How LA Landlords Are Using Flock Safety to Build a Private Surveillance Network

After three years of helping Los Angeles police track vehicles across the city, the Flock Safety contract with the Los Angeles Police Department has come to an end. The LAPD allowed its agreement with the surveillance company to expire after department officials concluded they could no longer support a contract that failed to adequately protect civil liberties, privacy, and the handling of sensitive location data. Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas said the department could not sign off on a new agreement because of “serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues,” particularly over what happens to the data collected by the cameras.

After years of sustained pressure from select City Council members and advocacy organizations such as the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, the decision appeared to mark a major victory for critics of automated license plate readers (ALPRs). But that victory is only partial. The cameras are still up.

Under the now expired agreement, the department didn’t own the physical Flock cameras — private developers, homeowners’ associations, and apartment complexes did. They purchased the cameras and could choose whether to share data with police through Flock’s platform. The agreement itself governed LAPD’s access to data shared through the system rather than the operation of privately owned cameras, many of which have continued collecting vehicle information after the department’s contract expired.

This is the blind spot at the center of Los Angeles’s surveillance expansion: while City Hall fights over million-dollar public contracts in full view of reporters, commissioners, and City Council, an entirely separate, privately-owned camera network spreads through the city’s apartment complexes largely uncounted, unregulated, and invisible to the tenants moving past it every day.

The Pitch Landlords Are Hearing

Flock Safety doesn’t hide its interest in multifamily housing. The company’s website has an entire vertical built for property managers, promising to help apartment operators “deter and solve crime” and “manage who enters” their communities with ALPRs that run around the clock. Flock frames the technology as a retention tool as much as a safety one, telling landlords that visible cameras and “Monitored 24/7” yard signs can drive down incident reports, which keeps renters from moving out. One Georgia-based property management executive quoted in Flock’s own marketing said a Nashville complex went from three incidents a week to zero within six weeks of installation.

The pitch is simple, and it works on landlords: no wiring, no electrician, no monthly utility bill. The cameras are solar-powered and run on LTE, so a property manager can bolt one to a light pole in a parking lot and have it live within days. Once it’s running, it doesn’t just photograph a plate, Flock’s “Vehicle Fingerprint” technology logs the make, model, color, dents, bumper stickers, and even whether a plate is paper or permanent. Multiply that by every car and person entering or leaving the property, every day, indefinitely.

A Private Front Door Into a National Network

What Flock’s brochures don’t emphasize is what happens after that data leaves the parking lot. Flock has built what the ACLU calls the country’s first true nationwide mass-surveillance network out of consumer-owned cameras now numbering close to 90,000 across roughly 5,000 communities, according to ACLU tracking. According to Flock, its nationwide network of cameras produces more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. Any property, HOA, or business that opts into data sharing can make its footage searchable by thousands of police agencies on Flock’s network, not just the police department down the street.

That architecture has already caused real damage. Reporting by 404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that a Texas sheriff’s office ran a nationwide Flock Safety search explicitly logged as looking for a woman who’d had an abortion. A Virginia investigation found thousands of immigration-related searches run against local ALPR data despite state and department policies barring it. In San Francisco, a class-action lawsuit filed this year alleges outside and federal agencies including ICE, CBP, the FBI, and ATF queried the city’s Flock cameras more than 1.6 million times in seven months, a volume the suit says violates California’s own ALPR Privacy Act. The ACLU has also documented that Flock’s standard customer agreement grants the company a broad license to share footage with outside agencies for “investigative purposes.” 

None of that requires a municipal contract. A landlord who buys a Flock camera and flips on data sharing has, in effect, made an independent decision to fold their tenants into a national surveillance apparatus that the tenants did not consent to join.

Who Gets Watched?

Research on license plate readers from a Brennan Center review of Oakland’s camera network found that over 10 years the technology disproportionately targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods, independent of where car-related crime actually occurred. A recent Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting analysis of Louisville’s Flock-linked citations found roughly half involved Black residents in a city where Black people make up about a quarter of the population. The ACLU of Kentucky’s executive director said the pattern was consistent with what researchers have found nationally about who gets surveilled in everyday life. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has separately documented more than 80 agencies using Flock’s nationwide lookup tool to run searches using terms such as “Roma,” “g*psy,” “g*psy vehicle,” and “possible g*psy,” raising concerns about racial profiling and discriminatory policing. 

Overlay that pattern onto Los Angeles’s rental housing stock where lower-income tenants are far more likely to live in large, professionally managed apartment complexes than in single-family homes, and the private ALPR buildout looks less like a scattered amenity and more like an arm of invasive surveillance that advocates have sounded the alarm about for years.

