Deflock-Sterling

Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based private company, one of the largest automated license plate reader (ALPR) vendors in the United States. Their system uses AI to build what Flock calls "vehicle fingerprints": the ability to track a specific vehicle by make, model, color, and visual characteristics even when no plate is visible.

What Sterling contracted for, and what's installed. The original order form was signed February 27, 2025 by then-Chief Alex Chavira and covered 10 Falcon LPR cameras and 2 Condor PTZ cameras at $36,000 per year. The order form sets an initial term of 12 months and a renewal term of 24 months, with the term commencing on first installation and validation. Flock first appears in a Sterling budget as a single word in a police department footnote, in the FY 2024/2025 budget adopted April 15, 2024 (Ordinance No. 2024-04-08), and again in the two budgets since. There has never been a standalone council vote on Flock, a public hearing, or an agenda item naming it. Chief Bartel's January 14, 2026 memo to the Council later described the contract as 18 cameras, 16 ALPR and 2 PTZ. At the June 15, 2026 study session, Chief Bartel told the Council that 11 Falcon LPR cameras are currently in service — fixed plate readers, not the live-video Condor model — with the Condor unit(s) not yet installed. We take that at face value; we're simply noting that the contracted scope grew over time.

What is actually installed, per the city's own written answers. Seven LPR cameras were installed between April 10 and April 24, 2025. Two more were installed July 16, 2025. One was installed August 18, 2025. One was installed April 10, 2026. That is 11 Falcon LPR cameras in service and zero Condor PTZ cameras. We take these dates at face value and they resolve most of the earlier confusion about camera counts.

One question remains open. The signed order form authorizes 10 Falcon LPR cameras. Eleven are installed. Chief Bartel's January 14, 2026 memo and the city's written answers both describe an approved scope of 18. The order form says 12. No amendment, addendum, or change order expanding the original scope has been produced. We are not suggesting anything improper; scopes change for ordinary reasons. We are asking a narrow question: under what document was the eleventh camera added, and where is the authorization for 18? A single published list of every camera, its model, and its location, together with the document authorizing the current scope, would settle it.

The two camera types are meaningfully different. Falcon LPR cameras are fixed units that photograph every passing vehicle and log the plate, timestamp, location, and vehicle description. Condor PTZ cameras are live-streaming pan-tilt-zoom units with AI-assisted tracking — active video cameras, not plate readers. That distinction matters mainly for what comes next: if Sterling's remaining Condor unit is ever installed, we'd want it held to the same standards as everything else on this page.

The $36,000 annual Flock contract has never received a standalone council vote. It appears in the city budget as one word in a police department footnote to a combined line called "Other Contractual Services," grouped with body worn cameras, squad cameras, cell phones, and April House. That footnote first appears in the FY 2024/2025 budget adopted April 15, 2024 (Ordinance No. 2024-04-08), then again in FY 2025/2026 (Ordinance No. 2025-04-14) and FY 2026/2027 (Ordinance No. 2026-04-08). The combined line has grown from $31,000 in FY 2023/2024, when it covered body cameras alone and Flock was not yet named, to $71,000 requested for FY 2026/2027. The word Flock appears nowhere on any of those meeting agendas.

What the Council was told before the contract was signed. The one pre-signing mention of Flock we have located in the council record is in the minutes of October 7, 2024, in a study session recapping the Illinois Municipal League conference. Among the topics reported back, between electronic speed warning signs and retail recruiting, is a single line: "Flock Cameras — Cameras that check license plates for warrants etc." That is the entire description. No vendor, no cost, no term, and no mention that the data leaves Sterling. The contract was signed roughly five months later, on February 27, 2025.

We are not suggesting anyone was misled. We are pointing out that "cameras that check license plates for warrants" is not a description of a national data sharing network reaching more than 1,500 entities, a subscription that renews for two years at a time, or terms of service incorporated into a public contract by live web link. The city has stated that Flock was discussed several times at council meetings and budget study sessions. We have asked for those meeting dates and the corresponding minutes. As of this update they have not been produced. Any resident or council member can request them, and if they show substantive discussion of Flock before February 27, 2025, that would meaningfully change the picture set out above.

