In 2020, the police department of picturesque Covington, Georgia, paid Flock Safety, the surveillance technology company, $40,000 to maintain 20 cameras around the city. The next year, it paid the same amount.
In 2022, that cost went up to $81,250. Fifteen new “Falcon” cameras, which Flock says have more sophisticated technology for reading license plates, accounted for $37,500. Another $3,750 went toward installing the new cameras, and the rest was spent maintaining the initial fleet.
Then, in 2024, the department paid Flock $113,225. Of that, $87,500 was to maintain its existing 35 cameras, a rate it agreed to pay for the next five years, and the remainder went toward eight new Falcon cameras. The next year, Covington paid Flock $159,000 for a combination of camera maintenance and enrollment in its Drone as First Responder program, which uses drones to fly to emergency scenes and stream footage back to the police station.
It’s unclear how much Covington will wind up paying Flock in 2026, but through August, it has paid $201,000—$100,000 to maintain its existing cameras, $800 to replace one, and another $100,200 for new software products. The Covington Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Overall, Flock is a small fraction of the Covington police department’s $12,488,733 budget for June 2025 to July 2026. But amid fierce blowback about Flock’s surveillance practices, contracts with the company are now being scrutinized in cities across the country. Flock did not provide a comment for this story.
WIRED obtained documents via public record request from a dozen Flock customers across the country and compared them to publicly available information from more than a dozen others. The documents shed light on how much Flock can actually cost communities, the way many of those deals are structured, and how the deals can expand over several years—leaving taxpayers on the hook year after year, with no end in sight.
“Once you let police officers try a tool,” says Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “it becomes really hard to get the political will and motivation to take that tool away from them.”
How Flock Gets in the Door
When Flock was founded in 2017, it originally sold its license plate readers to private homeowner associations (HOAs). By the time the company decided to sell to police departments in 2019, it had an in: Rather than starting a camera network from scratch, police could start by accessing the cameras that HOAs were already using.
A version of this story played out in Alpharetta, Georgia. In 2020, the city’s police department paid Flock $17,680 for five Falcon cameras and logins for Flock software called Wing, which can extract vehicle and license plate data from off-brand camera footage. The next year, when Alpharetta bought a few more Flock cameras, a payment justification noted that “several” local private homeowner associations had already purchased Flock and granted them camera access.
“We are looking to add more city cameras into the Flock system,” the justification read. According to the city, “other vendors” would “not integrate with our existing Flock system.”
Over the next several years, Alpharetta expanded its work with the company significantly. By 2025, the city’s annual Flock bill had ballooned to $381,000.