Murphy is removing its Flock cameras.
On October 6, 2026, after a presentation by Police Chief Jeff Gibson, the City Council opted to give Flock Safety 30 days’ notice to remove its four cameras. Councilmembers cited the absence of any state or national regulation of license plate readers, and uncertainty over whether the city would be reimbursed under the state grant program Gov. Abbott paused. The cameras stay on until Flock removes them, on Flock’s own schedule.
Murphy is removing its Flock cameras.
At its regular meeting on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, following a presentation by Police Chief Jeff Gibson, the Murphy City Council opted to give Flock Safety 30 days’ notice to remove its four cameras from the city. Per the Murphy Monitor, councilmembers expressed concern that there were no national or state regulations governing license plate readers, and that it was not certain the city would be reimbursed for the cameras under the state grant program Gov. Abbott paused. