Knock LA52%
LAPD Suspends Contract with Flock Safety For Now 28%
By Rosalind Jones36%
7/20/2026, 5:36:09 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Availability Heuristic, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 21.1% saturation with 334 hits. Analysis detected 2,932 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,583 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 39.3% and a BS Rank of 28% (14,090 of 19,420 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 72.60% of the article peer group.
On July 11, the Los Angeles Police Department announced that it was suspending its contract with Flock Safety, citing concerns over privacy and data usage.
The decision follows years of organizing and advocacy from community groups with Stop LAPD Spying Coalition leading the fight.
Boycott Home Depot Coalition organizer Miriam Arghandiwal speaks at a press conference with Stop LAPD Spying Coalition on Tuesday July 14 (photo: Rosalind Jones)
“I want to celebrate the power we have built,” said organizer Hamid Khan during a press conference on Tuesday July 14.
“Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has been building this culture of resistance for over fifteen years.”
While LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas claimed that the contract was paused due to internal concerns about ownership of data captured by Flock’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR’s), Stop LAPD Spying Coalition rejected this.
“This did not happen because the LAPD suddenly discovered privacy concerns,” said Stop LAPD Spying Coalition organizer Grace Zhang during Tuesday’s press conference.
“This did not happen because the Board of Police Commissioners grew a conscience.
This happened because the people organized.”
On May 6, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition sued LAPD to obtain public records regarding the department’s relationship with Flock Safety.
The coalition demanded that LAPD disclose all expired and current contracts, memorandums of understanding, and agreements between the two entities.
Among other correspondence, the lawsuit resulted in the revelation of the contract enacted by Flock and LAPD in July 2023 that was set to expire in July of this year.
Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has been a frequent attendee at weekly Board of Police Commissions meetings as a result of their campaign to end LAPD collaborations with Flock Safety.
The coalition routinely raised concerns around data-sharing between Flock, LAPD, and federal agencies.
In particular, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition sounded the alarm week after week about the ways in which Flock enabled the Trump regime’s deportation machine by providing detailed data to ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).
An investigation by CalMatters in 2025 revealed that Southern California police departments — including LAPD — illegally shared data from Flock Safety cameras illegally with ICE and CBP more than 100 times.
These departments searched Flock Safety databases on behalf of federal agencies and logged the reasons for the searches as ‘CBP’ or ‘HSI’ – Homeland Security Investigations.
During a press conference on July 14, Miriam Arghandiwal with the Boycott Home Depot Coalition stated that Flock cameras played a direct role in the CBP-led cluster raids at Home Depot parking lots in 2025 and early 2026.
These raids targeted day laborers who usually congregate in Home Depot lots as they look for work.
“[ICE and CBP] use surveillance to harass and monitor day laborers, with the abductees saying they are followed two to three days visibly before being picked up,” Arghandiwal said.
Day laborers are not the only victims of stalking and violence as a result of increased government and private surveillance.
In a 2026 needs assessment conducted by LACAN , women living on Skid Row named gender-based violence as a regular experience when interacting with LAPD.
Violent incidents will only increase as ballooning police budgets afford officers more tools to stalk and surveil them.
“[LAPD] would rather fund policing and tracking us rather than providing us real safety,” said Leticia Frederick with the Downtown Women’s Action Coalition and LACAN.
“Flock has been used as a tool to racially profile our communities.
All these actions are to contain and control us, not to serve and protect us.”
In a previous press conference on March 3, LACAN director Monique Noel stated that women living on Skid Row identified police harassment, stalking, and police brutality as some of their greatest threats to safety.
“Women are sleeping and dying on sidewalks.
Mothers are in soul-breaking battles to get their children back, because apparently poverty makes you an unfit mother.
People are starving in our communities,” Noel said.
“Why is there always money for surveillance but never enough for housing?”
Flock Safety’s harms against women and queer people extends beyond Los Angeles.
Police departments have demonstrated themselves to be untrustworthy and violent in the ways they handle and use ALPR data.