This is a documented pattern. In Verona, Wisconsin, which recently canceled, officials noted that residents were unaware of the cameras until just before auto-renewal, because the system was purchased through the police department's regular technology budget. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city council paused the cameras over privacy concerns. Flock then installed two additional cameras without the city's knowledge or authorization. The city terminated the contract, calling it a "material breach of our trust." In Evanston, Illinois, Flock reinstalled cameras without permission after the city ordered them removed, prompting the city to physically cover them with plastic sheeting.

What renewal actually commits Sterling to. Three clauses in the signed order form matter here, and they are worth reading together.

First, on renewal length, the contract states that it "will automatically renew for successive renewal terms of the greater of one year or the length set forth on the Order Form" unless a party gives notice of non-renewal "at least thirty (30) days prior to the end of the then-current term." The length set forth on the Order Form is 24 months. Renewals are two years, not one.

Second, on getting out early, the order form's Project Prove It provision gave Sterling a 60 day window after the first hardware was installed to terminate without penalty. That window closed in June 2025. The contract then states that "Customer may not terminate the Agreement, and Customer will pay any invoice(s) for the remainder of the Term."

Taken together, this is not a decision about one more year of cameras. If no one gives notice, Sterling is committed to two more years at $36,000 per year, roughly $72,000, with no contractual right to end it partway through. That commitment happens automatically, without a vote, unless the city acts first.

The documents do not agree on when the term ends. The city's written answers to residents state that the contract is a two year contract expiring April 30, 2027. The signed order form sets an initial term of 12 months, commencing on first installation and validation, and installation began April 10, 2025. Flock's own invoice describes the billing period as the initial year of a 12 month term covering 2025 to 2026. We take the city at its word, and there may be a straightforward explanation. But anyone relying on an April 2027 date should know that the contract documents read differently, and should confirm the date with the city before counting on it.

At the August 3, 2026 City Council meeting, the City Attorney addressed a resident's question about the absence of the Mayor's signature on the Flock contract. He confirmed that the code provision requiring the Mayor to sign city contracts exists, and explained that it dates to an earlier era, when Sterling operated under a different form of government.

He then gave his opinion on the substance. In his view the missing signature does not make the contract void, and if the city attempted to void it a court would likely rule in Flock's favor. He described entering the contract as reasonably within the Chief of Police's delegated authority, pointing to the Council approved budget, Council approved bills payable, and the terms of the grant issued to the Police Department by the Illinois Attorney General's Office.

We take the City Attorney at his word. This site does not argue that the contract is invalid, and no one is asking the Council to void it. Whether a court would unwind a signed agreement is a different question from whether Sterling should keep paying for it.

What matters most is how he closed. Addressing the Council directly, he said that if it wants to change this scope of authority and remove any such future power of the Chief of Police as it relates to ALPRs, "it may do so by Ordinance or direction to the City Manager."

That answers the only question that was ever genuinely in doubt. The Council has the authority to act, and it has now been told so on the record by its own legal counsel. It does not need a lawsuit, a court ruling, or anyone's permission. It needs a motion.

So the question is no longer whether the Council can do something about this. It is whether it will, and whether it will do so before the contract renews.

At the July 6, 2026 City Council meeting, the Police Department announced a new $12,000 Illinois Attorney General grant. The Chief confirmed the funds are for the Flock system. This is the second $12,000 grant supporting Sterling's Flock program, from the same office; the first was awarded in September 2025. That is $24,000 in grant funding toward a contract that costs $36,000 per year.

Per Shaw Local's July 15, 2026 reporting, the grant comes from the Illinois Attorney General's Organized Retail Crime Grant program, which funds police responses to retail theft and can pay for surveillance technology, officer training, and overtime for retail theft investigations. Shaw Local also reported that the first grant was used in 2025 to help defray the cost of the original Flock contract. Notably, the city has been notified of the award but has not yet received the acceptance letter or formally accepted it. Chief Bartel told the council, "We haven't accepted it yet but it is there." Because acceptance has not yet occurred, there is a natural opportunity for the Council to discuss the grant's intended use on the record before accepting it.

