Three US cities a day cancelled Flock surveillance contracts in August, a fourfold surge the company says is dwarfed by new sales

Flock Safety lost more city and county contracts in August 2026 than in all of 2021 through 2025

Ninety-three US cities and counties terminated Flock Safety camera contracts in August, about three a day and four times July's pace, and that single month out-cancelled the previous five years combined. 1 Secure Justice, an Oakland-based advocacy group, has recorded 214 terminations since 2021, 165 of them in the first eight months of this year, which leaves 49 for all of 2021 through 2025. 1 Flock's counter, from spokesperson Courtney Terlecki: new city partnerships have "outpaced nonrenewals by approximately 10 to one" so far in 2026, in a network the company says is "trusted by over 5,000 communities." 1 Both statements describe the same month, and the arithmetic that reconciles them is the actual story. Police surveillance in America is not collapsing and it is not quietly consolidating. It is turning into a procurement category that cities negotiate contract by contract, and August is what the negotiation looks like when it tips.

The exits are record-fast and the base is still growing

Set the two datasets side by side and both easy narratives dissolve:

• August's 93 terminations account for roughly 43 percent of every termination Secure Justice has recorded since 2021. 1
• All 214 walk-aways combined equal about 4 percent of the 5,000-plus communities Flock says it serves. 1
• Flock's own 10-to-1 ratio, applied to the 165 nonrenewals recorded through August, implies on the order of 1,650 new city partnerships in 2026, a figure Flock declined to confirm. 1

Two caveats travel with those numbers: the termination count is advocacy-compiled, and the ratio is Flock's own unaudited math. Taken together they describe a network growing roughly an order of magnitude faster than it shrinks, with an exit rate that turned steep in the same season the vendor shortened its data defaults.

The renewal clause is the lever cities actually hold

What they can do is decline to sign again, which makes contract terminations the accountability mechanism that actually exists, and it runs on a calendar. August's walk-aways are the delayed receipt for scrutiny that arrived earlier; the Senate investigation and the Florida arrests announced in late August will land, if they land, on renewal dates still ahead. A council weighing renewal now has a public count of exits, a vendor that has already cut its data defaults and rewritten its terms, and a Senate subcommittee asking questions the paperwork has to answer. That leverage arrived by procurement, not by statute.

Seven days of memory, and who pays for the tenth case

The most consequential August concession sits in the data defaults. On August 13, Flock CEO Garrett Langley announced the company was cutting default license-plate-reader retention from 30 days, a default set when the company started nine years ago, to seven. 2 Flock's justification is its own statistic: "Our analysis shows that over 90% of searches without a full plate are done within a week." 2 That number also prices the concession. The searches that matter to cold cases and slow-moving investigations live in the tail the 90 percent leaves behind, which is why the same post introduces Evidence Mode, a cold-storage carve-out that will let detectives preserve specific reads for active investigations. 2 Existing customers keep their current "democratically approved retention periods," and communities that adopt the seven-day default get Evidence Mode at no cost. 2 For new contracts, the arithmetic of the cut is 23 days of default memory: a plate read tied to a case three weeks later was retrievable by default before and is not now, unless someone preserved it. Ars Technica places the change among steps the company took after extensive criticism. 1

Flock is hard-wiring abuse monitoring into its contracts

The August 13 post also spells out how Flock now handles misuse, with direct bearing on the arrests that made the same month's news. Its Audit Assistance tool, introduced 16 weeks ago, flags abnormal use for administrator review, and those reviews have been associated with "arrests of several law enforcement officers who allegedly abused the system," the post says. More than a third of customers have adopted it voluntarily; every law-enforcement customer will be required to have it by the end of this year, alongside automatic lockouts for abnormal behavior and mandatory case codes on searches. 2 The same month, two Florida police officers were arrested for misusing Flock, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said the cameras were "out of control" in his state. 1 Misuse has moved from hypothetical to arrest record, and the vendor's answer is arriving as contract terms rather than press-release assurances.

Scrutiny now arrives from both aisles

On August 26, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, launched an investigation into Flock Safety's data practices, following up on August 28 with an op-ed in The Daily Wire titled "Why I Am Investigating Flock." His office puts the network at 120,000 AI-powered cameras across the United States, a figure from the senator's releases rather than from Flock itself. 3 The civil-liberties critique had already produced specifics: Catherine Crump, a UC Berkeley law professor, notes that a Texas sheriff's office used Flock to search for a woman who had had an abortion. 1 With a Senate Republican and a Republican governor now pressing the same vendor, there is no partisan shorthand a city council can lean on when the renewal vote comes. Every city negotiates alone.

Flock's network, by the company's account, is still growing. The exits are too few to shrink it and too many to ignore, which is exactly the position a city wants to be holding when its renewal date comes around.