A network of little black cameras on metal posts has sprouted up across the Waco-area.
The cameras, produced by Atlanta-based Flock Safety, use artificial intelligence to scan every vehicle that passes by, uploading their plate number, model, color and even bumper stickers to the country’s largest vehicle surveillance database. Law enforcement agencies that contract with the company — here and across the U.S. — can search the database with a few keystrokes and without a warrant.
A backlash is growing. U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a McKinney Republican, proposed legislation to restrict federal access to Flock camera data this month. Meanwhile, residents are dismantling the cameras, including those in the Waco suburb of Hewitt.
At least 41 cameras have been installed around Waco-area cities and state roadways since 2024, according to public records and law enforcement officials. Together they form a doughnut around Waco, which has not yet installed cameras despite ongoing interest from the Waco Police Department.
There are more than 30 Texas cities and 11 counties with Flock cameras, according to Texas Crime Reporter. Nationally, Flock Safety estimates some 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 6,000 communities use its products.
Many police departments consider Flock an invaluable crime-fighting tool, while privacy, civil liberty and immigrant rights advocates argue the system’s capacity for abuse is well established. Texas cities such as Austin and Bandera, a town of about 900 people 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, have chosen to terminate their contracts over such concerns. They are among the 47 cities nationwide to do so, according to DeFlock, an anti-surveillance group monitoring the company.
Businesses such as Home Depot and Lowe’s, and many homeowners associations have embraced Flock cameras as well, though they have more limited sharing options compared to law enforcement groups.
In a Monday interview, East Waco council member Andrea Barefield said several discussions would need to take place before deciding on a Flock contract.
Those conversations would involve Waco Police Chief Sheryl Victorian, city leadership and their analogues throughout the state, Barefield said, and help determine “the pros and cons before we make a decision on whether or not (Flock) belongs in Waco, Texas.”
The Waco Police Department is ready for that conversation.
“While the Waco Police Department does not currently use Flock Cameras, we are hopeful for the success the cameras can bring when assisting in a criminal investigation and have looked into how it could benefit our agency in the future,” the department said in a statement.
Flock Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
What is a Flock camera?
Most of the Flock cameras in the Waco-area scan license plates, looking for cars associated with warrants, stolen vehicles, missing persons or other suspected crimes.
Surveillance cameras are not a new technology. However, Flock’s cameras have additional features that worry privacy experts.
The first difference between a Flock camera and the kind of legacy license plate readers already attached to Waco Police Department cruisers is how the cameras connect with each other. Cities and agencies can allow one another access to their camera data, similar to the way you can adjust who sees or engages with your social media account.
If a department opts in to Flock’s “national lookup” program, officers can search for a plate anywhere in the country where another department or agency has opted in. These searches do not require a warrant.
The second difference with Flock is an AI capability allowing cameras to create a vehicle “fingerprint” independent of the license plate. A user can search “Blue Toyota Corolla, bumper stickers,” for example, to find matching hits and track the car’s movement.
Finally, any user can create a shareable “custom hotlist” of suspected vehicles. Vehicles do not need to be tethered to a suspected crime to be added to a custom hotlist, according to Footnote4a, a nonprofit surveillance watchdog group and creator of haveibeenflocked.com.
Why are they controversial?
The backlash against Flock can’t be attributed to any one concern or trend, but rather a drumbeat of incidents accumulating over several years.
Cases of Flock misidentifying suspect vehicles, however rare, have resonated well beyond the towns and cities where they happened, appearing to validate fears of opaque technology driving arbitrary arrests.
A Colorado woman was falsely accused of package theft last year after an officer said a Flock camera found her at the scene of the crime. Her story found its way to national news outlets, as did the case of a Denver man who was pulled over repeatedly because of his car’s mistaken addition to a Flock hotlist.
Cases of erroneous Flock hits — where the system flags the wrong car — are happening with greater frequency as Flock’s network expands, according to the Institute for Justice, a leading public interest law firm. The institute identified 27 cases in nine states, but none in Texas as of late July.
Flock cameras have also been used to aid immigration enforcement efforts in Texas and elsewhere, even in cases where the Flock customer explicitly restricted sharing with federal immigration agencies. Flock says it does not partner with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
However, immigration agents were able to gain back-door access to a Houston school district’s Flock data through out-of-state police departments the district shared data with, according to a February investigation by The 74. Meanwhile, an investigation by 404 Media last year found several local and state law enforcement agencies in Texas conducting searches on behalf of federal immigration agents.
Those incidents underscore how the ease of sharing data — what makes Flock so effective for solving certain crimes, such as stolen vehicle cases — makes data difficult to safeguard.
It’s a dilemma that’s hard to avoid when “the entire system depends on encouraging additional connections to the network,” said Beryl Lipton, a senior researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital civil rights group.
Blake Burleson, a founding member of the Waco-based Heart of Texas Network for Immigrant Rights, said he’s worried about how state law enforcement might use Flock to accelerate immigration related stops in Waco.
“Given the evidence we have right now of the Texas Department of Public Safety collaborating with ICE within the Waco city limits, and seeing the destruction they’re doing to families… I hope Waco doesn’t go to this quickly, or maybe never,” Burleson said.
The Texas Department of Public Safety approved a $26 million contract with Flock last year to surveil state roads and support Operation Lone Star, the state’s multibillion-dollar effort to curb unauthorized immigration and fortify the border.
In the Waco-area, the greatest share of Flock critics appears to be concentrated among data center opponents. A search for posts including “Flock” in the Stop the Waco Data Center Facebook group returns more than a hundred hits. Those posts present Flock, data centers and surveillance software, such as Palantir, as interconnected problems.