We want to be clear: outside funding for public safety is a good thing, and we thank the department for pursuing it. Our concern is process. Neither grant has come before the Council for a standalone vote, and at the July 6 meeting no Council member asked how the funds would be used.

Update: Chief Bartel reached out directly to clarify that the second grant will not be used to expand the camera network. He stated the funds are intended to fulfill obligations under the existing contract rather than add new cameras or capabilities. We appreciate the Chief taking the time to clarify this directly, and we take him at his word.

In a July 22, 2026 interview on Shaw Local Radio's Talk Line, Chief Bartel described how Sterling's cameras are used day to day. He said the cameras capture the vehicle, not the driver, and log only the plate, vehicle description, timestamp, and location. He said the system is not monitored continuously, and that alerts are limited to specific cases: missing or endangered persons, stolen vehicles, and warrants for serious felonies. "If you're not doing anything wrong, we could really care less," he said.

We take the Chief at his word about how the Sterling Police Department uses the system today. That has never been our question. Our question is about the more than 1,500 entities beyond Sterling PD that can search this data with nothing more than a case number, with no independent audit of those searches, and a documented pattern in other departments, detailed below, of officers using this exact kind of access to track people who were never the subject of a case number at all. A department's own stated practice, however well-intentioned, is not a guarantee about everywhere the data travels once it leaves Sterling.

On August 13, 2026, Flock announced a significant set of changes to how its system handles data and monitors the people searching it. Some of this is a real improvement and we want to say so plainly before we say anything else.

What Flock announced:

• Default retention drops from 30 days to 7 days. Flock acknowledged in making this change that roughly 90 percent of searches already happen within a week of collection.
• Evidence Mode, provided at no cost, lets investigators preserve specific data past the retention window when a search is tied to a case number.
• Case codes required for law enforcement searches by the end of 2026, with emergency overrides automatically flagged for review.
• Audit Assistance becomes mandatory for law enforcement customers by the end of 2026. It uses machine learning to flag abnormal search patterns for administrator review.
• Proactive lockout automatically suspends a user's access when activity meets an abnormal behavior threshold, until an administrator reviews the account.
• Offense type controls let a customer decide which categories of offense outside agencies may search its cameras for, which would allow a city to permit theft searches while blocking immigration related ones.

The shorter retention window is a genuine improvement and it is the single change most likely to reduce risk to ordinary drivers. The ACLU, which has pushed for far shorter windows, allowed that the retention change looks positive on its face while questioning the exceptions. Credit where it is due: this came from sustained public pressure, journalism, and state audits, which is evidence that this kind of engagement works.

Now the part that deserves scrutiny. The new misuse controls flag suspicious activity for administrator review. That raises an obvious question: who is the administrator?

In Sterling, the city's own written answers to residents state there are exactly two Flock system administrators: the Chief of Police and the Deputy Chief. So under this design, when the system flags an abnormal search by a Sterling officer, the people notified are that officer's own command staff. No one outside the department sees the flag. No report goes to the City Council, the City Manager, or the public. The department reviews itself.

We want to be careful here. We are not suggesting Sterling's command staff would ignore a flagged search, and we have no reason to think they would. The problem is structural rather than personal, and it would exist under any chief in any department. An internal reviewer has to investigate colleagues, and the finding, if there is one, stays in house.

The track record on this is not ambiguous. Consider where every significant ALPR finding of the past two years actually came from:

• The 32.3 percent false positive rate on stolen vehicle alerts in Los Angeles came from the department's Inspector General, not from the department.
• Federal access to Illinois camera data came from the Illinois Secretary of State's audit, not from any of the agencies whose data was accessed.
• The finding that more than 99 percent of alerts produced no police action came from Oak Park's police oversight commission.
• Dayton's discovery of thousands of immigration related searches by outside entities, and San Francisco's discovery of hundreds of improper inquiries, both surfaced through compliance reviews and disclosures, then went to a public body.
• The documented pattern of officers using these systems to stalk people was surfaced by investigative journalists and outside researchers analyzing millions of logged searches, which is what prompted the August 13 announcement in the first place.

