Amid growing backlash, some cities cancel Flock contracts and Florida revokes highway ALPR permits

More than 130,000 plate readers are on U.S. streets. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies buy from Flock Safety ^[1][2]. If every reader in the country were Flock's, the average agency would run 26 of them ^[2]. Flock is one manufacturer among several, so 26 is a ceiling. The Fortune essay gives no contract price and no revenue figure. The money at stake in any one cancellation cannot be worked out from it ^[13].

Cities have rejected and canceled Flock contracts after public outcry, which is ordinary procurement politics ^[8]. Florida is the structural case: the state Department of Transportation revoked permits for readers on its highway system in September 2026, and a transportation department is not the buyer ^[9].

In at least 36 states, opponents have destroyed or impaired the readers instead of waiting for local governments to act ^[10]. That is 72% of the states ^[1]. The misuse the essay documents runs from a Kansas officer's 18-month probation sentence in April 2023 to a Florida officer's firing and arrest in March 2026, about 35 months apart ^[5][6][3]. A 2021 lawsuit against California departments over plate data shared with federal agencies including ICE sits in between ^[7].

The piece is a historian's argument. It says so. "As a historian of the American Revolution, I see parallels between Americans' revolt against ALPRs and colonists' destructive and often violent pushback to late 18th-century British rule," the author wrote ^[11]. The benchmark it reaches for is Dec. 16, 1773, when the Sons of Liberty dumped nearly 10,000 pounds of privately owned tea, almost $2 million in today's dollars, into Boston Harbor ^[12].

Where this goes depends on which count moves. If the 5,000 agencies keep renewing, a few dozen cancellations are noise, and Flock can answer the misuse cases with access logs and firings ^[2]. If the backlash the essay calls increasingly bipartisan reaches state legislatures, search and retention rules get written once for every buyer instead of argued department by department ^[15]. In my view the second path is the one that sets the value of the installed base, because a statute binds every renewal at the same time. I would take the opposite reading seriously if Flock published cancellations against renewals and attrition came in under growth, or if Florida reissued the highway permits ^[9].