License Plate Trackers Promise To Root Out Local Crime. Amid Ice Crackdowns, Local Governments Say They Can’t Be Trusted.

A nationwide license plate recognition system tasked with reducing crime is being ousted from communities across the country — forcing local officials to reckon with mounting fears of federal surveillance during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Public safety company Flock Safety has billed its surveillance systems as a program to root out criminal activity on local streets, with its cameras already installed in more than 6,000 municipalities nationally. But as Trump’s deportation campaign brought an increased, forceful presence of federal agents to states across the country, some local officials in predominantly liberal cities and towns now argue the cameras themselves pose the bigger danger for their cities, offering federal law enforcement a back door for tracking residents’ movements.

“The problem is the federal government is going after a lot of people who aren’t doing anything wrong,” said Marc McGovern, a Democratic city council member and vice mayor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which voted last month to pause their Flock system due to mounting privacy concerns.

“So for me, a 56-year-old white guy, sure, take a picture of my license plate,” he said. “They’re not coming after me. But it’s not about me. It’s about other groups in our community — people of color, immigrants, people who they are targeting that also need to be safe in our community.”

Flock is one of many public safety companies that offer automated license plate readers to local governments across the U.S. These readers have become ubiquitous: There are Flock cameras near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, and a congressional report published in 2024 called these types of trackers “relatively commonplace in policing.”

But Flock’s national sharing model is what’s pulled it to the forefront of a national reckoning on federal surveillance — allowing local law enforcement or federal agencies to access data across state lines for up to 30 days in an effort to solve more crime faster, the company says.

More than a dozen local governments across the country in states like Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Texas have suspended or paused their Flock systems in the past year, citing concerns that the data collected by the cameras could be shared with federal agencies — as Flock says it did briefly during the summer through a since-terminated pilot program with the Department of Homeland Security.

Cambridge City Council first approved its Flock system in February, McGovern said, under assurances from local police that the data collected by the cameras would be owned and operated by city officials.

But just months later, the city council reversed its stance and voted unanimously to pause the program, pending review from a public safety committee, as councilors’ and activists’ unease deepened toward the heightened surveillance amid the Trump administration's intensifying immigration crackdown.

“If we’re really going to support them and be the welcoming city that we say we are, then we have to make sure that we’re taking their concerns and their fears into account, and those folks have every right in the world to be terrified, because there seems to be a declared war on them,” McGovern said.

Josh Thomas, Flock’s chief communications officer, said the number of cities canceling their systems pales next to the thousands of police departments contracted by Flock — and the thousands who’ve voluntarily opted into the federal sharing network — with less than 20 departments nationwide who’ve shuttered or paused their Flock programs due to mounting fears.

In response, Thomas said Flock has rolled out a handful of compliance features to its systems, like requirements for law enforcement to provide reasons for requesting data, embedded search blocks halting data look-ups if they cite a type of search prohibited by a city and additional search reasoning criteria.

Thomas said he "empathizes" with the mounting fears of surveillance and wishes Flock had “done it differently” in communicating to its customers about its initial pilot program with DHS to squash what he says is the company’s biggest misconception — that Flock shares data with agencies without the consent of local officials.

He contended many local governments who’ve decried the model either unknowingly signed onto the national sharing option or may have blindly approved immigration-related inquiries into their systems, noting the company is working to improve public education on the system to avoid these lapses in the future.

But he said amid the backlash against Flock, he sees a web of local communities grappling with what they can do in the current political moment to fight back — a tradeoff he says sacrifices public safety in the process.

“We’re in a hard time,” Thomas said. “And I think a lot of people don’t know what they can do about it, because maybe they voted and the votes didn’t go their way and they go, ‘I don’t know what else I can actually do.’ This feels like something that is substantive that they can do.”

“But let’s not throw out a thing that is proven to be successful in your city at the thing you want to do, which is stop crime,” he added.

But in cities where ICE detainments have left local communities fractured, Evanston, Illinois Mayor Daniel Biss argued the license plate readers are simply “not trustworthy,” given clashes between ICE protesters and immigration officers in the Chicago suburbs. In Evanston, city officials shielded their Flock cameras’ views with black plastic bags earlier this fall after they said Flock reinstalled the monitors without their consent — a move Biss said mirrors the city’s stark distrust with the company and with ICE.

“People feel this deeply, acutely, and they’re scared and they’re angry,” Biss — a Democrat who is running for an open congressional seat — said. “They’re rising up together, and they want to be damn sure that again, not only are we not doing anything to facilitate these outrageous attacks and abductions, but also that we’re doing everything we can to keep our residents safe.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not return requests for comment.

Flock cameras have watched over Evanston for more than a year, Biss said, but the city in August moved to terminate its contract with the company after a state audit found federal immigration enforcement had accessed camera footage across Illinois. But according to Biss, Flock reinstalled the cameras shortly after without the city’s permission.

“The most extreme public safety threat that my residents are facing is coming from ICE right now, so we have to prioritize protecting residents from ICE in our public safety efforts,” Biss said.

Thomas said Evanston had opted in to share their Flock camera footage with federal agencies — noting they “may not have been as clear as to what they were doing” — and then voted to turn off the license plate readers when they realized their data had been accessible to immigration enforcement agencies.

He said Flock believed Evanston’s move to remove its cameras was a violation of the city’s contract, so the company reinstalled the cameras but ultimately ceded to local officials and terminated the system.

Jennifer Yeh, a city council member in Eugene, Oregon, said when Flock cameras began to appear in Eugene’s neighborhoods, constituents began to raise concerns about potential federal overreach.

“Does the risk outweigh the benefits that our community would receive from the system?” she said.

According to Yeh, Eugene officials received confirmation that a federal agency had accessed their surveillance data through the Flock readers on two occasions — once by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and another by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — to investigate “mail fraud and narcotics,” respectively.

Eugene’s use of Flock cameras is now under review, Yeh said.

“Flock is building this huge for-profit, what seems to be an uncontrollable surveillance system that was first sold to us as license plate readers,” Yeh said. “But it seems like Flock now has all these ways you can expand it and do even more and more surveillance of your community. And I think people are right to be concerned.”