Somewhere on a highway in Leon County right now, a camera is photographing every vehicle that passes, reading the plate, and writing down where it was and when. There are fourteen of them going up across our county — in Centerville, Buffalo, Jewett, Oakwood, Normangee, Marquez, and Leona.

You didn’t vote for them. Most people don’t know they exist. And you’re paying for them.

If you’re not sure what an automated license plate reader even is, start here: What Is Flock Safety and an ALPR? The short version is that these aren’t ordinary security cameras — they record everyone’s movements, not just suspects’, and they feed a nationwide network that other agencies can search.

This post is about our county specifically: what was bought, what it costs us, who signed for it, and why the comfortable promise of “safety” doesn’t survive contact with the evidence. Every claim below links to its source, and the county’s own documents are linked too — I’ve hosted copies so they don’t disappear.

What our county actually bought

The whole system rests on a stack of agreements I obtained and read in full. The core document is the executed Multiple Use Agreement between the Leon County Sheriff’s Office and the Texas Department of Transportation — that’s the permission slip to mount Flock cameras in the state highway right-of-way.

It covers 14 cameras (Flock case #824152) at fixed locations on roads like US-79, Highway 75, Highway 7, FM 39, and FM 977 — the routes most of us actually drive. The cameras are owned and operated by the Leon County Sheriff’s Office.

One detail buried in the agreements matters a great deal: a supplemental agreement makes clear that all of the license-plate data belongs to and is stored by the Sheriff’s Office — TxDOT has no access — and that the Sheriff’s Office alone is responsible for answering public-records requests about it. In other words, the rules for who can look at where you’ve driven are set locally, by our county, and the public has every right to demand to see those rules in writing.

What it costs us

Here’s where the “they got it for free with a grant” story falls apart.

The recurring bill. Flock’s own price quote — sent by a Flock salesman directly to County Judge Byron Ryder and included in the county records — lists the standard stationary camera at $3,000 per camera, per year, as an annual license and service fee. Fourteen cameras at $3,000 each is roughly $42,000 every single year, for as long as the county keeps them. This isn’t a one-time purchase. It’s a subscription, like cable, except the product is watching you.

The county’s money. The county committed up to $49,000 in federal ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds to buy the cameras, through an internal Memorandum of Understanding (Contract #2435) signed by Judge Ryder and County Auditor Melissa Abney in November 2024. ARPA money is still your tax dollars — just routed through Washington — and it’s money the county chose to spend on surveillance instead of anything else.

The cities’ money. Six Leon County cities — Buffalo, Oakwood, Normangee, Marquez, Jewett, and Leona — each passed resolutions committing up to $10,000 of city general funds as a 20% local match on a state grant, for a combined commitment of up to $60,000 more in local tax money.

The cliff nobody’s talking about. Here’s the part that should bother every taxpayer in this county: the ARPA money has to be spent by December 31, 2026. It’s one-time pandemic-relief funding. But the ~$42,000-a-year subscription doesn’t end in 2026 — it renews, every year, forever. When the one-time money runs out, that recurring bill has only one place to land: the county budget, which means your property taxes. I have not found a single document in which the county explains where the money comes from after the grant dries up.

To be clear about what I’m asserting and what I’m not: the $3,000-per-camera figure is Flock’s quote as of late 2024; the actual signed Flock contract and the invoices paid to date are records I’ve requested but don’t yet have. If those numbers change, I’ll update this post. But the structure is not in doubt — this is a recurring annual cost the county has taken on.

“But it keeps us safe”

This is the entire sales pitch, so it deserves a hard look. And the honest answer is: there is no good evidence these cameras reduce crime.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has studied this technology for years, states plainly that there is no real evidence that ALPRs reduce crime. A 2025 peer-reviewed evaluation of a major ALPR expansion found no reduction in violent crime. Police research bodies themselves acknowledge that rigorous study has not kept pace with how fast departments are buying these things.

And the cameras aren’t even reliable at the one thing they do. An independent technical test by the research firm IPVM found Flock cameras misidentified which state a plate came from about 1 in every 10 reads, on top of duplicate logging and wrong vehicle descriptions. That error rate isn’t an abstraction — as you’ll see below, it ends with innocent people at gunpoint.

So we are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year, indefinitely, for a system with no proven safety benefit. That alone should end the conversation. But it gets worse.

Who really gets watched

Defenders always say the same thing: if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide. That argument assumes the people running the system only ever use it for good. The record says otherwise — and the abuse isn’t rare or theoretical.

A cop used these cameras to hunt a woman who had an abortion. In May 2025, a Texas sheriff’s deputy searched the Flock network — more than 83,000 cameras across 6,809 networks nationwide, reaching even into states where abortion is legal — to track down a woman, with the search reason logged as “had an abortion, search for female.” (404 Media broke the story.) The sheriff said it was for her safety; court records later showed police had discussed a “death investigation” and consulted the DA about charging her — that same day. This is what “nationwide search” means in practice: a single deputy in one county reaching into cameras everywhere.

Officers use them to stalk. This is now a documented pattern, not a one-off. A police chief in Sedgwick, Kansas resigned after using Flock to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend more than 200 times. An officer in Orange City, Florida ran his ex’s plate dozens of times, plus her parents’. The Institute for Justice has counted at least roughly twenty cases of officers using plate readers to stalk romantic interests — most of them since 2024.

This isn’t new to surveillance tech — it’s the rule. Back in 2016, an Associated Press investigation found that police officers and staff were fired, suspended, or forced to resign in more than 325 cases — with 250 more lesser punishments — for misusing confidential law-enforcement databases to snoop on ex-partners, neighbors, journalists, and celebrities. Give people a tool to secretly track other people, and some of them will. Every time. The only question is whether there are guardrails — and our county hasn’t shown us any.

