Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.

According to my analysis of data from the Atlas of Surveillance, a crowd-sourced database of police technology, nearly 800 rural law enforcement agencies use Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) as of December 2025. Rural jurisdictions with limited resources and staffing might find automated policing tools attractive, but investigative reporting on ALPRs reveals that they might do more harm than good.

Flock Safety, the well-known ALPR company, has come under fire for encroaching on citizens’ privacy in ways that are difficult for the public to track. Flock Safety and its competitors use artificial intelligence (AI) to collect sensitive data on both individuals and vehicles. Although Flock Safety says that they don’t track down people, just cars, public records obtained by 404 Media revealed that police regularly used Flock cameras to look for individuals, searching their databases with terms like “heavy-set male with a black and white hat.”

(Note: ALPRs are not traffic cameras. While law enforcement agencies use traffic cameras for ticketing traffic violations by capturing photos of license plates, they use ALPRs primarily for investigative purposes.)

“Much of the world hasn’t quite caught up yet to how much more powerful a surveillance camera is today compared to a few years ago,” said senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Jay Stanley in an interview with 404 Media. Stanley told 404 Media that, today, “oceans” of data can be searched with key terms like a text file, including for sensitive personal content, like one’s bumper stickers or clothing.

The vast majority of these cameras are manufactured by Flock Safety. In nonmetropolitan, or rural, jurisdictions, nearly 80% of all agencies that deploy ALPRs use Flock cameras, representing 627 communities.

The following map shows metro and nonmetro law enforcement agencies that have contracts with an ALPR company. Visit the interactive web map to click on points and explore the pop-up windows. This dataset was last updated at the end of 2025.

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National coverage of the ALPR debate has largely centered on urban areas. But a growing number of rural jurisdictions are also using this technology. And some rural communities are fighting back.

Police Stalking, Deportations, and Surveillance

Local police are increasingly using ALPRs to surveil protesters, help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) find and deport immigrants, stalk women, and track down a Texas woman who allegedly self-administered an abortion.

Because Flock cameras store information in a nationwide database, any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can access and share this ocean of data across agencies, including federal ones like ICE. Although ICE itself doesn’t have a contract with Flock, they access the Flock database through local law enforcement officers, often without warrants.

An Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) analysis of 2025 searches found that at least 50 law enforcement agencies ran searches through Flock’s network in relation to protest activity, from the local to the federal level. In 2025, the Tulsa Police Department logged 38 searches for terms related to No Kings protests and a demonstration in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian activist who was arrested by ICE in New York in March of 2025.

“In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate,” wrote EFF reporters Dave Maass and Rindala Alajaji. Civil rights activists argue that law enforcement should have to obtain warrants to make Flock network searches.

Earlier this year, ICE searched the Flock network via Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), according to public records obtained by 404 Media. Although Flock Safety’s website states that they “[do] not work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” public records show that thousands of local law enforcement agencies were sharing data with FWC – a commission regularly performing lookups for ICE despite ostensibly being aimed at regulating conservation violations.

The FWC also pulled Flock data to secretly investigate its critics, including environmental activists who opposed a bear hunt. One of those activists was Katrina Shadix, the founder of Bear Warriors United, an environmental organization that successfully sued the state of Florida for violating the Endangered Species Act. The Miami Herald reported that the FWC pulled data on Shadix’s car 17 times between 2023 and 2025.

The Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm, found that police used ALPRs to stalk women at least 28 times in recent years. In March, a Milwaukee police officer used the city’s ALPR network to track his partner and his partner’s ex 180 times in two months.

In 2025, a Texas sheriff’s office tracked down a woman who self-administered an abortion by accessing 83,000 cameras in an ALPR database, using the search term, “had an abortion, search for female.”

“This case underscores our growing concern: that the mass surveillance infrastructure—originally sold as a tool to find stolen cars or missing persons—is now being used to target people seeking reproductive healthcare,” wrote EFF reporter Rindala Alajaji.

Examples of Rural Resistance

Fed-up small-town residents are taking things into their own hands. In Pageland, a small South Carolina town near the North Carolina border, an individual recently cut down two Flock Safety cameras. Something similar happened in small-town Bluffton in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where another person unplugged and cut the wires of several Flock cameras.

In nearby Irmo, South Carolina, a small town outside of the state’s capital, concerned residents expressed opposition to Flock cameras at a recent town council meeting.

“I believe a free society should be reluctant to normalize the routine surveillance of ordinary people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. The question before you isn’t just whether this technology can be useful; it’s also whether it produces the kind of relationship we want between government and the people it serves,” said Irmo resident Evan Altman, according to reporter Tanner Gilmartin for WIS10.

But despite the opposition, the Irmo town council approved a $403,000 contract with Flock.

My colleague Ilana Newman said there’s also been broad disapproval of Flock cameras in her Southwest Colorado community. The town of Durango in Colorado’s Four Corners region proposed an ordinance to restrict the amount of time that Flock data can be stored, limit who has access to the data, and require a warrant to review footage.

“It was really the constituents who brought a proposed ordinance,” Shirley Gonzales, the city council member who introduced the ordinance, said in a town hall meeting.

In Monongalia County, West Virginia, county commissioners listened to the public voice their concerns about Flock cameras in a July 2026 meeting. Concerned Monongalia County residents said they were angry to learn that Opioid Settlement Fund money was used to purchase the cameras.

Monongalia County resident Justin Musser told 12 News reporters that he “[didn’t] want the commission or county to downplay the importance that transparency plays with getting people on board with stuff like this.” Monongalia County has a three-year contract with Flock Safety, but 12 News reporters spoke to protesters who said they will keep pushing for the cameras to be taken down.

Instead of heeding community concerns, Flock leadership doubled down, positioning themselves as the victims. “Let’s call this what it is: Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack,” wrote Flock CEO Garrett Langley in a December 2025 email to the Manchester Police Department. Emails were obtained by reporter Katherine Revello for Inside Investigator. “The attacks aren’t new. You’ve been dealing with this forever, and we’ve been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.”

Small-Town Ramifications

Flock Safety’s pitch to small towns goes something like this: “Imagine how much time and resources you could save if you spied on your own citizens with instantaneous access to everyone’s location, no warrant needed!”

Flock cameras are expensive, with cameras priced at an estimated $2,500 per reader per year. In small towns with small tax bases, these costs might account for a disproportionate share of the jurisdiction’s budget. But Flock tries to convince rural agencies that their cameras are well worth the investment, noting that public safety leaders in small towns “manage with lean teams and tight budgets.”

But Flock has an interesting relationship with the truth. Flock lied about partnering with civil rights groups like the ACLU and misled the public about whether ICE can access their database. A March 2026 report found examples of Flock denying public records requests and giving incorrect legal advice about how to request such public records.

At the time of writing this, I could not find independent reporting on verifying Flock’s claims that their cameras actually help law enforcement. There are, however, anecdotal reports from local police departments about Flock cameras helping police track down missing persons and stolen vehicles. But specific examples are rarely divulged, and a quantitative cost-benefit analysis of Flock’s efficacy does not exist, at least not to my knowledge.

Even so, privacy violations, particularly those that result in fear and intimidation, are not quantifiable. Small local agencies might want to think twice before destroying public trust.

Are you worried that your information has been searched in a Flock database by police? Type in your license plate number on HaveIBeenFlocked.com.

This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder. For more rural reporting and small-town stories visit dailyyonder.com.

Sarah Alexander MelotteArticles

Your local law enforcement is using Flock cameras