Salida Police Chief Russ Johnson has pulled the plug on the department's Flock Safety contract, ending the small Chaffee County city's use of automated license plate readers after months of pointed community pushback over privacy, data retention, and the possibility that vehicle tracking data could land in the hands of federal agencies. The decision, announced in an August press release, shuts down a six-camera network that had quietly been logging vehicle movements across the mountain town.
According to Heart of the Rockies Radio, Chief Johnson acknowledged that the Flock system had provided real investigative benefits to his officers, but said maintaining community trust and open dialogue took priority. Residents had shown up at Salida City Council meetings to object to the cameras, and as Denver7 reported, those concerns centered on government overreach, privacy violations, and the risk that data could be shared with agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The city had installed six Flock automated license plate reader cameras within its limits, and one of those units had already been damaged by hardware vandalism before the cancellation, per the same Heart of the Rockies Radio account. Notably, the station's report indicates it was citizen feedback voiced directly at city hall, not the vandalism itself, that ultimately drove the policy reversal, even though Chief Johnson noted the damage had cost taxpayers money.
No Statewide Rules to Fall Back On
Salida's move lands in a legal vacuum. Colorado lawmakers abandoned Senate Bill 70 in April, a bipartisan proposal from Sen. Judy Amabile and Sen. Lynda Zamora Wilson that would have required warrants for historical ALPR searches after 72 hours, following intense pushback from police agencies, according to reporting from the Colorado Sun. With no statewide statute governing how long departments can keep plate data or who can access it, individual city councils and police chiefs across Colorado have been left to sort out these decisions on their own.
That same gap in oversight shaped a similar reversal in Denver earlier this year. Denver Auditor Timothy O'Brien refused to countersign the city's Flock Safety contract over legal liability concerns, prompting Mayor Mike Johnston to end Denver's relationship with the company and switch to vendor Axon, Colorado Politics reported. An audit tied to that decision found that 80% of the entities accessing Denver's Flock data were external law enforcement agencies, not Denver's own police.
Privacy Advocates Point to National Dragnet Risk
The ACLU of Colorado has been blunt about what it sees at stake. In a February statement, the organization argued that ALPR networks like Flock's effectively build a national dragnet surveillance system, one where vehicle tracking data collected by a small municipal department can end up accessible to federal ICE agents or out-of-state authorities. Colorado law classifies license plate numbers as personally identifiable information that is supposed to be protected from unauthorized dissemination, the organization noted.
Security researchers have also flagged vulnerabilities in the physical hardware itself. Cybersecurity research cited by Denver7 found that certain Flock camera units contained sequence flaws that would allow unauthorized users to create a local wireless access point and get into the device's software within 30 seconds, raising a second layer of concern beyond how the company handles data in the cloud.
Flock Safety, for its part, has been trying to get ahead of the wave of criticism. TMJ4 News reported this week that the company operates more than 120,000 automated license plate readers scanning roughly 20 billion vehicle passes every month nationwide, and that it has rolled out new platform privacy controls that individual client agencies can choose to activate. Those updates arrived just as municipal pushback against the company kept accelerating across the country.
Part of a Wider Rural and Urban Retreat
Salida sits at the junction of U.S. Highway 50 and U.S. Highway 285 in Chaffee County, a crossroads that made automated vehicle monitoring an obvious flashpoint for a community wary of outside surveillance along its major travel corridors, according to city records. But the town's decision is far from an outlier. Hoodline reporting from earlier this month found that at least 100 U.S. local governments and law enforcement agencies have canceled, rejected, or removed Flock ALPR contracts amid privacy disputes and physical equipment destruction.
That trend has touched towns and counties well beyond Colorado. Sheriff's offices in Minnesota's Sherburne and Isanti counties both ended their Flock arrangements this month amid eroding public trust, while Arizona municipalities including Surprise and Tempe have suspended or cut off data-sharing following internal misuse scandals. A Texas sheriff's office in Burnet County pulled its cameras after repeated vandalism, and Michigan's Westland Police Department declined to renew its contract after sustained resident organizing. Salida now joins that growing list of communities choosing to walk away from the cameras even as police leaders like Chief Johnson concede the technology's investigative value.
