An Illinois College Tried To Cancel Its Flock Contract. Flock Refused.

Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company worth more than $8 billion, manufactures automated license plate readers (ALPRs), cameras that capture images of license plates and store them in a database that police can search.

Recently, the company has been under intense scrutiny over concerns about privacy and the cameras’ capacity for misuse, leading some cities to cancel their Flock contracts. But it turns out that getting rid of Flock is easier said than done.

“When Elgin Community College hired Flock Safety to install six surveillance cameras in April 2025, President Peggy Heinrich thought they would ‘enhance the safety and security of students,’” Lisa Kurian Philip reported last week at the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Chicago-area school signed up for a one-year contract with the company. It was not alone: Five of Illinois’ 12 public universities, plus four of its community colleges,

But Heinrich began to have second thoughts as she learned more about how the cameras can be used—for example, Flock allowed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to access over 80,000 of its cameras. In September 2025, ICE arrested a student near Elgin’s campus.

More than half of Elgin’s students are Latino, Heinrich told the Sun-Times, and enrollment began to suffer.

“In August of 2025, Flock publicly announced it would no longer conduct pilot projects with federal agencies,” according to the company.

Still, Heinrich said, the school chose to end its contract with Flock “out of an abundance of caution for our students.”

“Elgin Community College staff notified Flock in October 2025 that they wanted to cancel their contract and have the cameras taken down,” Philip wrote. “Within a day, Heinrich said, Flock rejected the request and refused to uninstall the equipment on the basis that the company had not breached their agreement.”

The school reached out again in December, offering to pay out the rest of the contract, but according to Heinrich, Flock did not respond.

Since the school no longer wanted the cameras to operate, and Flock refused to remove or disable them, officials zip tied garbage bags over the cameras on campus. But in a peculiar twist, “workers in an unmarked vehicle, which Heinrich assumed belonged to Flock, repeatedly removed the coverings.”

This continued until the school’s contract expired in April, when Flock finally removed the cameras.

Granted, the situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that while Elgin is a public institution, Flock is a private company.

“Per Flock contract conditions, the company retains ownership of the products it sells to cities,” Caroline Haskins reports at Wired. “This means that when people damage or destroy cameras, cities are on the hook for the cost.” Covering cameras with garbage bags will apparently work until Flock comes and cuts them down, but removing or disabling the cameras without the company’s permission will incur fees to replace them, even if the city has already said it doesn’t want them anymore.

But since the product that Flock sells is a searchable database of license plate images compiled from its interconnected nationwide system of cameras, the reality is more complicated than that.

Indeed, while Flock says repeatedly that customers own all data that their cameras capture, that’s little comfort when the information is also available to any other customer with access to Flock’s database.

Between June 2024 and May 2025, police in Illinois searched the Flock database over 4,000 times for immigration-related reasons, even though a state law prohibits ALPRs’ use for that exact purpose. This implies the searches were done at ICE’s request, meaning federal immigration authorities could access not just the license plate data in those Illinois communities, but also the thousands of communities nationwide that use Flock cameras.

It’s also particularly troubling that Flock would make it so difficult for customers to end their contracts. In that, Elgin Community College is not alone: Plenty of jurisdictions have kept using Flock even after supposedly canceling the service, though it’s usually the police who fight the cancellations.

In June 2025, the Austin, Texas, City Council declined to renew its Flock contract. Though the city police department supported the program, officials cited concerns about the cameras’ capacity to target vulnerable communities.

But in February of this year, public radio station KUT reported that at least two neighboring towns were sharing access to the Flock database with Austin police.

In July 2025, the Board of Lucas County Commissioners in Toledo, Ohio, voted 2–1 to approve 27 Flock license plate cameras across the county, costing $250,000 over four years. But a week later, one commissioner changed his mind, citing fears of how the data would be used, and the board voted again to rescind the previous approval.

In a letter to the Lucas County prosecutor the following day, Sheriff Michael J. Navarre said the commissioners “have a legal obligation to honor this contract” and alleged that the decision to rescind it was borne out of personal animus toward him.

“I cannot sit idly by and allow them to make decisions out of spite that negatively impact the safety of my deputies and the community they protect,” he wrote. To be clear, what apparently put everyone at risk was the decision not to move forward with a series of license plate cameras.

County prosecutor Julia R. Bates wrote back to the sheriff in September 2025, stating that since he had already signed the contract from the original resolution, the rescission was “void.”

Elgin Community College’s experience is not quite the same—in that case it wasn’t the police department, but Flock itself, that refused to take down the cameras. But it’s still indicative of the widening rift between those who worry about our growing surveillance state and those who apparently see it as worth the tradeoffs.

The post An Illinois College Tried To Cancel Its Flock Contract. Flock Refused. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/10/13/an-illinois-college-tried-to-cancel-its-flock-contract-flock-refused/