The new technology inside surveillance

How ALPRs used to work

ALPR systems previously served as a simple tool for police departments to quickly detect stolen vehicles and solve crimes when they happened. ALPRs performed a simple lookup to government crime databases when they saw license plates.

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   The camera placed on a major roadway captures images of license images of license plates as they pass by.

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   The camera uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read the license plate and determine the characters on the plate.

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   The license plate is then run against government crime databases like the NCIC and CCIC to see if the plate matches a stolen vehicle or is associated with an open crime investigation.

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   If the plate is found to be stolen or associated with an open crime investigation, the camera will capture the image of the vehicle and alert the police department.

How cameras have evolved

Companies like Flock Safety have since added significant new features to ALPR cameras.

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   Cameras are now installed in many locations around the city, including neighborhoods, playgrounds, and business areas.

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   Cameras come equipped with additional AI capabilities that are capable of painting a full picture of any persons movements and behavior through the city.

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   Data collected by the cameras is sent and stored by the camera company. This data is then used to train AI models on your behavior and movements.

Artificial Intelligence

Flock Safety and other surveillance companies are rapidly integrating their camera products with Artificial intelligence. PTZ cameras use AI to track humans and automatically follow them around.

Companies like Flock Safety market their systems as a something that canautomatically solve cases. Or even predict crimes before they happen.

On September 27, 2025, a Columbine Valley police sergeant went to a Denver woman's home with a summons for stealing a $25 package from a doorstep in nearby Bow Mar, based on a Flock camera hit and doorbell video. He told her he had no doubt and would not look at her evidence. The case was dismissed after she produced her phone's location history and her own car's camera footage, and the town later announced unspecified discipline for the officer.

Sources

• The Colorado Sun, officer will face unspecified disciplinary action (nonprofit), 2025-11-11

The Colorado Sun • October 28, 2025

After police used Flock cameras to accuse a Denver woman of theft, she had to prove her own innocence

Columbine Valley, Colorado

9News • October 2025

Castle Rock Police using AI drones in a deal with Flock

Castle Rock, Colorado

How they train AI

Flock's privacy notice says the company may use "a small fraction (less than 1%) of images captured by Flock Services," stripped of metadata and identifying information, as training data to improve its machine learning. In December 2025, 404 Media and WIRED reported that Flock hired gig workers on Upwork, some of them in the Philippines, to review and label that footage, and that the company had left its training materials and an annotation-tracking panel exposed online. The reporting could not determine which cameras' footage the workers were reviewing, and nothing we have seen supports the idea that this data is used to predict who is guilty of a crime.

Sources

• 404 Media, 2025-12-01 (independent tech journalism)
• WIRED, 2025-12 (mainstream tech)
• Flock Safety privacy notice (vendor, primary)

404 media • Dec 2025

Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build its Surveillance AI

Global, USA

When alerts replace investigations

Reason, a libertarian magazine, wrote in August 2026: "All too often, police pull people over, arrest them, and even jail them based on camera misidentifications that officers could have caught with basic scrutiny." The Los Angeles Police Department's Inspector General audited two months of alerts and found 161 stolen-vehicle alerts on cars that had not been stolen, against 337 real recoveries, and warned of "substantial legal and financial liability concerns." Police in Roseville, California found that in 71 percent of 1,427 alerts, the software had misread the plate (the department said none of those led to a stop). When Cleveland's council asked how many crimes its cameras had solved, the police department answered that its case files "are not written or maintained for the purpose of allowing a researcher to later isolate and measure the efficacy of a single investigative tool." Flock's own August 2026 statement puts it as "an alert is a lead, not a conclusion, which should be confirmed by an officer."

Sources

• Reason, 2026-08-13 (libertarian)
• LAPD Office of the Inspector General, BPC #26-184, 2026-07-10 (government watchdog)
• Business Insider, 2026-07-31 (mainstream)
• GovTech / cleveland.com, 2026-07-28 (centrist)
• Flock Safety, 2026-08-13 (vendor)

AI position tracking

AI position tracking is a feature that allows cameras to track the position of people and objects in real-time. This capability is made possible by the advanced level of data that cameras are now collecting like facial recognition, age, race, walking gait and more.

Data Sharing

With Flock Safety cameras, local police departments choose what other agencies they want to share data with. This level of data sharing can vary from city to city. See the examples below from two different Colorado cities:

Windsor Police Department

DeFlock's network view for Windsor PD, showing 799 sharing connections in its dataset as of August 24, 2026. Flock's own portal listed 808 organizations the same day, including the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service; about 700 of them are outside Colorado.

Lafayette Police Department

Shares data with 90 in-state organizations (older screenshot, not re-verified in 2026)

City Transparency

Windsor and Arvada both run Flock cameras with very different sharing settings. Boulder shared its data nationally until June 2025, and the ACLU of Colorado reports that U.S. Border Patrol searched Boulder's data more than 100 times before that access was cut off. Castle Rock and Greeley publish no sharing list at all.

Sources

• Flock Safety transparency portals, read 2026-08-24 (vendor)
• ACLU of Colorado, 2026-08-12 (civil liberties, left-leaning)

Many Colorado cities choose to hide this basic information. Whether or not a city discloses this information is a factor in our scoring system because we believe that the public should be aware of how their data is being shared in and out of the State of Colorado

Why haven't I heard about this?

Because ALPR systems have already been used successfully, it has been very easy for private companies to disguise these major surveillance upgrades inside of already approved "tools".

In concert with very aggressive sales and grant incentives, these cameras have snuck into thousands of small towns without any public awareness.

