In 2020, the police division of picturesque Covington, Georgia, paid Flock Safety, the surveillance know-how firm, $40,000 to keep up 20 cameras across the metropolis. The subsequent yr, it paid the identical quantity.
In 2022, that price went as much as $81,250. Fifteen new “Falcon” cameras, which Flock says have extra sophisticated know-how for studying license plates, accounted for $37,500. One other $3,750 went towards putting in the brand new cameras, and the remainder was spent sustaining the preliminary fleet.
Then, in 2024, the division paid Flock $113,225. Of that, $87,500 was to keep up its present 35 cameras, a fee it agreed to pay for the following 5 years, and the rest went towards eight new Falcon cameras. The subsequent yr, Covington paid Flock $159,000 for a mixture of digital camera upkeep and enrollment in its Drone as First Responder program, which makes use of drones to fly to emergency scenes and stream footage again to the police station.
It’s unclear how a lot Covington will wind up paying Flock in 2026, however by August, it has paid $201,000—$100,000 to keep up its present cameras, $800 to interchange one, and one other $100,200 for brand new software program merchandise. The Covington Police Division didn’t reply to a request for remark.
General, Flock is a small fraction of the Covington police division’s $12,488,733 budget for June 2025 to July 2026. However amid fierce blowback about Flock’s surveillance practices, contracts with the corporate are actually being scrutinized in cities throughout the nation. Flock didn’t present a remark for this story.
WIRED obtained paperwork through public document request from a dozen Flock prospects throughout the nation and in contrast them to publicly out there data from greater than a dozen others. The paperwork make clear how a lot Flock can truly price communities, the best way lots of these offers are structured, and the way the offers can increase over a number of years—leaving taxpayers on the hook yr after yr, endlessly.
“When you let law enforcement officials strive a device,” says Matthew Guariglia, a senior coverage analyst on the Digital Frontier Basis, “it turns into actually onerous to get the political will and motivation to take that device away from them.”
How Flock Will get within the Door
When Flock was based in 2017, it initially sold its license plate readers to personal house owner associations (HOAs). By the point the corporate decided to promote to police departments in 2019, it had an in: Fairly than beginning a digital camera community from scratch, police might begin by accessing the cameras that HOAs have been already utilizing.
A model of this story performed out in Alpharetta, Georgia. In 2020, town’s police division paid Flock $17,680 for 5 Falcon cameras and logins for Flock software program referred to as Wing, which may extract automobile and license plate knowledge from off-brand digital camera footage. The subsequent yr, when Alpharetta purchased a number of extra Flock cameras, a cost justification famous that “a number of” native personal house owner associations had already bought Flock and granted them digital camera entry.
“We wish to add extra metropolis cameras into the Flock system,” the justification learn. Based on town, “different distributors” would “not combine with our present Flock system.”
Over the following a number of years, Alpharetta expanded its work with the corporate considerably. By 2025, town’s annual Flock invoice had ballooned to $381,000.