Not one of those findings came from a department auditing itself with a vendor supplied tool. Every one came from someone outside the system with the standing to look and the obligation to publish. The ACLU made the same point about the new tool directly, noting that there is no evidence yet that it works consistently and that Flock should have it examined by an independent evaluator. The ACLU's broader assessment was blunt, calling the package a "thinly veiled PR attempt" rather than an earnest response.

What this means for Sterling, concretely. Three of these points are actionable right now and none of them require a lawsuit, a new contract, or anyone's permission:

• The 7 day retention is not automatic. Reporting on the announcement indicates existing customers keep their current retention period unless they opt into the new standard. Sterling's contract specifies a 30 day retention period. Unless someone acts, Sterling stays at 30. Opting in costs nothing and can be done without renegotiating anything.
• The offense type controls are new leverage. Sterling has stated it does not share data with federal agencies. This feature would let the city enforce that at the technical level rather than by policy alone, which is a meaningfully stronger position.
• Audit results should go somewhere other than the department. A short periodic report to the Council on flagged searches, lockouts, and their resolution would cost almost nothing and would answer the self review problem directly. Sterling reports 1,537 searches since January 2026 and no documented false positives. A published audit is how a claim like that becomes verifiable rather than simply stated.

One last caution. These are product announcements and policy recommendations, not contract terms. Sterling's order form incorporates Flock's Terms of Service by live web link, and as documented above, those terms have already changed several times without Sterling signing anything. What a vendor announces in August it can revise later. If any of these safeguards matter to the Council, the place they belong is in writing in the contract, not in a press release.

These concerns have been raised in active federal litigation and by respected civil liberties organizations. Courts are divided. This is an honest summary of where the law stands.

This section is not a reflection on the Sterling Police Department, which I respect. It documents a structural problem: when a powerful tracking tool requires no warrant to use, misuse is not theoretical. It is documented across departments in multiple states, including Illinois.

Updated August 2026. The count has grown substantially since this page first went up. In early August 2026, the Washington Post published an analysis of police and court records finding at least 50 law enforcement officers charged with or accused of using license plate reader technology for unauthorized purposes. Most of the cases involved surveillance of women. The Institute for Justice, which maintains a running tally focused specifically on officers stalking romantic interests, counted at least two dozen such cases as of late July 2026, up from 21 in its April report.

The pace in mid 2026 was rapid. Savannah, Georgia terminated four sworn officers and two civilian employees after an internal investigation into misuse of the department's Flock system, with all six cases referred to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation; investigators found employees running searches on personal acquaintances and family members, and one officer giving an outside agency unauthorized access. Five Albany, Georgia officers were arrested and fired. Greer, South Carolina fired two. Fayetteville fired three after an audit tool flagged officers searching plates belonging to themselves and family members.

The most widely reported case involved a Georgia police chief who searched a former partner's plate and her teenage daughter's roughly 600 times. She learned of it through HaveIBeenFlocked, the public records aggregation site. He was arrested in November on stalking, harassment, and license plate reader misuse charges, and was found dead before trial. In California, a former deputy was convicted on ten charges including stalking and unauthorized access of electronic data, and sentenced in February to six years in prison.

One case bears directly on Illinois law. In Wisconsin, an officer allegedly used Flock to check whether a former girlfriend had visited an abortion clinic. Illinois law at 625 ILCS 5/2-130 specifically prohibits the use of license plate reader data in connection with reproductive health care. Sterling shares camera data with Wisconsin agencies. That is not an accusation about any Sterling officer, and we make none. It is an illustration that a prohibition written into Illinois law does not travel with the data once it leaves Illinois.

An honest note about how these cases surface. Several were caught by internal audits, including the Fayetteville, Greer, and Savannah cases above. Internal review is not worthless and we will not claim otherwise. What the record shows is a division of labor: internal audits tend to catch individual officers after the fact, while the systemic findings, the false positive rates, the improper federal access, the percentage of alerts leading nowhere, have consistently come from inspectors general, state audits, oversight commissions, and outside researchers. Both matter. Only one of them is currently built into Sterling's arrangement.

The Institute for Justice attorney identified the structural cause: "The fundamental problem with these systems is that they place private information about people's movements in the hands of every officer. Without the constitutional safeguard of a warrant requirement, that predictably allows officers to abuse their access."

