Syracuse's Flock readers may have been removed, but the readers still flourish in Central New York

The city of Syracuse in June left a license plate reader flock — but Flock Safety remains in Syracuse.

Through contracts with retailers like Home Depot, Walmart, and Lowes, Flock retains a presence in and around Syracuse despite national backlash against the company’s tools and business practices.

The city in March terminated its contract with Flock Safety, making it one of more than 200 municipalities that have cut ties with Flock.

Flock still has contracts with thousands of clients in 49 states who together have installed more than 120,000 automatic license plate readers along American roads. Those readers scan over 1 billion license plates per month, and most of Flock’s clients pool those scans together in a nationwide database.

The company in June removed its readers from city property. The Syracuse Police Department pivoted to Flock’s rival, Axon Enterprise, as its new vendor for license plate readers.

Outside Syracuse city limits, Flock cameras flourish; the company’s automatic license plate readers track Central New Yorkers throughout Onondaga County. Along with the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office, the Solvay Police Department, DeWitt Police Department and Camillus Police Departments are all using Flock readers.

The tools and Flock’s national network of databases have served as a conduit for informal collusion between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration agencies, according to an August report from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and LatinoJustice. That report outlined how local police officers appear to have obfuscated baseline transparency measures by inputting vague reasons for searching Flock data on behalf of federal agents.

It’s not just law enforcement agencies that are using the scandal-laden company’s tools. The Baldwinsville Central School District has installed six automatic license plate readers and a “fixed video camera” (which looks identical to a license plate reader but continuously records video), according to district spokesperson Sarah Buckshot.

“The district uses this technology as an additional tool to support the safety and security of our campuses, including helping identify when a person who is prohibited from being on district property enters a campus,” Buckshot said in a statement to Central Current.

Flock’s own sales representatives have in the past used the company’s live cameras in Dunwoody, Georgia during sales pitches with law enforcement agencies to surveil a children’s gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a pool, and a Jewish community center in the city, per 404 Media’s reporting.

Flock has in the past exposed access to live cameras to the internet, allowing anyone online to access the realtime footage. News outlet 404 Media in 2025 demonstrated that vulnerability by standing in front of a Flock camera, accessing the livestream, and surveilling themselves in real time. Last week, 404 Media and WIRED published the results of a joint investigation which found that Flock’s tools aren’t just tracking license plates, but also people. Flock has routinely denied that claim, despite briefly piloting a “people lookup tool” in 2025.

Livestream cameras in school settings have been leveraged by hackers in recent years. In 2021, researchers revealed that a student monitoring company used by millions of teachers to track student compliance during remote education had exposed those students’ webcameras and microphones to outside hackers. That same year, a hacker group gained access to the live feeds of 150,000 cameras, operated by surveillance vendor Verkada, inside of hospitals, health clinics, schools and other public spaces.

Access to Baldwinsville’s Flock cameras is “primarily limited” to its school resource officers but local law enforcement agencies may have access, and local police may also be granted access upon request, Buckshot said.

Buckshot would not provide the district’s Flock contract, nor answer questions about the district’s data retention period and data-sharing policy. She did not respond to a question about whether the district has opted into Flock’s national network.

Data compiled by Have I Been Flocked suggests the Baldwinsville Central School District has opted into the national network. In June, the district searched over 6,000 networks of cameras to investigate a “traffic infraction — reckless driving on campus,” according to Have I Been Flocked’s records. The district redacted the amount of cameras it searched, but a similar search from the district in November 2025 demonstrates the breadth of the school district’s reach.

That month, the district searched 96,043 cameras across 6,315 networks. Flock now has roughly 120,000 cameras around the nation. The district’s apparent ability to search the data of those networks means those agencies have access to the school district’s data, too.

When the Syracuse Police Department “inadvertently” opted into that national data-sharing network, it exposed sensitive driving data to federal immigration agents who performed thousands of “immigration-related” searches and 175 “US Customs and Border Protection-related searches” of Syracuse’s data.

In an August guest opinion column published by syracuse.com, STOP outlined the real and potential impacts of school districts’ use of ALPR data, including an Illinois family whose children were disenrolled from their school after the school used ALPR data to allege they were not residents. The family lived less than a mile from the school.

“[ALPRs] provide an additional layer of security for our students, staff and school communities,” Buckshot wrote.

Syracuse University doesn’t use livestreaming cameras, according to university spokesperson Sarah Scalese. The school plans to keep its six Flock Safety automatic license plate readers despite the controversies swirling around the company.

“We have no plans at this time to terminate our agreement with Flock. We have evaluated a range of options and determined Flock Safety was the best fit given its established use at peer institutions, its presence in more than 4,000 cities and its ability to meet both safety and privacy requirements,” Scalese said in a statement to Central Current.

SU maintains a seven-day data retention period, Scalese said, mirroring the reformed data retention period that Flock adjusted to following backlash against its previously default period of 30 days. Access to the university’s Flock cameras is limited to six members of the Department of Public Safety’s investigation unit and limited to criminal investigation purposes, Scalese said.

“Data is used strictly for criminal investigations and is not shared outside the University,” Scalese said.

Councilor Corey Williams, one of two city lawmakers who led the charge to remove Flock’s tools from city property, said city lawmakers “did our part” to remove Flock readers. He hopes other organizations also remove them, he said.

‘The surveillance industrial complex’

Flock may remain on Syracuse University’s and Baldwinsville Central School District’s campuses, but the company’s national presence appears poised to shrink.

