What’s Actually Happening With Flock in Colorado Right Now

If you’ve seen Flock Safety in the news lately, there’s a reason — Colorado has been at the center of the national story. Denver ended its long-running contract with Flock in early 2026, decommissioning and physically removing all 110 license plate reader cameras across the city as the agreement expired, and awarded its replacement contract to Axon instead. Boulder opened a competitive bidding process for its own license plate reader vendor following local pushback over Flock’s data-sharing practices. Longmont’s city council paused data sharing collected by its Flock cameras, and Fort Collins has been debating whether to keep its cameras at all.

The common thread across all of these: it was never really about whether the cameras worked. Denver police credited the program with hundreds of arrests and a measurable drop in auto theft. The concern that actually moved city councils was who else could see the data — specifically, whether license plate data collected by one city could be searched by other agencies outside that city’s control, without that city’s direct knowledge or consent.

That’s the context a lot of Colorado businesses and HOAs are reading about when they start wondering whether their own camera and access control choices carry the same risk. The short version: they almost certainly don’t, because they’re not buying the same kind of system Denver was.

Flock Safety and Verkada Are Not the Same Kind of Product

Flock Safety’s core business is automated license plate recognition sold primarily to law enforcement agencies, HOAs, and municipalities, built around a network model — cameras feed into a shared system where participating agencies can search each other’s data, with hotlist alerts that can cross jurisdiction lines. That cross-agency sharing architecture is precisely the feature driving the current wave of contract reviews, because a city that’s careful about who it shares data with can still have its residents’ plate data reach an agency it never intended to share with, through another participating agency’s account.

Verkada is a cloud-managed physical security platform — cameras, access control, alarms, and environmental sensors — built for a single organization’s site or portfolio of sites. It’s worth being precise here: Verkada does offer license plate recognition as a feature, used for things like gate control at a parking structure or flagging unauthorized vehicles at a loading dock. But it operates as a private, single-tenant capability configured by and for the business that owns it — not as a participant in a shared, multi-agency law enforcement network. There’s no cross-agency search function, no hotlist-sharing architecture, and no default pathway for another organization’s account to reach into your data.

The Privacy Debate, Explained Plainly

Civil liberties organizations including the ACLU have argued for several years that ALPR networks like Flock’s create a level of location tracking that goes well beyond what most residents expect from a traffic camera — because the system doesn’t just catch a plate at one moment, it can build a searchable history of where a vehicle has been over time, across a network of participating agencies. Reporting from CNN has documented cases where plate-reader data reached agencies, or was used for purposes, well outside what the purchasing city or department originally intended when it signed the contract — the kind of downstream use a city agreeing to a data-sharing network can’t fully predict or control once the data leaves its hands.

Flock has disputed characterizations of its practices and points to its role in real criminal investigations and stolen-vehicle recovery — outcomes Denver police themselves credited before the city ultimately chose not to renew its contract. Both things can be true at once: the technology has produced real investigative results, and the data-sharing architecture created a governance problem that a growing number of Colorado cities decided they weren’t willing to carry.

That’s a legitimate public-policy debate about law enforcement technology, and it’s one that will keep playing out in city councils, state legislatures, and courts. It’s a genuinely different question from what a private Colorado business or HOA needs to evaluate when choosing a camera and access control system for its own property.

Fair’s Fair: Verkada’s Own Security History

It wouldn’t be an honest comparison if we only talked about the other guy’s history. In 2021, a hacker gained unauthorized access to Verkada’s platform and was able to view footage from a number of customer cameras before the breach was contained. The Federal Trade Commission later took enforcement action against Verkada over the security failures that allowed the breach and over separate CAN-SPAM marketing violations, resulting in a settlement that required Verkada to build out a comprehensive information security program along with a monetary penalty.

That’s a real incident with a real regulatory consequence, and it’s worth knowing about rather than pretending it didn’t happen. The relevant point for a business evaluating vendors today is what changed afterward: Verkada now operates under an FTC consent order requiring ongoing third-party security assessments, and the company has published details of an automation-first security program with continuous monitoring and a public bug bounty. It’s a different kind of concern than Flock’s — a security failure that was identified, penalized, and remediated under regulatory oversight, versus a data-sharing architecture that’s still actively being renegotiated by the customers who bought it. Both are worth knowing before you sign a contract with any security vendor, not just the one making headlines this month.

What This Means If You’re a Colorado Business, HOA, or Property Manager

If you’re evaluating cameras or access control for your own property — an office, a retail location, a manufacturing site, or a residential community — here’s the practical translation of everything above:

• You’re not buying into a shared law-enforcement network. A private commercial or HOA security system doesn’t participate in the kind of cross-agency data-sharing architecture that’s driving the Flock contract cancellations. Your footage and access logs stay with your organization.
• You still get to ask who can see your data — and that’s the right question to ask any vendor. Whether you’re buying cameras, access control, or both, ask directly: does this system share data with any other organization by default? Who has to request access, and who approves it?
• License plate recognition for your own gate or lot is a different use case than a citywide ALPR network. If your interest in LPR is managing vendor vehicles, staff parking, or a gated community entrance, that’s a private, single-site application — not a participant in a multi-jurisdiction lookup system.
• HOAs specifically should know their options extend beyond Flock. Some HOAs and neighborhoods have purchased Flock cameras directly, separate from any city contract — but a cloud-managed access control and video platform built for private communities is a genuinely different structure, with access and sharing decisions controlled entirely by the HOA board, not a multi-agency network.

The Decision Criteria That Actually Matter

Whether you’re comparing Verkada to another platform, or just trying to ask the right questions of any security vendor, these are the criteria that determine how much control you’ll actually have over your own data:

• Data ownership and export rights — Can you export your own footage and logs on demand? Who technically holds the data, and under what terms can they use or retain it?
• Sharing architecture — Is data ever shared with other customers, agencies, or organizations by default, or does every disclosure require your explicit approval?
• Integration between video and access control — Are cameras and door/gate access managed from one platform, or are you running separate systems that don’t talk to each other during an investigation?
• Retention control — Do you set how long footage is kept, or is that decision made for you?
• Vendor security track record and remediation — Every vendor in this space, including Verkada, has had incidents. What matters is whether they were disclosed, penalized appropriately, and actually fixed under independent oversight.

ABT is a Verkada authorized partner across the Front Range, and we work with Colorado businesses, property managers, and multi-site organizations on exactly this kind of platform — see our Verkada security camera solutions for Colorado businesses or our broader Verkada access control overview, including the property management and vehicle gate control use cases covered there.

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