Cities across the United States are canceling contracts for Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers. Axon sees customers coming the other way.
On its August earnings call, Axon CEO Rick Smith told investors that the DeFlock movement had created “broader anti-surveillance” momentum. He then described the commercial result: a “significant number” of agencies want to convert from existing license-plate readers to Axon because of its controls and privacy work.[1]
That conversion is the new development. Last week’s article on DeFlock examined how police fusion centers turned a public protest calendar into operational intelligence. The latest reporting shows another response to the same campaign. Municipalities can reject Flock while preserving automated vehicle tracking, cloud evidence, anomaly detection, and integrated police sensors under a different contract.
the competitor named the funnel
Axon’s earnings call makes the commercial mechanism unusually explicit. Smith acknowledged police misuse of license-plate data, including officers tracking former partners. He presented Axon’s privacy controls and planned anomaly-detection tools as the answer. Customers worried about Flock can move to an established vendor that already sells body cameras, Tasers, drones, 911 software, real-time operations, evidence storage, and license-plate readers.[1]
The company describes this as one connected public-safety system. Sensors feed what Smith called the largest customer-controlled data repository in public safety. Software turns those signals into operational context. Hardware closes the path with officers, drones, and weapons. Axon reported $15.1 billion in future contracted bookings and said newer software beyond its evidence platform grew roughly 70 percent year over year.[1]
License-plate readers therefore enter a much larger account. A city replacing Flock with Axon can buy a camera and inherit a route into evidence management, dispatch, body-camera footage, real-time operations, drones, records, and AI-assisted review. The procurement decision can widen the system while public debate remains fixed on one recognizable roadside device.
NPR reported on August 22 that Denver and Longmont, Colorado, moved from Flock to Axon products after local backlash. About 100 cities have deactivated cameras, rejected deals, or canceled contracts with Flock and similar companies, according to DeFlock’s public database. Axon declined to tell NPR how much business it gained from the cancellations.[2]
flock changed the controls
Flock has answered the backlash with a detailed product-policy package. The company will recommend seven-day retention instead of 30 days, add an Evidence Mode for preserving material tied to investigations, require case codes for police searches, mandate its Audit Assistance system, automatically suspend some anomalous users, and let cities restrict external searches by offense. Flock also says mandatory multi-factor authentication is active and promises a security review summary in September.[3]
Those changes touch real control surfaces. Retention duration limits the historical trail. Offense filters can constrain cross-jurisdiction use. Case codes create an audit key. Automatic lockouts can interrupt repeated abuse. An independent security review can expose weaknesses that a customer cannot inspect from a sales deck.
The details also preserve large areas of discretion. Existing customers keep their current retention periods. Emergency searches can bypass case-code requirements. Flock has not published the criteria or measured performance of its anomaly detector. Evidence Mode can create a new long-term store, depending on which records a search preserves and how a case closes.
The ACLU’s review focuses on those gaps. It notes that earlier search-purpose controls could be defeated with generic reasons and that the company has supplied no independent measurement showing what share of abusive searches its audit system catches. The ACLU also asks whether Evidence Mode retains a narrow result or every record returned by a query. That distinction determines whether seven-day deletion is a meaningful limit or a staging period before indefinite case storage.[4]
Flock’s response and Axon’s pitch share the same political premise. Surveillance remains acceptable if the vendor can supply better retention, monitoring, permissions, and trust language. Public anger becomes a request for improved administration of the capability.
procurement converts refusal into requirements
City purchasing systems are built to compare bidders. A failed vendor becomes a requirements document: shorter retention, stronger audit logs, clearer ownership, local offense controls, anomaly detection, and a better public portal. A competitor can check those boxes while selling the same underlying power to reconstruct movement from a dense camera network.
That process has value when the capability has legitimate, bounded uses. Police cite stolen vehicles and missing people. A city may decide those uses justify a narrow plate-reader deployment. Procurement can force concrete limits around access, retention, sharing, warrants, emergency overrides, discipline, and public reporting.
The failure begins when the bid assumes continuous collection. Officials compare who stores the records, who monitors searches, and who integrates with existing systems. They avoid deciding whether every passing vehicle should enter a searchable government dataset. Vendor governance replaces democratic authorization.
Axon has an advantage in that frame because integration looks like administrative competence. Its cameras can live beside evidence, dispatch, body-camera, drone, and records products already inside an agency. The company calls the resulting continuity an ecosystem. From the public side, it is also concentration: one supplier can mediate collection, interpretation, storage, response, disclosure, and courtroom delivery.
the camera became the decoy
Flock’s cameras are physically obvious. Once somebody recognizes the black solar-powered units, the network becomes visible on ordinary streets. NPR documented vandalism in at least 36 states and a broader campaign of meetings, protests, contract challenges, and public mapping. The hardware gives opposition a concrete object.[5]
The surrounding system is harder to see. Search permissions live in contracts and admin panels. Data-sharing relationships cross city borders. Evidence retention follows case rules. Anomaly detection runs inside vendor software. Real-time crime centers merge feeds. Procurement bundles can connect the plate record to other sensors without adding another conspicuous pole.
A movement organized around removing one manufacturer can win visible battles while the category routes around it. Competitors can adopt better controls, absorb canceled accounts, and fold license-plate data into wider platforms. Flock can answer criticism fast enough to retain cities that want reassurance. Every response treats public rejection as product feedback.
A durable city decision needs a capability ledger before the next request for proposals. It should state the collection purpose, geographic coverage, search predicates, retention clock, sharing graph, emergency path, audit publication, independent test, discipline process, and exit plan. It should also name the integrations that disappear when the contract ends. Renewal should require evidence that the system solved the stated problem without expanding into routine location history.
The most revealing sentence in Axon’s earnings call concerned trust as a “valuable and fragile asset.”[1] Trust appears there as both an institutional requirement and commercial durability. That is why backlash can create a market instead of ending one. A supplier with a broader platform can sell itself as the trusted custodian of a power the public was trying to remove.
Cities now have a clean test. Canceling Flock should produce an observable reduction in surveillance authority. A new logo on the same camera category is procurement theater.
Sources
[1] Axon Enterprise: Q2 2026 earnings-call transcript [2] NPR: As Flock battles public scrutiny, other police surveillance companies see an opening [3] Flock Safety: privacy, accountability, security, and transparency updates [4] ACLU: Despite “New” Updates, Flock’s Cameras Remain a Civil Liberties Threat [5] NPR: Amid intense backlash, people are vandalizing Flock surveillance cameras