In Costa Mesa , police officer Robert Jay Josett used the city’s Flock Safety database to track his mistress’s vehicle with the intent of following her.
He later pleaded guilty to harassment and was terminated from the police force.
In February of this year, Riverside County sheriff’s deputy Alexander Ravy Vanny was sentenced to six years in prison for felony and misdemeanor charges, including stalking and misuse of protected electronic data.
Using ALPR data, Vanny tracked his ex-partner’s location to a bar, confronted her, then forcibly threw her in his truck, and drove her more than 17 miles against her will.
A Kansas police chief used Flock data 164 times to search for information about his ex-girlfriend.
In Florida , a police officer allegedly stalked a woman he met on a television set by adding her license plate to a “hotlist” that alerted him if her vehicle was detected by ALPR’s.
He ultimately pulled her over after receiving one of those alerts, reportedly responding by speeding through a no-passing zone at 70 miles per hour, nearly causing a head-on collision.
The former officer then failed to log the traffic stop when he pulled the woman over.
In terms of other weaponization, people seeking abortions have been targeted after Flock ALPR data was used to track their movements.
In Texas , police searched Flock Safety’s data in order to compile evidence against a woman who had self-administered an abortion.
Deputies had at first lied and said the query into ALPR data was related to a missing person case, but a sworn affidavit from the lead detective revealed that the investigation was never about a missing person and always centered on criminalizing the woman for choosing to get an abortion.
In May of 2025, 404 Media uncovered that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched more than 83,000 Flock ALPR cameras nationwide with the reason cited as “had an abortion, search for female.”
When all these instances are placed side by side, it is impossible to see anything other than criminalization of racial minorities, women, and gender-expansive people as the purpose of ALPR technology.
“This is not a bug in the system,” said Grace Zhang during the July 14 press conference.
“This is the system working exactly as intended.”
In April, LAPD Commander Randy Goddard revealed to the Board of Police Commissioners that LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto was in active negotiations with Flock Safety to formalize a $1 contract.
Goddard said the negotiations were centered around data sharing and data usage.
“I can tell you absolutely from the department’s perspective, we will not accept that contract unless it has the language in the terms and conditions that is agreeable to the department, that is in the best interests of the department, that it is the department’s data,” said Goddard in that April 28 Board of Police Commissioners meeting.
Given that the previous MOU expired, it is unclear where negotiations between the ALPR vendor and the City Attorney’s office currently stand.
It can be deduced that there were disagreements between the two entities over how the data would be shared with third parties and how much ownership LAPD would have over the license plate data it collected.
While there will now be a period in which there is no contractual agreement between Flock and LAPD, this does not necessarily mean that the relationship is over.
“The department itself admitted that discussions with Flock are continuing.
Let us translate that plainly: LAPD does not want to end ALPR surveillance.
LAPD wants to save ALPR surveillance,” Zhang said in the press conference.
“They want a cleaner contract, a quieter contract, a contract the public will be less angry about.
This is damage control in response to the political heat that our communities have created.
We refuse to let them steal our demands and turn shutting down the stalker state into reform.
Our demand has never been a kinder, gentler surveillance state.”
The suspension of Flock’s contract with LAPD marks an undeniable victory for Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and its allies in the fight against the surveillance state.
LAPD has also announced that it will continue soliciting public input in this next phase of partnership exploration with Flock Safety.
On Thursday July 30, the LAPD Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is holding a meeting for the public to submit feedback about the future of ALPR technology in Los Angeles.
Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has put out a call to action for people to join the session on July 30 and speak to the OIG about the harms that Flock Safety currently causes along with threats it poses to the city’s residents in the future.
“We celebrate today and tomorrow we stay suited up for the fight,” said Zhang.
Rosalind Jones (she/they) is a queer, Los Angeles-based writer and community organizer.
She is a contributor for the online publication Knock LA, a founding member of the social justice organization Community Solidarity Project , and authors a Substack titled ‘ Another World is Inevitable ’.
Rosalind holds a BA in Diplomacy and World Affairs from Occidental College and a certification in Creative Writing from the UCLA Extension.
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