In recent months, Flock Safety has hemorrhaged more than 200 customers following a slew of reports from local and national investigative journalists and civil liberties think tanks which have found that Flock’s systems have exposed data, performed frequent misreads and allowed federal agents to leverage data for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation initiatives.

Flock has recently explored selling itself, according to reporting from Semafor, while news outlet Inc. in September reported that Flock is offering its employees buyouts.

Vermont has enacted legislation to ban all automatic license plate readers effective July 2027, Florida banned most ALPRs from state roadways and the Texas Department of Transportation in September halted issuing new approvals for the installation of Flock ALPRs. In New York, Assemblymember Pam Hunter introduced legislation to regulate the collection, retention and sharing of license plate reader data and limit the use of such tools to high-priority incidents like felonies, stolen vehicles, and missing persons.

Despite those actions from state governments, Trump recently said he “liked” license plate readers. John Sarcone, a US Attorney whom a federal appeals court ruled was unlawfully appointed by the Trump administration, also recently praised Flock license plate readers and claimed the tools were vital to thwarting an allegedly planned terrorist attack in Albany.

The controversy has reached the chambers of the US Congress.

In September, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) introduced the “Flock-Off Act,” legislation that would prohibit the use of federal funds for purchasing and operating automatic license plate readers and biometric surveillance cameras.

In a Senate subcommittee hearing on Wednesday called by bipartisan lawmakers, senators heard testimony from civil liberties attorneys critical of Flock and its competitors’ practices, a Texas sheriff who leads one of the first agencies to cut ties with Flock, a cybersecurity engineer who hacked Flock’s devices to expose vulnerabilities and a Florida woman who was falsely arrested based on erroneous data from a Flock reader.

“In my case, a Flock camera captured my vehicle a few miles from the scene of a terrible crash. That piece of information became part of an investigation that ultimately led to my arrest on three counts of vehicular homicide and 13 days in jail for a crash I had nothing to do with,” said Lindsay Isaacs, who was placed in solitary confinement for over three days after the arrest.

Flock Safety Chief Executive Officer Garrett Langley, Axon Enterprise CEO Rick Smith and the executives of rival surveillance companies Motorola Solutions and Verkada did not accept an invite from Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin to testify before the subcommittee.

“Obviously, they’re nervous about being on camera,” Durbin quipped at the hearing.

Paris Lewbel, public relations manager for Flock Safety, did not answer a reporter’s questions about Langley’s decision not to appear at the Senate hearing in a statement to Central Current.

“We support thoughtful, bipartisan legislation that puts strong privacy, transparency, and accountability guardrails in place while preserving law enforcement’s ability to use technology responsibly to keep people safe,” Lewbel said.

Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued in his testimony that automatic license plate readers do not provide the benefits that manufacturers tout, but do constitute excessive encroachment on individual privacy.

Marlow has for years researched Flock Safety and rival ALPR vendors, and has published a series of reports analyzing how mass ALPR surveillance appears to violate Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights. Marlow leads the ACLU’s “Get the Flock Out” campaign, which provides a toolkit with which individuals can encourage their communities to pass legislation protecting against ALPR surveillance.

Marlow advocated for Congress to ban any law enforcement entity who receives federal funding from using ALPR.

“In short, ALPR companies are in the business of trading our privacy for profits and they are getting rich off of it,” Marlow said at the Senate hearing. “Welcome to the surveillance industrial complex, America.”

Referencing a recent analysis of FBI data in Atlanta, which found ALPRs had “virtually zero impact on the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to solve crime,” Marlow said ALPRs potential to “marginally speed up” the closure of a criminal investigation is not worth the privacy tradeoffs that accompany their use.

Flock Safety, which is based in Atlanta, has more than 5,000 ALPRs in the city and surrounding area, according to the DeFlock.org crowd-sourced map tracking the locations of license plate readers.

The Atlanta Community Press Collective reported that in 2024, Flock Safety declared on its website that “one additional Flock Safety License Plate Recognition (LPR) camera per sworn officer correlates with a 9.1% increase in clearance rate, and that “20 additional Flock customers within 50 kilometers of the original agency leads to a 1% increase in clearance rates.”

An analysis of data from 2021 to 2025 found that the Atlanta Police Department’s closure rates on homicide, robbery, miscellaneous larceny and shoplifting decreased, despite the city’s installation of thousands of license plate readers during that time period. Meanwhile, the closure rate on motor vehicle theft — reduction of which has been a core talking point for ALPR vendors and clients alike — increased just 0.3% in that time period.

While the report found the benefits of ALPRs didn’t appear to bear out in the Atlanta data, Marlow reiterated that the privacy concerns posed by such surveillance are not theoretical. Police officers have used ALPR databases to stalk women and romantic partners, track citizens based on their free speech activities, track abortion seekers and target immigrants.

In an interview with Central Current, Marlow said that those privacy concerns should also dissuade schools from using ALPRs, no matter the vendor.

Acknowledging that most schools are installing such tools in a well-intended effort to enhance safety for their students, Marlow said that installing ALPRs from Flock and its competitors achieves the opposite and endangers children to bad actors. Further, Marlow said, schools’ surveillance is counterintuitive to fostering the free thought and expression that should undergird education.

“Schools should not be getting within a country mile of these technologies and using technologies that were developed to surveil people, originally in a military context, on kids,” Marlow said. “I mean if that doesn’t throw up a red flag, maybe those people should find another line of work.”

Syracuse’s Flock readers may have been removed, but the readers still flourish in Central New York

‘The surveillance industrial complex’

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