Sean Terrel, an organizer with the Waco data center opposition, does not see the two issues as fundamentally linked. He said that the prevalence of anti-Flock sentiment in the data center opposition group is more a general indicator of community engagement.
“The people that are concerned with their community are interested in the things that are happening (to it),” Terrell said. “And these are two big issues.”
This week, the Institute for Justice published a survey of 28 cases where police used Flock to stalk romantic interests. Two of the Flock stalking cases were reported in Texas this month, one of which involved an officer using Flock to stalk a female colleague.
Flock Safety introduced a new AI auditing tool in April, billed as a solution to police abuse of the product. At least 20 officers in Georgia have been disciplined or charged with Flock misuse in the past year, according to an Atlanta News First investigation, which partly credited the sudden spike in cases to the new audit tool.
Who operates Waco-area Flock cameras?
Flock cameras in the Waco-area are operated by local police departments, the Texas Department of Public Safety and private businesses. The Waco Police Department has not purchased Flock products, nor has the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office.
Because there is no centralized register of all Flock products in a given area, the most comprehensive list of known camera locations is a user-generated map hosted by DeFlock.
The Bridge confirmed the following camera counts using public records and calls to local police departments:
- Hewitt – 19 ALPR cameras; 2 Flock video cameras
- Robinson – 11 ALPR cameras
- West – 9 ALPR cameras
- Bellmead – 2 ALPR cameras
Both The Home Depot, located on West Waco Drive, and Lowe’s Home Improvement on New Road have Flock cameras installed. Home Depot has said it does not grant federal law enforcement access to its Flock data. Bellmead’s cameras were partly paid for by Walmart, which has a location in the city along Interstate 35.
It’s unclear how many cameras the Texas Department of Public Safety operates in the area. The department did not immediately respond to a request for information. The department did not respond to similar requests made by other media in other parts of the state.
Why are they popular with law enforcement?
The value of Flock cameras for quickly investigating some crimes and preventing others is as well-documented as the technology’s risks.
The Hewitt Police Department has been one of the biggest advocates for expanding the Flock network in the Waco-area. With 21 cameras, the city has installed more Flock cameras than any other in McLennan County.
That’s not because Hewitt wants to spy on its residents, said Hewitt Police Chief John McGrath in an interview with The Bridge.
“We have placed these cameras mainly on the outer limits of our city, because what we’re interested in is the people that are coming into our city and committing criminal acts,” McGrath said.
He listed several examples where Flock was the deciding factor in a local investigation, or helped another city with a Flock data sharing agreement, track down a suspect moving through Hewitt.
One of those examples involved a victim of domestic violence in Hewitt and a protective order against the suspect in the case, who lived outside the city. The suspect’s vehicle was added to a hotlist, allowing Hewitt officers to interdict when he approached the victim’s residence.
Robinson police share Hewitt’s positive impression of the cameras. This week, the Robinson Police Department attributed a steep, year-over-year drop in burglaries, property crime, and vehicle theft to the city’s 11 cameras. However, it’s not clear that Flock caused the drop. National crime rates across multiple categories have dropped precipitously since 2022, according to an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice.
Flock Safety claimed its products helped locate 10,000 missing persons and supported 1 million investigations in 2025.
Flock cameras are also heavily subsidized by state grants in Texas, chiefly through the Texas Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority. Hewitt pays $9,600 a year for its camera network; the other $38,400 is paid for by the state grant. Bellmead’s system is partly paid for by the authority’s catalytic converter grant.
Can local law enforcement create safeguards for Flock?
Police departments can determine how Flock cameras are used and regulated, not just the company.
McGrath said his department takes potential officer misuse of Flock seriously. The Hewitt Police Department is an accredited member of the Texas Police Chiefs Association Best Practices Program and has instituted its own guidelines for proper use of the cameras.
Flock mandates users enter a reason for their search, though instances of vague search reasons have appeared in Flock audits throughout the country, such as “sus vehicle,” “test,” “investigation,” or random letter strings.
Hewitt’s policy demands a higher standard to execute a search, McGrath said. If a case number isn’t supplied, “you can’t just do a search and say something like ‘drugs’ (as a search reason),” he said. Hewitt officers who misuse the system could be fired.
McGrath said he was not aware of any requests from federal agencies to access Hewitt’s Flock data, nor were the cameras purchased with the intent of aiding immigration enforcement. Immigration enforcement is a “prohibited use” according to Hewitt’s Flock transparency portal.
Sign-up for Flock’s transparency portal service is optional. Because Flock data is owned by the user, according to the company, police can also choose the level of access to data they grant other agencies.
Are Flock cameras being defaced around Waco?
The trend in Flock vandalism points to an emerging movement rejecting mass surveillance technology. Social media posts about damaged Flock cameras, as well as comedic instructionals on how to disable them, have gone viral.
Now, Flock cameras are being hacked, smashed, and blinded across Texas, with reports of similar incidents surging throughout the country.
Last week, Dallas police reported 25 attacks on Flock cameras since March, while authorities in Houston are investigating their own string of anti-Flock vigilantism this month.
Flock cameras have been vandalized in the Hewitt area, too, police said.
“We have actually had a couple of our cameras vandalized in Hewitt,” he said, adding that Hewitt police are considering adding surveillance cameras to watch its Flock cameras in the event of a repeat strike.
A suspect in one of those cases was captured by the Flock camera being defaced.
“We will get arrest warrants for them, and we will put them in jail, and we will work with the DA’s office to try and get the maximum punishment,” McGrath said.
The Bridge found another camera in Robinson that appeared to have been cut down by a saw. However, Robinson police believe the camera became unstable due to dirt erosion, a department staff member told The Bridge on Wednesday.
