Flock sent a letter to Mayor Sharon Owens outlining that it planned to forced the city to abide by its contract. Credit: Patrick McCarthy | Central Current

Syracuse lawmakers are switching providers for license plate readers — but Flock Safety has threatened to make taxpayers pay for both.

Flock Safety, the city’s current license plate reader provider, contacted Mayor Sharon Owens after it learned of the city’s plan to ax its Flock partnership and contract with Flock’s rival, Axon Enterprise. Flock in a letter to city officials warned Owens that the city’s plans to drop Flock could result in Syracuse taxpayers footing the bill for both products.

The Syracuse Common Council on Monday voted 7-1 to approve a five-year, $422,636.28 contract with Axon for 26 automatic license plate readers. Councilors also pledged to vote at their next voting session on legislation that would revoke Flock’s privileges to access and operate its surveillance systems on Syracuse streets.

Syracuse in 2023 entered into a contract with Flock for 26 license plate readers, though only 13 were installed. Former Syracuse Police Department Deputy Chief Richard Shoff previously told lawmakers the city encountered issues gaining state authorization to install the remaining 13 readers on the state’s right of way.

Flock Safety sent the city a letter on Jan. 23 — before lawmakers approved the city’s contract with Axon — to make clear its intentions to enforce its contract with Syracuse. That could leave taxpayers on the hook to pay the Axon contract and the remainder of the city’s agreement with Flock through October 2027, the letter stated.

Central Current reviewed a copy of the letter Flock’s Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley sent on Jan. 23 to City Hall asserting Flock’s belief that Syracuse has no valid reason to terminate its contract early. 

Haley also stated that the city’s contract can only be terminated for material breach, subject to a 30-day “cure period,” meaning Flock has about a month to address whatever the city cites as the grievance prompting its attempt to prematurely end its Flock agreement.

“We are aware of no allegation that Flock has materially breached its contractual obligations to Syracuse and certainly no opportunity to cure has been afforded. Accordingly, we are aware of no actionable grounds for termination of the Contract,” Haley wrote.

City spokesperson Sol Muñoz confirmed that Owens received and reviewed the letter but declined to answer questions regarding Haley’s assertions within the letter. The city did not comment because of potential litigation between the city and Flock, Muñoz said. 

Haley alleges in the letter that Syracuse has owed Flock money since October 2025. The city has not provided a reason for not paying Flock, Haley said. 

Flock also contends that the city has refused to correspond with the company and has not explained its grievances to Flock or discussed potential solutions.

“We at Flock are deeply concerned about the confluence of public and repeated misrepresentations by City officials about Flock and its services; refusal by the same City officials to engage with Flock to clear up those misrepresentations… and apparent parallel efforts, as reported in the media, to engage with a competitor of Flock to provide similar services to those covered by the Contract,” Haley wrote.

Flock did not specify to Central Current what misrepresentations Haley was referring to. Haley in the letter called claims Flock exposed or accessed data Syracuse police has collected since 2024 “categorically false.” He also denied that Flock “inappropriately shared” the city’s data with other organizations.

A timeline of Central Current’s Flock Safety coverage

Data sharing, storage, and security have concerned Syracuse lawmakers and residents since former Mayor Ben Walsh’s Surveillance Technology Working Group in 2023 first reviewed license plate readers.

Those concerns compounded as the program was implemented, and continued to grow. When the city first implemented the AI-powered license plate scanners in 2024, Central Current reported the technology’s error rate, identified by a research firm. Later, Central Current’s reporting demonstrated how Syracuse’s license plate readers presented a conduit for data to flow from the city, to the Onondaga County Crime Analysis Center, to the New York State Department of Criminal Justice Services, to ICE.

Federal immigration agents found more direct ways to leverage Flock’s national lookup feature to access Syracuse’s data, as Central Current reported last June. But the Syracuse Police Department signed off on that access, having “inadvertently” opted into sharing data with Flock’s network of thousands of law enforcement agencies. The police department eventually shut off out-of-city access to its license plate reader data but not before other law enforcement performed over 2,000 immigration-related searches, Syracuse police said. 

Those searches resulted from local law enforcement agencies throughout Flock’s national network performing searches of Flock’s systems on behalf of federal immigration agents. But in September, investigative reporters at the digital publication 404 Media reported that Flock had granted U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents access to its servers through a covert pilot program.

Ensuing reporting from Central Current revealed that the federal connections were more direct than previously known — but were still authorized by the Syracuse Police Department’s inadvertent opt-in.

After the Common Council pressed the police department to explain its failure to safeguard Syracuse drivers’ sensitive data, the police department locked down access to its database.

As councilors began scrutinizing the city’s contract with Flock, Central Current obtained a copy of that document and reported that it included language granting Flock the right in perpetuity to use Syracuse-generated data for the company’s own purposes.

Walsh and city officials signed off on contract terms that allowed Flock to retain the data. 

“We hope that our concerns are unfounded, but given the above-described dynamics, we feel it important to flag for you the question of what connection exists, if any, between the City’s apparent reliance on unsubstantiated internet rumors to undermine its active and enforceable contract with Flock,” Haley wrote.

Read more of Central Current’s coverage

Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...