On the numbers, and why they differ. Counts vary depending on what is being counted, and we would rather be precise than dramatic. The Washington Examiner put the number of communities that have walked away from Flock since 2021 at roughly 98, with about 23 city councils acting since the start of 2026. Futurism counted at least 54 cities in 2026 alone. Newsweek, drawing on the crowdsourced DeFlock project, reported communities across 23 states acting in 2026, and DeFlock's own tally at that point separated the categories: 47 jurisdictions that canceled contracts, 25 that voted down proposed agreements, and 22 that switched cameras off. Some tallies include cities that rejected a proposal before a single camera went up; others count only terminated contracts. The direction is consistent across every count, and it coexists with continued growth elsewhere, since Flock's network still spans well over 100,000 cameras.

Illinois and Wisconsin matter most here, because Sterling shares camera data with agencies in both. Per the Newsweek and DeFlock data, Wisconsin and California led all states in 2026 with seven decisions apiece. Appleton, Wisconsin stopped using its system in May 2026, saying concerns about the integrity of the underlying system had eroded its trust.

South Portland, Maine voted to terminate immediately on June 11, 2026. A councilor put it plainly: "It's a data retention problem. This is not a camera company, this is a data company."

In Denver, the City Council President said: "I had an apology email from the CEO of Flock because he lied to my face." Flock's CEO had told council members the company had no federal contracts, which public records disproved.

Update, August 2026. Both of the communities we were tracking in July have now acted. In Harrisonburg, Virginia, the City Council voted unanimously, 4 to 0, to end its Flock contract; the city manager confirmed the systems would go dark that Friday. In Binghamton, New York, the City Council passed a resolution on August 6 urging the mayor to terminate the city's Flock contracts. The council president said the current contract terms do not serve residents' interests. Notably, the Binghamton resolution acknowledges that ALPRs can serve legitimate public safety purposes while still calling for transparency and accountability, which is close to the posture we have taken here.

The Illinois record, and one finding Sterling should read closely. Oak Park's village board canceled mid contract on August 5, 2025. A trustee explaining his vote cited the village's police oversight commission, which found that more than 99 percent of Flock alerts produced no police action. That is an Illinois municipality, with a formal oversight body, measuring what the system actually produced. Sterling reports 1,537 Flock searches since January 2026 and no documented false positives or incorrect alerts. We take that at face value. Oak Park's experience suggests the more useful question is not how often the system is wrong, but how often it leads anywhere at all, and whether anyone in Sterling is measuring that.

Evanston terminated in August 2025 and deactivated all 19 of its cameras after the Illinois Secretary of State's audit, then had to issue a cease and desist when Flock reinstalled units anyway. Salem, Illinois canceled its agreement after changes to Flock's contract terms raised concerns among officials, which is the same issue documented in the Terms of Service section above. Not every Illinois city has left: Springfield renewed for two years at roughly half a million dollars, but did so with added transparency conditions and regular public reporting on the cameras' effectiveness, drafted with guidance from the ACLU.

Cancellation is not always the end of collection, and it does not always stick. We include this because it cuts against our own argument and residents deserve the whole picture. Cambridge, Massachusetts terminated in December 2025 after discovering two cameras installed without the city's knowledge following an earlier deactivation, which the city called a material breach. In Eugene, Oregon, at least one camera was still logging plates weeks after officials ordered all 57 shut off, capturing roughly 8,500 plates in a thirty day span. And in Cleveland, the city let its $250,000 per year contract lapse on June 29, 2026, then reversed course two weeks later and approved a six month, $125,000 extension carrying new conditions: no third party data sharing, a public transparency portal, quarterly reporting, and access cut off for the regional fusion center. Cleveland is not a cancellation. It is a city that used the leverage of an expiring contract to rewrite the terms, which is a real outcome and one Sterling's Council should understand is available to it.

What happens to the data afterward is not fully documented. Flock's stated policy is rolling deletion on a thirty day cycle, set by contract and state law, enforced by an automated process the company describes as irreversible. Flock's public documentation does not spell out a distinct end of contract data disposition process beyond that rolling window. On that policy, a departing customer's footage would age out within weeks. We are not alleging otherwise. We are noting that a city ending a contract is relying on the vendor's rolling deletion rather than on a documented handover or certified deletion, and that is a term worth asking for in writing.