Federal agencies are getting in the side door. Reporting found more than 4,000 searches of local Flock networks done for or on behalf of federal agencies, including immigration enforcement, despite ICE having no formal contract for the system. Several cities were so alarmed to learn their local cameras were being queried by federal agents that they shut their networks down. The data our sheriff collects on Leon County drivers can travel a lot farther than Leon County.

And it reaches ordinary Texans just going about their lives. In 2022, Houston businessman Alek Schott drove to Carrizo Springs for work and stayed the night. On his way home, a Bexar County sheriff’s deputy pulled him over for supposedly drifting over the fog line — but Schott’s own dash cam showed he never did. There was no violation, and no real reason to stop him. As the lawsuit the Institute for Justice filed on his behalf brought to light, it was a “whisper stop”: federal agents watching highway travel patterns had flagged his overnight trip and asked the deputy, through a private group chat, to find a pretext to stop and search him — a chat the deputy later deleted. He was detained more than an hour while a drug dog circled his truck; the search turned up nothing but work gear and car seats. The federal travel-pattern surveillance that targeted him runs on the same kind of license-plate readers and cameras our county is now feeding. Schott cleared his name only because he happened to be recording — the case is still being fought in court. Most people don’t have the footage, and don’t get the chance.

The cost they don’t advertise

Remember that 1-in-10 error rate? Here is what it costs — in dollars and in trauma — when a camera misreads a plate and an innocent person gets flagged as driving a stolen car:

And the data itself isn’t safe. Flock left dozens of its cameras’ live feeds and admin controls exposed on the open internet with no password, and a redaction blunder exposed 2.3 million license plates and the search terms police had used — including someone searching the word “protest.” The system collecting a permanent record of where you drive cannot reliably keep that record secure.

And when that data spills, look at who is not left holding the bag: Flock. The company’s standard contract caps its liability for free-trial access at a token $100, and for paid service at no more than the fees the customer paid it in the prior twelve months — while expressly disclaiming any responsibility for lost or corrupted data. In the standard agreement, it’s the local government that indemnifies Flock, not the other way around — and in February 2026 Flock quietly removed the clause that had kept its own gross negligence and willful misconduct outside that cap. Put plainly: the vendor builds a permanent record of everywhere you drive, but if that record leaks, the financial fallout lands on the county — on you. What Leon County’s own signed contract says about this is one more reason the public ought to see it; it’s among the records I’ve requested.

Let me be careful here, because honesty is the whole point of this site: I have not found a formal study that nets a specific county’s legal payouts against its measured crime savings. So I’m not claiming a study proved this. I’m pointing at two verified facts and letting you draw the line between them — there are documented million-dollar payouts caused by these systems, and there is no proven safety benefit to weigh against them. A single wrongful-stop lawsuit would dwarf years of the “safety” this county is paying $42,000 a year to buy.

What the courts have actually said

You’ll hear that courts have “approved” license plate readers. That’s half true, and the half that’s left out is the important part.

Courts have generally held that photographing one plate on a public road, one time, isn’t a search — there’s no expectation of privacy in a plate anyone can see. That’s the easy case, and Flock loves to cite it.

The hard case — the one that actually describes what’s being built here — is different. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that tracking the whole of a person’s movements over time is a Fourth Amendment search that requires a warrant, even when each individual location is public. Courts are now wrestling with whether a dense, permanent, searchable ALPR dragnet crosses that line. Massachusetts’ highest court recognized in 2020 that with enough cameras in enough places, the resulting picture “would invade a reasonable expectation of privacy and would constitute a search.”

And this fight is live, right now:

So no — the courts have not blessed this. They’ve said “not yet,” while the legal challenges multiply. And here’s the practical kicker for taxpayers: when these suits land in counties that deployed the cameras, the county pays to defend them. We could be buying ourselves a lawsuit.

It’s also worth noting Flock’s own track record with the law. An investigation found the company installed cameras without required permits in at least five states; South Carolina found more than 200 unpermitted Flock cameras and imposed a moratorium. This is the vendor we’ve handed a permanent, networked record of our movements.

What you can do

This was decided quietly, in routine Commissioners Court items and an internal funding memo, the same way too many things get decided here. (If that pattern sounds familiar, see The Cost of Transparency.) It can be un-decided the same way — in public — but only if people show up and ask for it.

Here’s what I think every resident should be demanding of the Commissioners Court and the Sheriff:

  1. A written, public data policy. How long is plate data kept? Who can search it? Is every search logged and audited? If they can’t answer in writing, that’s the answer.
  2. A hard ban on outside sharing. No queries by other jurisdictions, and no federal access, without a warrant. Put it in the contract.
  3. An honest cost accounting before the 2026 cliff. Exactly what is the annual bill, and where does the money come from when the ARPA funds run out? Taxpayers are owed that number now, not later.
  4. A real public vote on whether to renew at all — with the documents on the table, in plain language, before the decision is made.

And you can help build the record. The signed Flock contract, the invoices paid so far, and the county-cities Memorandum of Understanding are all public records. The more residents who request them, the harder they are to ignore.

I’ll keep updating this post as those documents come in. The cameras are already up. The question is whether anyone gets to say so.

Every factual claim above links to its source. The county documents are hosted here so they remain available: the Multiple Use Agreement, the Flock price quote, the ARPA funding MOU, the county resolution and Commissioners Court minutes, and the city resolutions and MOU minutes. If I’ve gotten anything wrong, tell me and I’ll correct it.