Audits, a proposed city ordinance and a push in Washington are testing the license plate reader maker in the city where it was founded. Flock Safety, the license plate reader company built in Atlanta, is under growing pressure at home. Residents are pushing back at public meetings, city leaders are drafting permanent rules and one of Georgia’s U.S. senators is pressing for federal limits. The fight in Flock’s hometown comes as the startup, valued at $7.5 billion in its last reported funding round, shrinks its workforce and loses customers elsewhere. Officials in all four of metro Atlanta’s largest counties have held town halls on the cameras since August. The common complaint is that a tool sold to help catch car thieves and find missing people now logs the movements of ordinary drivers. Critics say it has too few safeguards against misuse.
A hometown company with a national footprint
Garrett Langley and two fellow Georgia Tech graduates, Paige Todd and Matt Feury, founded Flock in 2017. Langley has said he started it after car break-ins in his neighborhood. The cameras photograph passing vehicles and log their plates and other features in a searchable database for police. Flock says it operates more than 120,000 readers in 49 states.Investors have backed that growth. In March 2025, a $275 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz valued the company at $7.5 billion, and Flock said at the time that its annual recurring revenue had passed $300 million. The company declined to tell CNN how many cameras it runs in the Atlanta area. DeFlock, a crowdsourced mapping project, counts more than 6,000 plate readers from Flock and other vendors across a 29-county region.
What is driving the backlash
Much of the anger stems from cases in which officers allegedly used the network for personal reasons. Citing Georgia Bureau of Investigation figures, Sen. Raphael Warnock said in September that 19 people in law enforcement or emergency services in the state had been arrested and charged this year over misuse of the cameras. Several of the accusations involve officers tracking current or former partners.Errors have also drawn attention. In May, police in the Atlanta suburbs of Dunwoody and Doraville stopped a 26-year-old man at gunpoint after a Flock alert matched his car to a domestic violence suspect. Officers let him go once they confirmed he was the wrong person, CNN reported.Dunwoody has become a focal point. A resident’s open records requests showed that Flock employees without law enforcement roles had accessed some city cameras for testing and sales demonstrations. In April, 404 Media reported that demo feeds included a Jewish community center, among them a children’s gymnastics room. Langley apologized, and Flock has agreed to stop using Dunwoody’s data for promotions and to run future demos in public places, CNN reported. Some residents still want the city to end its contracts.Organized opposition is also visible. In August, a coalition led by the group Community Movement Builders rallied outside Atlanta City Hall. “We want Flock to be gone,” organizer Kamau Franklin told Fox 5 Atlanta. Some cameras have been vandalized, including one near Georgia Tech.
Atlanta tightens rules but keeps the cameras
City officials have chosen regulation over removal. At Mayor Andre Dickens’ request, the Atlanta Police Department reviewed 115,578 Flock searches made between January and early September. It flagged 79, or about 0.07%, for further investigation. Police stressed that a flag is not a confirmed violation.The department then rewrote its procedures. It cut off direct access for outside agencies, revoked logins held by retired reserve officers, spelled out prohibited searches and penalties, and added monthly compliance audits. Dickens also proposed a citywide ordinance that would require annual independent reviews of high-risk systems and quarterly public reports. Vendors such as Flock would have to write city privacy, retention and data-sharing limits into their contracts. A council committee is still reviewing the measure. City officials have said they do not intend to drop Flock, and the Atlanta Police Foundation calls the cameras invaluable.Pressure is building above the city level as well. In September, Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, and Sen. Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican, asked the Justice Department to issue guidelines on police use of plate readers and to disclose how much federal money has funded them.
Flock’s response
Flock argues that the answer is better guardrails. In an Aug. 13 blog post, Langley announced that the default data retention period would fall from 30 days to seven. Police will have to enter a case code for every search by the end of 2026, with emergency searches flagged for review. The automated audit tool that flags unusual activity will become mandatory, and accounts showing abnormal behavior will be locked automatically.Langley told CNN that the mayor’s proposal was “a step in the right direction.” He said he is open to regulation and expects rules to be set state by state. Civil liberties advocates are not persuaded. Chad Marlow of the ACLU told CNN the new guardrails repeat measures that have failed before.
The commercial stakes
The scrutiny is spreading beyond Georgia. A Newsweek analysis of DeFlock data counted 149 cities and counties that canceled or rejected Flock contracts or switched off cameras between January and August, more than half of them in August, Jalopnik reported. In October, Reuters reported that Flock would shed about 18% of its staff, roughly 270 people, through a voluntary buyout program. A company spokesperson called it “a voluntary program, not a layoff.”The evidence on results is mixed. An August University of South Carolina study cited by CNN found an 11% drop in auto thefts where the cameras were used, with no significant change in other property crime. Atlanta’s ordinance, the outcome of the 79 flagged searches and any federal guidance will now help decide how much room Flock has to operate in the city where it started.