Others since: South Kingstown, Rhode Island voted unanimously in late July to terminate and remove its cameras, a contract first approved only a year earlier in June 2025. Monroe County, Indiana commissioners voted to end their contract roughly a year early and agreed to pay about $3,000 to have the cameras removed, with one commissioner calling it money well spent. Redmond, Washington voted unanimously on May 26 to cancel and remove all 24 of its cameras, after the city attorney was asked to determine whether grant funding complicated an exit and concluded it did not. That last point is directly relevant to Sterling, since our cameras were also partly grant funded and the question of whether that complicates an exit is a fair one to put to the City Attorney.

Earlier decisions fill in the pattern. Ithaca, New York's Common Council ended its contract in March 2026, citing conflict with the city's sanctuary policy and reports of Flock data accessed without local authorization. Flagstaff, Arizona canceled in December 2025 after sustained public opposition. Sedona, Arizona voted unanimously in September 2025 to end its program and remove 11 readers after Flock acknowledged that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had accessed locally collected data. Menominee, Michigan canceled in May 2026 after learning cameras had been activated without council approval. Dayton, Ohio suspended its program and covered all 72 cameras after the department found more than 7,000 immigration related searches by outside entities, against city policy. And the pattern is spreading to neighboring towns: after Harrisonburg voted to end its agreement, the Elkton town council less than 20 miles away followed. Framingham, Massachusetts and Saranac Lake, New York both voted to decline contracts after months of public opposition.

A dated, individually sourced tracker of these decisions is maintained at Finding Flock, which verifies each entry against a specific news report or public record and distinguishes cancellations from non renewals, pauses, rejections, and deactivations. We have used it here rather than relying on headline totals, and we would encourage anyone checking our work to start there.

Los Angeles joined the list on July 11, 2026. The LAPD, the third largest police department in the country and one of Flock's biggest customers, declined to renew its three year contract. Its chief information officer said the contract was not renewed because of "serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues" tied to the data the cameras collect. Days earlier, the department's Inspector General reported the audit results in specific terms: reviewing stolen vehicle alerts from August and September 2025, the audit found 161 vehicles incorrectly flagged as stolen, a false positive rate of 32.3 percent. The Inspector General warned that false alerts carry a risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions. Sterling's written answers to residents state that the department has documented no false positives or incorrect alerts. We take that at face value. The open question it raises is whether there is a mechanism in place that would capture a false positive if one occurred, since Los Angeles only learned its rate because an Inspector General went looking. To be precise about the status: this is a non renewal, and the LAPD is renegotiating with Flock for stronger terms.

Update, July 2026: At the July 15 Police Commission meeting, LAPD officials confirmed the specific terms they are negotiating: legal ownership of all collected license plate data would vest in the City of Los Angeles, Flock would be prohibited from sharing or commercially using that data, and civil financial penalties would apply if those terms were violated. A virtual public listening session is scheduled for July 30, 2026 so LA residents can weigh in before any new agreement is finalized. The relevant point for Sterling is this: a department with far more negotiating leverage than any small city concluded that Flock's standard terms could not protect its residents, paused the program until the data ownership and sharing terms change, and is holding a public session before signing anything new. That is the standard we believe Sterling's own vendor research should be held to.

The Council has directed staff to research alternative ALPR vendors. That research deserves a clear picture of what has happened in cities that already made the switch, because a vendor change and a policy change are not the same thing.

Axon, the company best known for body cameras and Tasers, ended its partnership with Flock in early 2025 and launched competing products: a pole mounted camera and a streetlight retrofit unit. 404 Media reported in August 2026 that a number of cities have canceled Flock and immediately replaced it with equivalent Axon systems, and noted the streetlight units are designed to blend into their surroundings.

