langley told Denver’s 9NEWS the company had no federal contracts. It did. Flock later acknowledged pilots that gave access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations (the investigative arm of ICE), the Secret Service, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In Langley’s own correction: “some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information… We clearly communicated poorly.” In an October 2025 letter, Senator Ron Wyden reported Flock’s account in the company’s own words: “due to internal miscommunication, customers were inaccurately informed that Flock did not have any relationship with DHS.” That same August, an Illinois state audit found Flock had violated Illinois law by letting CBP reach the state’s plate data; the Secretary of State ordered the access shut off, and Flock paused its federal pilots nationwide.

A contract approved and revoked in twenty-four hours

In April 2026, a councilmember in Oshkosh, Wisconsin asked Flock’s representative a direct question: does the system create a heat map of a vehicle’s movements? “No, that is not available,” the representative answered, and the council approved the renewal. The next morning the police chief checked the software himself: “My staff advised me that the system does create heat maps. I visually confirmed this this morning… Because of this misrepresentation… I can no longer recommend Flock.” That evening the council reversed itself, 7–0, one day after approving it. Flock conceded the underlying fact — calling it “one small misconception” and “a minor nuance” — and said its representative understood the question to be about tracking people. What is not in dispute is that the answer was wrong, that the chief confirmed it, and that the council acted on it.

What the customers said on the way out

Dozens of jurisdictions have dropped Flock. Most cited privacy. A smaller group said something sharper — that they no longer trusted the company — and these are not activists:

• Nine Denver councilmembers, in writing: the CEO “has made multiple false statements both publicly and directly to council members, which raises significant questions about Flock’s trustworthiness as a vendor.” The city’s 110 cameras came down.
• Cambridge, Massachusetts, after Flock technicians installed two cameras “without the City’s awareness”: “Due to this material breach of our trust and the agreement, the City is terminating its contract with Flock Safety.”
• Oak Park, Illinois trustee Derek Eder: “Flock claims that each community owns their own data and can control who can have access. This is not true and their own service agreement contradicts it.”
• Appleton, Wisconsin Mayor Jake Woodford, citing what Flock had told a neighboring city: “questions about the accuracy of information Flock Safety provides to its customers.” The council terminated 13–0.

The composition matters more than the count. Several votes were unanimous. Two of the sharpest objections came from police chiefs — the constituency with the strongest institutional reason to keep the cameras. One came from a councilmember who had previously voted yes. That is a different fact pattern from organized opposition.

Flock’s answer, stated fairly

The company’s response deserves to be put in one place rather than in fragments. Flock’s position is that it builds tools and does not operate them: customer agencies decide what to collect, how long to keep it and whom to share it with; sharing is off by default; and the most-criticized searches were run by police officers, not by Flock. On the federal pilots it says they were short, that they have ended, and that its failures were in how it described them rather than in what it did. On facial recognition it says — accurately — that its system does not match faces against a database. Much of that is true, and some of it is a complete answer. Where the record parts company with it is narrow but recurring: several of these assurances are accurate as written while leaving an impression the underlying facts do not support, and the customers who relied on them have said so in their own words.

What we are not saying

Fairness runs both ways, so several widely-repeated claims are left out because they did not survive verification, and their absence is deliberate. We do not say Flock lies about 30-day deletion — thirty days is a default that customers can and do change themselves. We do not say Flock’s “Nova” product was proven to ingest data-breach records — a later code analysis raised the question, but no regulator or court has established it and Flock denies it. Flock’s claim that its cameras help solve ten percent of U.S. crime is unverified, not disproven. Naming what the record does not support is what keeps the rest of it trustworthy.

Why this matters in New Hanover

New Hanover County’s central assurance to residents — the one written into the Sheriff’s policy and the Flock contract — is that the County controls who touches the data. That is the same promise Mountain View, Denver, and Oak Park were given before their own records showed otherwise. We have already documented that the County’s contract gives the vendor standing access rights the policy never mentions, and that the County has withheld for 97 days the one record that would show who has been searching our plates. A vendor’s candor is not a side issue when the entire safeguard is “trust the vendor’s settings.”

The most useful summary came from a councilman in Wisconsin, the day after his council reversed itself, speaking to the company’s representatives in the room: “I don’t know how this body can govern if someone tells untruths, mistruths, exaggerated truths. I don’t know how I can make a decision or discern what’s right or what’s wrong, or even the capabilities of this system if you lie to me.”

Read the complete, source-linked record — every court order, audit, letter and company statement, with Flock’s responses and the claims we excluded — in the full report. And if you want the commissioners to weigh it before August 17, here is how to speak.

This article summarizes public records and quotes public officials and Flock Safety’s own published statements. It is opinion and general information on a matter of public concern, not an assertion of anyone’s intent. Every episode links to a primary source in the full report. Flock Safety’s responses are quoted throughout, and the company’s “Myths vs Facts” page sets out its current position; readers should weigh it alongside this. If any quotation here is inaccurate, write to mark@deflockilm.org and we will correct it in public. First published August 2, 2026.