If you have driven through Ogden, Provo, or West Valley City in the past few years, a camera on a black pole probably photographed your license plate and logged your vehicle.
The cameras belong to Flock Safety, an Atlanta company that Stateline describes as the largest provider of automatic license plate readers in the country. Roughly 30 Utah cities, counties, and police departments used them in 2025, according to KUER's analysis of state vendor data.
The payments are recorded in Transparent Utah, the state's public spending database. In 2025, Ogden paid Flock $123,000, more than any other Utah government. Wayne County paid $95,100, and Provo paid $75,406. Ogden signed its first contract in 2021, after the police department spent more than two years evaluating vendors, and now operates 41 cameras funded mostly by grants.
Police say the cameras work. Ogden Chief Jake Sube told the city council in January that the readers are solving crimes the department otherwise could not have investigated, and cited a case in which officers located a suspect wanted for kidnapping a 13-year-old girl. St. George police, whose eight readers are Motorola's Vigilant brand rather than Flock's, credit them with breaking cases involving missing persons, vehicle thefts, and burglaries.
In Cedar City, Police Chief Darin Adams cited rising drug offenses and vehicle thefts to justify the city's camera rollout, which sparked its own constitutional debate.
Not every Utah camera is a Flock camera. Salt Lake City uses Motorola Vigilant readers and has paused a planned expansion. Summit County and Park City run Motorola readers at the main highway entrances to Park City, and in May, the Summit County sheriff confirmed those cameras feed a national database that federal immigration agents (ICE) have paid to query for years. Smaller departments adopted the technology with little attention. North Ogden began a Flock trial in 2023.
The state government does not appear on the customer list. No state agency shows a Flock contract in the vendor data. The Utah Highway Patrol uses license plate readers under Department of Public Safety Policy 639, which requires a documented law-enforcement reason and a case number for every query, and prohibits troopers from running the data before or during a traffic stop without articulable, reasonable suspicion. The state's role has been to write the rules, not to buy the cameras.
Utah was early on regulation
Utah regulated this technology before most states knew it existed. The Legislature passed the Automatic License Plate Reader System Act in 2013, limiting government use to active investigations, outstanding warrants, missing persons, and stolen vehicles. A companion ban on private scanning drew a First Amendment lawsuit from the industry.
Digital Recognition Network and Vigilant Solutions sued the state in 2014, arguing the ban put them out of business in Utah. Sen. Todd Weiler, who sponsored the law, said it gained momentum after legislators discovered that police were collecting extensive data from mobile readers. The state later amended the law to loosen the private-scanning restrictions, and the suit went away.
A 2023 law, Senate Bill 250 from Sen. Daniel McCay, added two requirements. Agencies must obtain a special use permit from the Utah Department of Transportation before installing a fixed camera on a state highway, and every agency using the readers must post its written use policy on a public website before a permit can be approved.
Then came 2025. House Bill 468, sponsored by Rep. Kristen Chevrier with Sen. Daniel McCay, would have rewritten the framework: tighter authorized uses, a ban on using the readers to target people for First Amendment activity or to discriminate, data security standards, and a requirement that every law enforcement agency using the readers file an annual report with the State Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice.
Those filings would have been the first official census of the technology in Utah: how many cameras, where, searched how often, by whom. Chevrier argued for the security provisions by citing a 2019 hack of an ALPR vendor that exposed license plate data and images of people. The bill passed the House 64 to 2 on February 27, with support from legislators who wanted privacy safeguards and from legislators who wanted the cameras on rural highway corridors.
Then the session ended on March 7 before the Senate voted, and the bill died.
A separate bill, Senate Bill 138 from Sen. Derrin Owens, would have changed the rules in both directions: it would have let law enforcement obtain plate data from privately owned camera networks without a warrant, while requiring agencies to keep a five-year record of every search they run, including the crime type behind it. It never left Senate Rules. On the session's final day, the Senate struck its enacting clause.
Chevrier ran the framework again this year as House Bill 327. Libertas Institute endorsed it, citing its data security standards and transparent reporting requirements. On March 3, a House committee returned it to the Rules Committee, and it died there when the 2026 session ended three days later. It never received a floor vote.
Three bills. Two sessions. Zero laws.
So there is no census of this technology in Utah because the Legislature has declined, three times, to require one. What Utah law demands today is what the 2013 Act and subsequent amendments require: restricted uses, a 9-month cap on how long captured plate data can be retained, a ban on selling it, UDOT permits for fixed cameras on state highways, and public posting of each agency's use policy.
What the law does not require is an annual accounting, to anyone, of how the systems are actually used. The cameras have multiplied on a legal foundation written mostly in 2013.
What oversight has found
In a 2025 review, the Utah State Privacy Officer's office examined a complaint against two law enforcement agencies. One agency's policy allowed the readers to be used for homeland security and electronic surveillance. Nothing in the statute authorizes either use. The same policy stated that neither reasonable suspicion nor probable cause was required. The office recommended that the agency bring its practices into line with the law.