The documented examples are worth reading closely, because they did not all end the same way:

• Denver let its Flock contract lapse and moved to Axon in early 2026. Per reporting on the transition, the new arrangement was roughly $150,000 for 50 cameras rather than the previous 110, with 21 day retention instead of 30, no access to a vendor run national database, and audit trails required for every query. That is a genuinely narrower system, and it came out of a formal request for proposals rather than a renewal.
• Douglas County, Colorado moved to a ten year, $23 million Axon contract. The sheriff attributed the change to a loss of trust with Flock over its handling of privacy and policy concerns.
• Austin, Texas canceled Flock in 2025, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted at the time that the city kept using ALPRs through a separate Axon contract the cancellation never touched.

Denver shows that a vendor change can produce real limits when a city writes them into the contract. Austin shows what happens when it does not. The difference was not the vendor. It was whether retention, sharing, query logging, and camera count were negotiated terms rather than defaults.

Security researcher Bruce Schneier and others have made the blunter version of the point: switching brands of license plate reader is not by itself a privacy decision, and the replacement cameras collect a comparable amount of information. Axon also links ALPR data to body camera footage and its other systems, which is a real advantage for investigators and, for exactly the same reason, a broader pool of connected data about ordinary residents.

What this means for Sterling. We are not arguing against any particular vendor, and alternatives were not our suggestion. Our point is narrower. If this research ends in a new contract on standard terms, Sterling will have changed logos and kept the system. The commitments in the next section are the ones that would actually make a difference, and they are things a city writes down rather than things a vendor volunteers.

When this page first went up, skepticism about these systems was easy to characterize as coming from one direction. That is no longer an accurate description, and anyone weighing Sterling's contract should know it.

In Michigan, Republican state Senator Jim Runestad has introduced legislation requiring a warrant before government access to an ALPR database. He described passive collection around the clock as a drastic overreach, while acknowledging that certain emergencies are genuinely aided by the technology. In Washington, Democratic state Senator Yasmin Trudeau introduced a bill limiting access, requiring logging, and barring immigration enforcement use. In California, Senate Bill 1013 would tighten retention, access, and sharing; it has advanced through the legislature and is opposed by at least 39 police agencies and officers' unions.

At the federal level, Republican Congressman Marlin Stutzman was himself flagged by a Flock camera over an expired registration and has since called the network invasive and said he plans to work on legislation setting boundaries around it. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie has also taken the issue to Congress. In May 2026 a bipartisan amendment that would have sharply restricted police ALPR programs nationwide was introduced and then killed at a House committee markup, which is its own indicator of how contested this has become.

The point for Sterling is not which side is right. It is that a small city signing a multi year surveillance subscription is signing into an area of law actively moving in several states and in Congress, under terms that renew automatically.

Both of Sterling's $12,000 grants came from the Illinois Attorney General's Organized Retail Crime program. Retail theft enforcement is the stated justification for this system.

In Washington, the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act passed the U.S. House on May 12, 2026 and is pending in the Senate. Per the Senate Judiciary Committee's own section by section summary, the bill would create an Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center inside Homeland Security Investigations at the Department of Homeland Security, tasked with coordinating federal, state, and local enforcement, partnering with private industry to share threat information, and reviewing and optimizing grant programs. It has broad backing from retailers, carriers, and law enforcement organizations, and it cleared the House Judiciary Committee unanimously.

It is also opposed by a coalition of more than 130 civil rights, immigration, and criminal justice organizations, including the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Vera Institute, which wrote to the Senate in July 2026 warning that the information sharing provisions risk building a public private surveillance network in which personal data reaches federal law enforcement systems without constitutional safeguards.

To be precise about what this does and does not mean. This bill does not govern Sterling's grants, which come from the state rather than from DHS, and it does not change Sterling's contract. We are not suggesting the Sterling Police Department has any connection to this legislation, and we take the department at its word that it does not share data with federal agencies.

The point is direction of travel. The policy category that pays for Sterling's cameras is the same category Congress is moving toward a DHS coordination center with an explicit mandate to review grant programs and share information with private industry. A city renewing a multi year ALPR subscription funded through that category is making a longer bet than it may appear, and under the current contract that renewal happens without a vote unless someone asks for one.

The council didn't cancel the contract on June 15, but it didn't dismiss the concerns either — it directed staff to research other ALPR vendors. That research, and whatever decision follows, is the live opportunity.