Protecting privacy in Colorado.

Most Flock cameras are small gray or black boxes on thin poles, often with solar panels on top. You will see them at intersections, neighborhood entrances, and parking lot exits. Some are mounted on traffic signals or light poles. They use optical character recognition to read license plates as cars drive by. To learn how to spot them, you can use EFF's interactive scene or DeFlock's identification catalog, which has photos of hardware from the major manufacturers.

Older plate readers only checked for stolen cars. Newer networked systems track every car they see, share that data with hundreds of other agencies by default, and allow searches by vehicle description. That is what we object to, and it does not depend on the vendor: Denver and Longmont both replaced Flock with Axon, and Motorola, Rekor, and other companies sell the same kind of networked system, so the questions about oversight, sharing, and retention are the same whichever vendor a city uses.

There is no official statewide count, and the available numbers measure different things. Are You Flocked, a community records project, has documented 60 ALPR deployments across 51 Colorado communities, with 44 confirmed as Flock. The Colorado Sun reported in April 2026 that 42 Colorado police departments have Flock contracts, and an OpenStreetMap query returned 2,659 ALPR-tagged points statewide across all vendors on August 25, 2026 (volunteers map individual cameras there). The camera counts on our city pages come from contracts, city documents, or the vendor's transparency portal, so they differ from the crowd-mapped totals for those cities. Nationally, Flock says it has more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and that they produce more than 20 billion vehicle reads a month.

Colorado has no statute that mentions license plate readers by name. Four general laws apply instead. C.R.S. 24-72-113 limits how long a government can keep "passive surveillance records" (free access for one year, logged access up to three, then destruction). C.R.S. 24-74-102(1) defines a license plate number as personal identifying information. C.R.S. 24-74-103 and 24-74-105, amended by SB25-276 in 2025, stop state and local employees and their vendors from sharing that information for federal immigration enforcement. Intentional violations can result in penalties up to $50,000. The Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act determines if you can get the records. Your city's contract and council set the rules for retention, sharing, and oversight. Courts have not yet ruled on whether the retention statute applies to data held on a vendor's servers.

Partly, and so far only for one kind of crime. A working paper released August 16, 2026, covering 216 agencies, reports that motor vehicle theft fell 11 percent after cameras were deployed. The same paper found no distinguishable change in other property crime. We have not found a study showing a reduction in violent crime. NIJ CrimeSolutions, the federal government's clearinghouse, rates license plate readers "Ineffective" as a crime deterrent. That rating dates to 2013 and covers mobile patrol use instead of fixed citywide networks. We have not found a Colorado city that has published a before-and-after crime analysis of its own program.

The Los Angeles Police Department's Inspector General audited two months of alerts from 2025 and found 161 alerts that were correct plate reads on cars that were no longer stolen, against 337 real recoveries. The camera worked, but the hot list was out of date. Police in Roseville, California, reviewed 1,427 stolen-or-felony alerts from 2023 and 2024 and found that Flock's software misread the plate in 71 percent of cases. Flock said Roseville's setup was unusual because of rear-only capture, older hardware, and cameras mounted higher than recommended. Flock's own published figure is fewer than 9 human-reported errors per million alerts. Roseville said none of its misreads led to a stop or an arrest. The LAPD audit found high-risk stop tactics were used in 46 of the 68 stops it reviewed, cited "substantial legal and financial liability concerns," and noted that the department's Flock agreement had ended in June 2026.