That review matters because the statute's limits are the legal foundation on which the system rests, and because it is the closest thing Utah has to the accounting the failed bills would have required. Courts have so far held that photographing a plate on a public road is not a Fourth Amendment search.
A federal judge in Virginia upheld Norfolk's Flock network on those grounds in January, in a case brought by the Institute for Justice, while warning that the analysis could change as camera networks grow denser.
On June 29, the Supreme Court held in the Chatrie geofence case that police conducted a search when they pulled a suspect's location data from Google, ruling that people keep an expectation of privacy in their location history even when a company holds it. What that means for 30 Utah networks sharing data with thousands of others nationally, no court has said.
The company on the other end of the contract
Flock Safety was founded in Atlanta in 2017 by Garrett Langley and Matt Feury, two Georgia Tech engineers, after Langley was the victim of a property crime that police could not solve for lack of evidence. The company went through Y Combinator and sold its first cameras to homeowners' associations. It now sells to police departments, and the plate reader has become one product in a line that includes gunshot detection, AI software, and drones that the company pitches as first responders. The cameras capture more than a plate number.
Forbes reported last fall that Flock's network exceeds 80,000 cameras nationally, each recording a vehicle's make and distinguishing features, broken windows, dings, bumper stickers, all of it searchable.
Investors have priced the business accordingly. In March 2025, Flock raised $275 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $7.5 billion valuation, up from $3.5 billion in 2022. In April, a corporate charter filing authorizing roughly $200 million in new shares put the valuation at $8.4 billion, and Axios reported the company was talking to investors about more. Funding trackers disagree on the lifetime total; Tracxn counts $658 million while PitchBook counts $1.17 billion, but the direction is not in dispute. Sacra estimates annual recurring revenue above $300 million.
Langley says Flock operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states and helps solve over a million crimes a year, a figure he puts at 7 percent of all reported crime in the United States. Those numbers come from the company and have not been independently verified. The resistance is easier to verify. Axios reported in April that dozens of cities have suspended or ended Flock contracts over fears the data could be used for immigration enforcement, and that Ring canceled its partnership with the company in February.
The mapmakers and the word "terroristic"
The most visible opposition to Flock is a map. DeFlock is an open-source project started by Will Freeman, a software engineer who noticed the cameras on a cross-country move in 2024, photographed one, traced it to Flock's website, and began plotting camera locations on a crowdsourced map built on OpenStreetMap.
DeFlock's stated mission is to shine a light on ALPR technology and the threat it poses to privacy and civil liberties. Volunteers have mapped tens of thousands of cameras, including the direction each one faces.
Flock sent Freeman a cease-and-desist letter in early 2025, claiming the DeFlock name diluted its trademark. The Electronic Frontier Foundation took Freeman's case for free, rejected the demand in writing as an attack on protected speech, called the letter "birdcage liner" publicly, and the map stayed up.
Later in 2025, in a video interview with Forbes, Langley said what he thought of the mapmakers. He divided Flock's critics into two groups, praised the ACLU and EFF for fighting in court, then said: "There's terroristic organizations, like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos." He added, "They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else."
His defense of the business followed in the same answer: "We're not forcing Flock on anyone." Elected officials, he said, choose the cameras because their communities want to be safe.
Here's a clip from the full interview:
The interview was not an isolated remark. In December, Langley sent an email to Flock's law enforcement clients saying the company and police were "under coordinated attack" from activist groups that want to "normalize lawlessness."
The police chief in Staunton, Virginia, released the email and rebuked it in writing, saying local residents raising surveillance concerns are not under attack. The ACLU, responding to that email in January, called the company's posture "simplistic, juvenile, and ultimately authoritarian."
The louder response came months later from the right, and it changed what the company was willing to say in public.
The cameras are coming down
On July 15, Tucker Carlson devoted a full episode of his show to Flock, built around independent researcher Benn Jordan and titled "Whistleblower Reveals the Largest Mass Surveillance Operation in History and the Coming Slave State." Part of the monologue concerns people who are physically destroying the cameras. Carlson spent several minutes explaining why he understands them.
Here's a clip from the full episode:
The segment centers on Javon Martinez, a 44-year-old New Mexico man facing larceny, property damage, and tampering with evidence charges after police say he destroyed three Flock cameras in Rio Rancho, costing the city thousands of dollars. Asked on camera whether he plans to keep taking cameras down, Martinez answers, "Absolutely," calling them "a clear and present threat to public safety."
In his monologue, Carlson repeatedly stated that he is not endorsing vandalism. Then he describes the people doing it as "sober, decent, patriotic Americans" who were never asked for their consent, who believe lawmakers and police departments will not help them, and who see destruction as the last recourse of the powerless. Days earlier, UFC fighter Sean Strickland posted that America salutes the people destroying the cameras.
In Ashland, Ohio, News 5 Cleveland reported that suspected vandals targeted at least five Flock cameras in a single week in July: broken glass, missing cameras, a pole mowed down with tire tracks still beside it. Days earlier in nearby Parma, someone sawed a camera off its pole.
