Flock Safety Contracts Show Rising Camera Costs for US Cities

The police department in Covington, Georgia, paid Flock Safety $40,000 in 2020 to maintain 20 license-plate reading cameras. By August of this year, the city's running total for the surveillance company's products had reached $201,000, according to contract records obtained by WIRED through public-records requests.

The jump illustrates a pattern WIRED found after reviewing documents from a dozen Flock customers and comparing them with publicly available records from more than a dozen other cities and towns: contracts that start small and expand steadily, often locking departments into multiyear maintenance rates while new hardware and software are layered on top.

How Much Has Covington Paid Flock Safety Since 2020?

Covington's payments rose nearly every year, according to the records WIRED reviewed:

• 2020 and 2021: $40,000 annually to maintain 20 cameras
• 2022: $81,250, including $37,500 for 15 new "Falcon" cameras and $3,750 for installation, with the remainder covering maintenance on the original fleet
• 2024: $113,225, with $87,500 locked in for five years to maintain 35 cameras and the rest spent on eight additional Falcon units
• 2025: $159,000, combining camera maintenance with enrollment in Flock's Drone as First Responder program, which dispatches drones to emergency scenes and streams footage to the police station
• 2026 (through August): $201,000, split between $100,000 in maintenance, $800 to replace a single camera, and $100,200 for new software products

Flock's Falcon cameras are marketed by the company as having more advanced license-plate-reading technology than its earlier models, according to WIRED. Even at $201,000, the contract remains a small share of the Covington Police Department's $12,488,733 budget for the period from June 2025 to July 2026, WIRED reported. The Covington Police Department did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED, and Flock did not provide a comment for the story.

How Did Flock Get Access to Police Departments in the First Place?

Flock was founded in 2017 and originally sold its cameras to private homeowner associations rather than law enforcement, according to WIRED. The company began marketing to police departments in 2019, and in several cities it used existing HOA camera networks as an entry point rather than building new infrastructure from scratch.

In Alpharetta, Georgia, the police department paid Flock $17,680 in 2020 for five Falcon cameras and software licenses for a product called Wing, which extracts vehicle and license-plate data from non-Flock camera footage, WIRED reported. When Alpharetta's department purchased additional cameras the following year, an internal payment justification noted that several local homeowner associations already had Flock cameras installed nearby.

Why Are Flock's Contracts Facing New Scrutiny?

The pricing structure WIRED documented, recurring maintenance fees combined with incremental hardware and software additions, means costs tend to climb even without a single large initial purchase. Multiyear maintenance commitments, like the five-year rate Covington agreed to in 2024, also reduce a department's ability to scale back once a network is in place.

Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told WIRED that once a department adopts a surveillance tool, reversing course becomes difficult. "Once you let police officers try a tool," Guariglia said, "it becomes really hard to get the political will and motivation to take that tool away from them."

The scrutiny comes as Flock faces broader criticism over its surveillance practices, according to WIRED, which did not detail the specific complaints in the material reviewed for this story.

What Does Flock Say About the Criticism?

Flock did not provide a comment for WIRED's story, and the Covington Police Department did not respond to WIRED's request for comment. That leaves the public record, the contracts and payment justifications obtained through records requests, as the primary account of how the company's pricing has evolved in at least one of the cities examined.

WIRED said it reviewed documents from a dozen Flock customers obtained directly through public-records requests and compared those contracts with publicly available information from more than a dozen additional cities and towns, giving the news organization a broader sample of how Flock's per-camera and per-software fees vary by jurisdiction.

The full set of contracts, and how Flock's pricing compares across the more than two dozen communities WIRED examined, is detailed in the original WIRED investigation.