At least seven US cities that canceled Flock Safety license plate reader contracts replaced them with Axon cameras within weeks. The votes ended Flock's national lookup network, which let out of state agencies search local data, not the plate scanning itself.
Read the full story: Cities Ditch Flock Cameras, Then Buy Axon's Instead →
Transcript
About two dozen American cities canceled their Flock license plate reader contracts this year. Reporting out today shows what happened next in seven of them. The Flock cameras came down, and Axon cameras went up, sometimes within weeks. So nobody actually voted against plate surveillance. What they voted against was one feature. Flock ran a national lookup network that let police in other states search local camera data. In Ventura County, a configuration error quietly switched that back on, and three hundred sixty four thousand unauthorized searches followed. In Dayton, camera data got searched over seven thousand times for immigration enforcement, against the city's own policy. Axon does not pool the data nationally, and promises no federal access without a warrant. That is a real fix. But the cameras still read every plate of every driver who drives past.