The Ashland cameras are shared among the county sheriff, the city, and the village of Loudonville, and the sheriff's office has opened an investigation. Local law enforcement calls the readers "the best tool that we've had in our toolbox," citing an attempted murder suspect from Canton pinged 30 miles away.
One neighbor shrugs that people doing nothing wrong have nothing to fear. Another, who would not be identified, says nobody should be surveilled. News 5's own investigators found outside agencies, including ICE, accessing camera systems in Ohio communities like Shaker Heights.
Flock told the station that people have every right to make their voices heard but that "criminal acts should never be part of that process," and that damaging the equipment hurts the communities it protects. The company acknowledged damaged cameras nationwide.
Here is the segment from News 5 Cleveland:
Utahn found no reported vandalism of Flock cameras in Utah.
On Carlson's show about Flock, Jordan calls "I have nothing to hide" one of the most inaccurate statements ever made, and offers a test: hand me your unlocked phone and let me take it into the other room. Why not? Do you have something illegal on there? Anyone who has been stalked, falsely accused, hacked, or had their identity stolen, he argues, learns they had plenty to hide.
Jordan's message to police chiefs is about incentives. Flock is a private, venture-backed startup whose job is to make money, so it will say whatever gets cameras installed, including claims about clearance rates that he says come without evidence. What actually lowers crime, Jordan argues, is community policing built on trust, and in the communities he visits, people feel the cameras are "violating that social contract" between residents and police.
Here's a clip from the full episode:
The Cambridge Analytica connection and Flock apology
In the clip above, Jordan says one of Flock's venture investors is "on the hook for Cambridge Analytica." He does not name the investor, so here is what the record supports. Founders Fund, the venture firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, is a Flock Safety investor. Thiel also co-founded Palantir and sat on Facebook's board. Utahn has not confirmed this is the investor Jordan is referencing in his interview with Carlson.
In 2018, The New York Times reported that a London-based Palantir employee had worked with Cambridge Analytica's data scientists since 2013 and had suggested building the personality quiz app that harvested the Facebook friend networks of tens of millions of Americans.
Whistleblower Christopher Wylie testified to the UK Parliament that senior Palantir staff helped build Cambridge Analytica's psychographic models, while acknowledging the two companies never signed a contract. Palantir first denied any relationship, then confirmed that an employee had engaged with Cambridge Analytica in what it called an entirely personal capacity. Thiel himself was never accused of wrongdoing. Readers can weigh Jordan's phrase against that record.
On July 17, two days after the episode aired, Langley retracted the "terroristic" remark in Forbes. "My comments were a mistake and I apologize," he said, acknowledging critics have valid complaints and saying of DeFlock's mapping: "Assuming no one is committing a crime, it's perfectly fine." Freeman called the apology awesome.
In the same interview, Langley said Flock does not work with ICE and retains data for 30 days unless local governments require otherwise. That denial does not resolve the Park City question, because the Summit County cameras that feed the database ICE has queried are Motorola's, not Flock's. But the sequence is worth noting. The country's most-watched conservative commentator spent an hour treating license plate readers as a threat to liberty, and within 48 hours, the CEO of an $8.4 billion company was apologizing.
Where this leaves Utah
The national politics are no longer sorted by party. Cities in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington canceled Flock contracts last year over privacy concerns. Conservative legislatures in Arkansas, Idaho, and Montana passed restrictions of their own. Now the loudest voice against the cameras belongs to Tucker Carlson, and the company is apologizing to its critics.
Utah has so far avoided both the cancellations and the vandalism. About 30 local governments pay for the cameras. The state regulates them and does not buy them. A state privacy office has already caught one agency claiming powers the law does not grant. The reports designed to tell Utahns how the system is actually used are four months overdue for public view. Whether Utah's orderly version of this story survives contact with the national one depends in part on what those reports say.
Help us go deeper
If you have worked with this technology in a Utah police department, voted on a Flock contract, been flagged by a camera in error, or filed a records request of your own, we want to hear from you.
Send tips, documents, and interview suggestions to utahnjournal@proton.me.
Editor's Note
A previous version of this article reported that House Bill 468 and Senate Bill 138 became law in the 2025 session, that Utah law required every law enforcement agency using license plate readers to file an annual report with the State Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice by March 1, 2026, and that those reports were four months overdue. That was wrong. Both bills failed.
HB 468 passed the House 64 to 2 but died without a Senate vote when the 2025 session ended. SB 138 never left Senate Rules, and its enacting clause was struck on the session's final day. A third bill, HB 327, revived the framework in the 2026 session and died in the House Rules Committee in March.
No annual reporting or audit requirement for these systems exists in Utah law. The error came from relying on legislative tracking services and floor coverage that described the bills' provisions without confirming enactment. We have since verified the bills' status against the Legislature's own records.
In the same review, we also corrected our description of SB 138, which restated existing law's nine-month retention cap and sale ban while its actual changes would have relaxed the warrant requirement for obtaining private camera data and added search record-keeping, and we corrected our summary of current law, which already includes the retention cap and sale ban.
Article edited by Clint Betts.
