OPINION: Denver City Council Votes to Cease Using ‘Flock’ Surveillance Cameras

Photo: A Flock license plate-reading camera is seen at Colfax Avenue and Franklin Street in Denver on August 5, 2025. (Quentin Young/Colorado Newsline)

This op-ed by Quentin Young appeared on Colorado Newsline on September 18, 2025.

The use of Flock cameras in Colorado exemplifies the dark side of government surveillance. Proponents tout their law enforcement utility, but the outsize risk they pose to targeted residents and their contribution to Big Brother conditions in the state far outweigh any legitimate use to which they’re put.

Flock Safety cameras, often affixed to utility infrastructure above streets, capture images of passing vehicles from which information, particularly license plate numbers, is documented in a sharable and searchable database. The company has said its cameras are present in more than 5,000 communities across the country, including 75 in Colorado. They include Colorado Springs, Boulder, Durango, Longmont and Castle Rock.

Concerns about Flock intensified this year as the Trump administration implemented its mass deportation policies, which unaccountable federal agents have carried out through kidnappings, the transfer of detainees to foreign prisons and other abuses.

In April, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent using the Loveland Police Department’s account conducted searches of Flock data on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The searches appear to have violated a state law that restricts state participation in federal immigration enforcement.

As Newsline reported last month, data collected by Flock’s 111 cameras in Denver was accessed in immigration-related national searches more than 1,400 times between June 2024 and April 2025.

“This is more evidence conveying the serious threat the Flock mass surveillance system poses to the privacy and safety of not only immigrants in Denver, but across Colorado and the country,” the ACLU Colorado said in a statement when the Denver searches were exposed through a public information request.

Civil liberties advocates have long highlighted how government surveillance can intrude on the lives of everyday residents and result in abuses of power. Their warnings have only become more urgent amid recent technology advances and lawless behavior by federal agents.

The Denver City Council in May voted against renewing Flock’s contract. But Mayor Mike Johnston, who argues the camera network is an important tool for crime-fighting, extended the contract on his own. It expires at the end of October, and mass surveillance opponents are working to at least regulate so-called automatic license plate readers if they persist in the city beyond that date.

In a welcome move, the city established a task force to examine transparency and other concerns that surround the camera network. The task force includes representatives from Flock allies Johnston and the Denver police, but it also includes civil rights champions such as Denver City Council member Sarah Parady, an outspoken Flock critic. Parady has noted that the potential for misuse of Flock data goes well beyond immigration enforcement.

“Everyone is very rightfully focused on deportations, because we are seeing a crackdown, the likes which we’ve never seen,” Parady told Newsline last month. “But there are all kinds of ways that you can abuse surveillance data.”

Debate over the cameras comes as law enforcement agencies across the country increasingly rely on sophisticated technology to conduct omnipresent and warrantless surveillance. The practice erodes privacy protections and makes everyone, even the most law-abiding residents, vulnerable to repression.

A guest essay by a former public defender published by The New York Times this week paints a dystopian picture of New York City. Called “N.Y.P.D. Is Teaching America How to Track Everyone Every Day Forever,” the piece raises alarms about agencies around the country following New York’s lead as its police department goes about “building vast, hidden repositories of data it collects on everyone in the city, with no clear boundaries on how it can be used.”

Using cameras, license plate readers, social media analysis and numerous other surveillance tools, the department knows “where you have been, whom you have interacted with and what you have said, thought and believed.”

Civil liberties advocates have long highlighted how government surveillance can intrude on the lives of everyday residents and result in abuses of power. Their warnings have only become more urgent amid recent technology advances and lawless behavior by federal agents.

Anaya Robinson, public policy director of ACLU Colorado, sees Denver’s Flock cameras as part of the larger network of national surveillance, which increasingly appears to violate Fourth Amendment protections and the Supreme Court-affirmed right to privacy in America.

“This surveillance really not only erodes that right to our privacy, but it also chills the use of our rights in a First Amendment context. It’s also able to surveil and look at what protests we’re going to, what religious institutions we are attending, what kinds of bars and stores we patronize,” Robinson said, adding, “Just because it makes it easier to potentially solve crime doesn’t mean that we should be eroding constitutional protections. What we should be doing is investing the money that we are spending on these surveillance technologies into programs and services that have proven time and time again to decrease crime rates rather than increase our ability to respond when crime occurs.”

The ACLU has a seat on the Denver task force, and Robinson said the organization wants to see the city establish legal guardrails if it continues to operate automatic license plate readers. But in no case should Denver continue using Flock cameras, Robinson said. Flock’s national database, allowing law enforcement anywhere in the country to surveil anyone anywhere in the country, poses particular and intolerable dangers.

While the ACLU is helping to craft regulations with the task force, it maintains its position that Johnston should immediately cease use of the Flock network. That advice should be heeded by every city in Colorado that operates Flock cameras. If they value their residents’ fundamental rights, if they want to avoid chilling free speech and association, if they want to uphold the freedoms that the country was founded on, they would turn their cameras off right now.