The Disclosure Gap

California law gives landlords fairly wide latitude to install cameras in common areas like parking lots, entrances, and hallways, so long as they don’t point into windows or capture areas with a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Even if a lease discloses the presence of security cameras, it may not explain that a property uses Flock’s Vehicle Fingerprint technology, how long the company retains vehicle data, or whether the property has enabled data sharing with police through Flock’s network. Such a gap represents an area within LA’s fight against Flock Safety that has yet to be bridged. 

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition organizers spent the past year pushing LAPD to disclose the full scope of its relationship with Flock, arguing that the Board of Police Commissioners functions less as oversight and more as cover. The coalition’s public records lawsuit against the city, filed earlier this year, accuses the LAPD of concealing years of the partnership behind a single expired memorandum. Councilmember Ysabel Jurado has separately called for enforceable limits on how ALPR data gets collected, retained, and shared before any new agreement is signed. All of that scrutiny is aimed at the public side of the network. On the private ownership side, the cameras purchased by landlords remain a significant hurdle to ending the surveillance state.

The Lawsuit That Already Names the Problem

Nobody has to speculate about whether LAPD relies on privately owned cameras. Stop LAPD Spying Coalition organizers spent the past year pushing LAPD to disclose the full scope of its relationship with Flock, arguing that the Board of Police Commissioners functions less as oversight and more as cover. The coalition’s public records lawsuit, which sought contracts and agreements between LAPD and Flock dating back to 2017, accused the department of concealing years of the partnership behind a single expired memorandum. The lawsuit was ultimately resolved, and the department turned over the records the coalition had sought. Organizers told Knock LA that the production did not uncover additional Flock contracts beyond those already known, but they argued the case nonetheless exposed how little public visibility exists into the department’s relationship with the company and the broader network of privately owned cameras operating across Los Angeles. 

At a May 5 press conference outside LAPD headquarters, the coalition’s attorney, Shakeer Rahman, described Flock as “a private company that has rolled out these cameras all over the city” and argued the department was withholding records because it feared what disclosure would do to public support for the program. Organizer Grace Zhang put it more directly: the department was hiding the truth about its relationship with Flock Safety.

The coalition’s research already revealed one concrete example of how the private-purchase pipeline works. In 2024, the Cheviot Hills Neighborhood Association raised $200,000 to buy its own Flock cameras, with an informal understanding that LAPD would eventually take over ownership and data control after five years. While the consumer in this case is a homeowners’ association, not an apartment complex, it is the same model Flock uses to market surveillance technology to multifamily property managers, and it shows LAPD is already comfortable inheriting camera networks it never had to buy, install, or earn public approval for. 

Whether any specific LA apartment complex has struck a similar arrangement is exactly the kind of detail that doesn’t show up in a police budget line; it lives in property management contracts and HOA minutes that nobody outside the building management sees.

The Current, Tenant-Led Fight

In December, the ACLU of Northern California sued Equity Residential, one of the country’s largest corporate landlords, and its “smart home” vendor SmartRent on behalf of the San Francisco Tenants Union and three specific tenants. The suit doesn’t involve license plates; it’s about in-unit sensors, digital locks, and thermostats that log occupancy patterns. However, the underlying complaint is the same that ALPR critics raise: tenants being forced to accept monitoring technology as a condition of having a home, with no meaningful way to opt out. 

Plaintiff William Solis, who lived in his unit for nearly six years before the system was installed, said a home should be the one place where you shouldn’t have to worry about being watched. ACLU senior staff attorney Jake Snow was more pointed: “this is a flagrant abuse of people’s privacy.”

Back in LA, that same tension between “surveillance” and “safety” has become Stop LAPD Spying Coalition’s central argument. At the same May press conference, Shameka Foster of the Downtown Women’s Action Coalition and LA Community Action Network (LA CAN) spoke to how Flock data being fed to ICE endangers immigrant women already navigating poverty and instability. Foster argued that surveillance cannot substitute for meaningful support. “Surveillance does not keep women safe. Housing does. Stability does. Care does. Real care,” she said.

After the Contract Ends

If the past two years have taught Los Angeles anything about Flock Safety, it’s that a canceled contract doesn’t mean a camera goes dark. LAPD’s decision to suspend its relationship with Flock was the product of sustained public pressure, records requests, a lawsuit, and years of organizing. However, nobody voted on the camera bolted to the light pole in an apartment complex’s parking lot. No commissioner reviewed it. No councilmember was briefed. In that case, a landlord signed a service agreement and, somewhere in a clause never read by tenants, decided how much of a person’s daily life lives in a data set owned by a private surveillance company.

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