You’ve probably been hearing more about license plate readers and Flock Safety over the last few months.
With resistance against authoritarian control growing, footage from cameras like these raise serious questions about mass surveillance and privacy.
Over the last few months, we’ve learned via reporting by 404 Media that Flock’s cameras, in particular, have been used to do a lot more than locate stolen cars and missing people. They are also being used nationwide to monitor abortion care, surveil protests/demonstrations, and for immigration enforcement.
That’s concerning because in New Mexico these cameras are rapidly multiplying in our cities/towns.
And while New Mexico’s law enforcement agencies say they currently do not use Flock for these purposes, a KOB-4 investigation found that local and state police do share data with hundreds of agencies outside of the state, including police in Arizona, Colorado, and Texas, as well as Customs and Border Patrol.
Act Now: contact your state legislator before the next session starts on January 20th and tell them to pass legislation requiring guardrails on license plate readers and cameras (scroll down to see examples!)
Sharing this data far and wide is a clear violation of our right to privacy. It’s also a green light for discrimination based on immigration status, health care decisions, or political beliefs.
Flock Safety in New Mexico
The Otero County Sheriff’s Office and Alamogordo police recently announced an agreement with Flock to “enhance safety.”
Bernalillo County started using Flock Safety and Axon, another provider, in 2024, according to Sheriff John Allen. Public records show that beginning in 2023, Taos also installed 18 of Flock’s license plate readers near the main plaza and along residential streets. That’s 18 cameras watching your daily life — without your consent.
Las Cruces, in particular, has embraced the company’s technology, installing a combination of up to 37 license plate readers and pan/tilt/zoom (PTZ) cameras, based on a review of public records. Those cameras can also be controlled remotely to follow people and vehicles and zoom in on faces and license plates in real time.
The history behind ALPRs and Flock Safety
Automated license plate readers are sometimes called ALPRs or just LPRs for short.
The base technology has been around for roughly 20-25 years, and privacy advocates have repeatedly raised concerns about the potential for misuse. For example, ACLU of New Mexico warned about sensitive information being captured and weaponized back in 2013.
Each device is mounted on a police car, road sign, or traffic light. As you drive by, it takes up to a dozen still images of your license plate, which is then added to a database that law enforcement can search.
Founded in 2017, Flock started with an original product of automated license plate readers. But don’t let the name fool you. This isn’t just about catching stolen cars.
Flock’s newest camera product includes the pan, tilt, zoom (PTZ) feature. In recent years, the company has also connected multiple data sources to their Flock OS dashboard.
The Las Cruces contract mentions both the PTZ camera system as well as an integration with Peregrine, which uses machine learning and AI tools to analyze content in real-time.
Flock and its controversial CEO Garrett Langley are also known for praising AI tech and the use of broad surveillance as part of their goal of “preventing all crime in America.”
It’s also worth noting that Flock is a private company backed by venture capitalists by close to $950M. The common tech startup motto of “move fast, break things” surely applies here.
For example, in December 2025, a researcher found that video feeds from Flock’s AI-powered cameras were left exposed on the internet, accessible with no password or login. The footage included recordings of unattended children at a playground. And, completely unredacted Flock audit logs with millions of license plate searches were recently exposed to the public.
Far from creating safety, this kind of negligence puts communities at greater risk.
“Move fast, break things” is also a scary concept to introduce to local police, sheriffs, and state police, as well as federal authorities like the FBI and DHS/ICE, because it creates incentive to use our taxpayer money and resources to break the law and violate the US constitution.
An urgent situation
Flock, in particular, has aggressively expanded and marketed new AI tech and tools into their business model.
For example, when Las Cruces signed a contract in 2021, the company threw in a free “Raven audio detection,” a product that recently started listening for human voices. The city did not extend that option in a September 2024 renewal contract worth up to $737K.
In October, Amazon Ring also announced a partnership with both Flock and Axon to share Ring video camera footage with police. Combined with Amazon’s “familiar faces” AI recognition, this provokes disturbing, large scale concerns about mass surveillance. That means that your front door camera is now feeding data to the police.
In other words, this isn’t a distant, hypothetical risk. As 2025 made clear, unsafe and invasive surveillance behavior is already occurring nationwide.
The surveillance net is also far from limited to law enforcement agencies or Ring cameras — Flock is rapidly expanding. We spoke with two separate people in Albuquerque’s Foothills and Northeast Heights neighborhoods who confirmed Flock was pitching the company’s HOA product with their homeowners association.
There are safeguards New Mexico can put in place
Flock’s questionable business practices have already prompted cities like Flagstaff, Eugene, and Cambridge to move quickly to revoke their contracts in recent months.
Given that Flock provided ICE and DHS with logins to search nationwide data — even in states like New York and Washington where local agencies had opted out — revoking contracts may be a wise move.
There are also some common sense guardrails and protections that a state legislature, city, or county can put in place for any camera vendor.
For example, setting a state standard for how long local agencies can save and store audio and camera footage from any vendor is a sensible way to protect the privacy of all New Mexicans.
The state legislature could also limit the data that can be accessed by agencies outside of the state. That would reduce or possibly stop DHS, ICE, and Border Patrol from using camera data for their increasingly reckless and dangerous immigration enforcement. It could also stop police from outside NM hunting someone down for accessing abortion or gender affirming healthcare.
If you haven’t spoken with your state legislator, county commissioners, city councilor, school board member, etc. about this topic, take a moment to send them this story and let them know your concerns.
All of this surveillance is funded by our taxpayer resources so we deserve a say in what happens. Every New Mexican deserves both privacy and the assurance that their personal information will be treated with respect.