In May 2025, without notifying the cities whose data it held, Flock Safety — an Atlanta-based surveillance company — quietly signed a pilot agreement with the U.S. Border Patrol, granting the agency access to its entire nationwide license plate database. Among the jurisdictions whose residents were exposed: sanctuary cities that had specifically contracted with Flock on the understanding that their data would never reach federal immigration enforcement. 

Berkeley was one of them.

Yet barely a year later, the city was on the verge of a $2 million deal to dramatically expand its Flock surveillance network — adding AI software, tilt-pan cameras, and video-equipped drones in what would have marked the biggest surveillance expansion in Berkeley history. Officials thought they’d done their due diligence but when the city’s legal team began reaching out to counterparts in other jurisdictions to vet the company, the results were troubling. 

When the full picture emerged, in an internal memo that leaked on the eve of a council vote, it may well have changed the outcome.

Some of the information was already public, amplified in litigation throughout the state. A class-action lawsuit in San Jose claims the South Bay city’s 500 or so license plate scanners constitute a dragnet that violates residents’ Fourth Amendment rights. Police in San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Capitola, Seaside, Ventura, and El Cajon, to name a few, allegedly shared millions of illegal data points with the feds using sidedoor access through Flock. 

The breaches surfaced in audits even after cities tried to crack down on the leaks. In no case, as far as it’s publicly known, did Flock take the initiative to identify the violations. 

Other details were shared confidentially among city attorneys. Mountain View officials, for one, alerted Berkeley about corrupted datasets, and how camera feeds from other jurisdictions repeatedly popped up on their end without formal approval from either jurisdiction.

The Berkeley City Attorney’s Office laid out those and other findings in an internal memo, which leaked to the media (opens in new tab) on the eve of a meeting where the City Council would consider expanding a contract with Flock. 

Going into Thursday’s vote, it looked like Berkeley’s nine-member council was poised to adopt the no-bid contract to dramatically scale up its Flock surveillance network. Four council members supported the expansion; four, including Mayor Adena Ishii, opposed it. One, Brent Blackaby, seemed ambivalent. 

After five hours of public comment — overwhelmingly opposed to Flock — the council narrowly passed a compromise. Instead of approving the contract pitched by police, it would extend the existing 52-unit license plate reader system for a year and open up the camera, drone, and software additions to competitive bidding. 

The East Bay college town is far from the first jurisdiction to pump the brakes on Flock. More than 80 cities throughout the U.S. have dumped the Atlanta-based company over similar concerns — many of them this year. But in few places does the decision carry as much weight as in the nation’s original sanctuary city. 

If Berkeley keeps working with Flock, critics say that the company could use that as a selling point for other progressive jurisdictions with doubts about its stewardship of sensitive data. And if it cuts ties altogether, it might spur other sanctuary cities to do the same. 

Since last year, 80-plus jurisdictions in 28 states have terminated their Flock contracts. Little more than a dozen are in California. Locally, Mountain View, Santa Cruz, Campbell, Los Altos Hills, and Santa Clara County left Flock. El Cerrito became the most recent city in the region to join the movement, ending its contract just days before Berkeley’s vote. 

Even Ring ended its partnership with Flock after an online backlash over a Super Bowl ad boasting about using an AI face scan to find lost pets. The ad was widely viewed with skepticism as people realized the dog-finding tool could just as easily be turned on people.

Flock Safety was founded in 2017 (opens in new tab) as a Y Combinator cutout by a young electrical engineer named Garrett Langley, who said he wanted to find a way to solve crimes that went unsolved because of a lack of investigative evidence. With the right tools — something better than alarms and closed-circuit cameras — he said he believed he could not just solve crime, but eliminate it. 

Nearly a decade later, Flock is a $7.5 billion data broker, equipping more than 5,000 public and private entities with a vast infrastructure of license plate scanners, solar-powered video and audio detection, and AI-powered investigative software. 

Its new Flock Nova software serves as a one-stop-shop for surveillance, consolidating inputs from its cameras, public records, and even hacked data to map links between people and vehicles. Flock points to a study (opens in new tab), which has not been independently verified, that its cameras help solve 700,000 cases, or about 10% of crime, in the whole country. 

Concerns about Flock’s capacity for sweeping surveillance have dogged the company from the get-go. But they became all the more urgent after President Donald Trump took office and began ramping up immigration enforcement into an indiscriminate dragnet. 

Stories then began to unfold about how ICE and other related agencies used backdoor access to Flock to cull information on people. Several California law enforcement agencies were implicated, including the San Francisco, Oakland, Mountain View, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Capitola, and El Cajon police departments. School resource officers throughout the nation used Flock to help federal immigration agents.

The CEO, meanwhile, seemed to be hardening his stance on critics. In December, Langley sent an email to all 5,000-plus law enforcement agencies and other clients that cast doubt on the intentions of privacy and civil liberties advocates. 

“Flock is building tools to help you fight the real crime affecting communities across the country,” he wrote. “Many activists don’t like that. Let’s call this what it is: Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack.” 

Several police chiefs pushed back (opens in new tab), defending activist concerns as part of a healthy democracy. 

When the illegal data-sharing came to light in a series of reports over the course of 2025, much of it through a combination of government audits, leaks, watchdog investigations, and media reporting, Flock Safety largely blamed its customers: local police. Other times, Flock credited the breaches to implementation errors and inadvertent lack of compliance controls.

At the Berkeley council meeting on Thursday, Blackaby confronted Flock lobbyist Trevor Chandler about the numerous violations: “One error is a user error,” he said, “but multiple efforts is a product flaw. Can you acknowledge today that Flock has made these mistakes?”

“We have made public that we could have and should have done many things better,” Chandler replied.

Instead of mandating compliance, Flock left it up to clients to abide by local and state laws. Now, according to Chandler, they have no choice. As of August, he said, police in California can’t use the national lookup if they tried. 

Mayor Ishii said that after all the conflicting representations and blameshifting, it’s not enough for her to take Flock at its word. “It’s not ready for our city yet,” she said. “I don’t have full confidence in (the) company, and I can’t support something that I just really don’t trust.”

As head of civil liberties advocacy nonprofit Secure Justice, Brian Hofer has been suing cities throughout the Bay Area to comply with their own surveillance laws. He sued San Francisco for skirting its facial recognition ban, and filed lawsuits against a host of other cities for flouting California’s prohibition on sharing automated license plate reader data with out-of-state agencies. 

Lately, most of his lawsuits involve violations enabled by Flock. Had Berkeley gone through with the proposed expansion of its contract with the company, he was prepared to file a suit over breaches of the city’s surveillance ordinance. Now, he’s curious to see whether it prompts other cities to reconsider their ties to Flock. 

“I would hope people pay attention,” he said. 

But Hofer says he’s none too optimistic that the momentum will carry through to the Bay Area’s biggest cities. 

“The whole Bay Area is supposed to be the ‘woke mob,’” he said. “But San Jose is doubling down, Richmond turned its cameras back on. Oakland doubled down. San Francisco doubled down. Berkeley almost did. Flock’s strongest fan base is in the Bay Area. The urban core loves Flock.”