Fighting Mass Surveillance in Colorado

Most Flock cameras are small gray or black boxes on thin poles, often with a solar panel on top. You'll see them at intersections, neighborhood entrances, and parking lot exits. EFF's interactive scene and DeFlock's identification guide have photos to help you spot them.

Older plate readers only checked for stolen cars. Newer networked systems track every car they see, share that data with hundreds of agencies, and allow searches by vehicle description. That's what we object to, whatever the vendor. Axon, Motorola, and others sell the same kind of system, so the questions about oversight, sharing, and retention don't change.

There's no official count. Volunteers have mapped 2,659 plate readers across Colorado on OpenStreetMap (August 2026), and the Colorado Sun counted 42 police departments with Flock contracts in April 2026. Nationally, Flock says it has more than 120,000 cameras in 49 states.

No Colorado law mentions license plate readers by name. A few general laws apply: your plate counts as personal information, agencies and their vendors can't share it for federal immigration enforcement, and government surveillance records must be destroyed after three years. Everything else, including retention, sharing, and oversight, is up to your city's contract and council.

So far, only car theft. A 2026 study of 216 agencies found car thefts fell 11% after cameras went in, with no change in other property crime. We haven't found a study showing less violent crime, and no Colorado city has published an analysis of its own program.

More often than the marketing suggests. An audit of the LAPD found 161 alerts in two months for cars that were no longer stolen, against 337 real recoveries, and officers used high-risk stop tactics in 46 of the 68 stops it reviewed. In Roseville, California, the software misread the plate in 71% of 1,427 alerts, though Flock blamed that city's camera setup. Flock's own figure is fewer than 9 human-reported errors per million alerts.