Flock Safety Surveillance Cameras Are Costing Cities Millions Over Time

In 2020, the Covington, Georgia, Police Department paid surveillance technology company Flock Safety $40,000 to maintain 20 cameras throughout the city. The department paid the same amount the following year.

In 2022, that cost rose to $81,250. The department added 15 new Falcon cameras, which Flock describes as sophisticated license plate-reading technology, for $37,500. Another $3,750 went toward installing the new cameras, while the remaining amount covered maintenance for the original system.

In 2024, the department paid Flock $113,225. Of that amount, $87,500 covered maintenance for the existing 35 cameras under a five-year agreement. The rest paid for eight new Falcon cameras. The following year, Covington paid Flock $159,000 for camera maintenance and enrollment in the Drone-as-First Responder program, which sends drones to emergency scenes and streams footage to police departments.

It is unclear how much Covington will ultimately pay Flock in 2026. Through August, however, the city had paid $201,000: $100,000 to maintain existing cameras, $800 to replace one camera, and another $100,200 for new software products. The Covington Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The Flock contract represents only a fraction of the Covington Police Department’s $12,488,733 budget. But Flock’s contracts are facing scrutiny in cities across the country amid intense backlash over the company’s surveillance practices. Flock has not commented on the matter.

WIRED obtained documents through public records requests from more than a dozen Flock customers across the country and compared them with publicly available information from more than a dozen other companies. The documents reveal how much Flock contracts can cost local communities, how those deals are structured, and how agreements can extend over several years—leaving taxpayers responsible for recurring payments with no clear end date.

“Once you let police officers try a tool, it’s very difficult to get the political will or motivation to take it away from them,” said Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

How Flock Safety Expanded From HOAs to Police Departments

When Flock was founded in 2017, it initially sold license plate readers to private homeowners associations, or HOAs. Before selling to police departments in 2019, the company’s model allowed law enforcement agencies to access cameras already installed by HOAs instead of building a camera network from scratch.

A similar pattern emerged in Alpharetta, Georgia. In 2020, the city’s police department paid Flock $17,680 for five Falcon cameras and access to Flock’s Wing software, which can extract vehicle and license plate data from camera footage. The following year, when Alpharetta purchased additional Flock cameras, the justification for the payment stated that “several” local HOAs had already purchased Flock cameras and granted the city access to them.

“We are considering adding more city cameras to the Flock system,” the justification said. According to the city, “other vendors” would “not integrate with our existing Flock system.”

Over the next several years, Alpharetta significantly expanded its relationship with Flock. By 2025, the city’s annual Flock bill had grown to $381,000.