Colorado law says

Colorado has no statute that specifically regulates license plate readers. Four general laws apply, and none of them were written with these cameras in mind.

Retention: C.R.S. 24-72-113 allows a government custodian to access a "passive surveillance record" freely for one year. In years two and three, they must log a reason tied to a claim or incident. The record must be destroyed after three years. This has not been tested against data held on a vendor's servers. Boulder's own attorney argued in court that the city's contract did not transfer ownership of the Flock data to the city "as against the rest of the world."

Your plate is personal information. C.R.S. 24-74-102(1) lists "a license plate number" and "vehicle registration information" in its definition of personal identifying information. The state's own 2024 ALPR brief calls plate reads anonymous, but the statute says otherwise.

Immigration enforcement: C.R.S. 24-74-103, extended to cities and counties by SB25-276 in 2025, says a state or local employee "shall not disclose or make accessible, including through a database or automated network," personal identifying information that is not publicly available, for federal immigration enforcement. It reaches home-rule cities and, on its face, private vendors that manage data for them. The penalty is up to $50,000 per intentional violation. The Attorney General used it in July 2025 against a Mesa County deputy who passed a driver's plate number to federal agents. No court has yet applied it to a camera network.

City contracts, invoices, and policies are open records under CORA. Police plate reads and search logs are criminal justice records. These are governed by a different statute, the CCJRA, which allows the custodian to refuse requests. Review the FAQ on records requests before filing.

The legislature considered SB26-070, the PEEPS Act, in 2026. The bill would have required a warrant to search location data older than 72 hours. It also would have capped retention at 30 days and barred sharing that data outside Colorado. It cleared two Senate committees (5-2 and 4-3). On April 29, sponsors laid it over past the end of the session after the governor's office indicated they would veto the warrant provision. Its status is "Lost." SB26-071, the SAFE Act on law enforcement surveillance oversight, and HB26-1037, which would have banned government purchases of personal data from third parties, also died. Police chiefs, sheriffs, district attorneys, and the Colorado Municipal League opposed SB26-070. Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and immigrant rights groups supported it.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2026 in Chatrie v. United States that using a geofence warrant to get cell phone location history is a Fourth Amendment search. The opinion does not mention license plate readers, so it decides nothing about them directly, but it rejected two arguments cities rely on: that data handed to a third party loses Fourth Amendment protection, and that a short window of location data is too small to matter. In Colorado, Freeman and Steel v. City of Boulder, filed May 27, 2026, argues that Boulder's cameras violate the state constitution. The city moved to dismiss on July 29. As of August 24, 2026, we have found no ruling.

Sources

• Colorado Revised Statutes 2024, Title 24 (primary)
• SB25-276 signed act (primary)
• Colorado Attorney General, 2025-07-22 (primary)
• SB26-070 (primary)
• SB26-071 (primary)
• HB26-1037 (primary)
• Chatrie v. United States slip opinion (primary)
• Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, 2026-08-12 (nonpartisan)
• CDPS Office of Research and Statistics, May 2024 (state agency)
• The Colorado Sun, lawsuit over Boulder Flock cameras (nonprofit), 2026-05-28

Do they reduce crime?

The evidence supports an effect on car theft and, so far, nothing else on crime rates. A working paper released August 16, 2026, covering 216 agencies, found motor vehicle theft fell 11 percent after cameras went in, with no distinguishable change in other property crime; its authors also note that the rise in car theft clearances "began during the final three pre-deployment months, weakening causal attribution to the cameras." The federal government's clearinghouse, NIJ CrimeSolutions, rates plate readers "Ineffective" as a general deterrent based on randomized trials, though that rating is from 2013 and covers patrol use. The one study of a large fixed network found clearance improvements that were not statistically significant. We have not found a Colorado city that has published a before-and-after analysis of its own program, which cuts against claims in both directions. The National Policing Institute's evaluation page, summarizing earlier studies, says the technology's value depends on conditions including "the types of databases connected to LPR system and how often they are updated." The LAPD audit found that condition failing.

Sources

• Mourtgos and Adams, CrimRxiv working paper, 2026-08-16 (not peer-reviewed)
• NIJ CrimeSolutions (U.S. Department of Justice)
• Koper and Lum, Police Quarterly, 2019 (peer-reviewed)
• National Policing Institute (police research organization)

What Flock changed in August 2026

On August 13, 2026, Flock cut its default and recommended retention period from 30 days to 7, with an "Evidence Mode" that lets specific data be kept for active investigations. By the end of the year, anomaly detection and case codes on every search become mandatory for all law enforcement customers. Multi-factor authentication is now required, and an outside security review by Bishop Fox will be published in September. Existing customers keep their current retention periods unless their council changes them. Cities can also now let another agency search their cameras only for specific offense types, blocking immigration-related searches. The Institute for Justice called the package "window dressing" and the ACLU said it was "more focused on addressing a PR problem than the significant privacy and other harms its products create." EFF's objection is that a company is setting the rules and can change them again; the ACLU says the audit tool needs an independent evaluator before anyone can tell whether it works. On August 21, Flock also rewrote its standard contract terms, removing language from its non-appropriation provision that said a city could not end the program through a discretionary budget decision. The new terms apply to customers whose agreements reference Flock's online terms and, the post says, do not alter existing negotiated contracts.

Sources

• Flock Safety, 2026-08-13 (vendor)
• Flock Safety, updates to terms and conditions, 2026-08-24 (vendor)
• ACLU, 2026-08-13 (civil liberties, left-leaning)
• EFF, 2026-08-13 (digital rights, nonpartisan)
• Reason, 2026-08-14 (libertarian)

What Can You Do?

There are several ways you can take action: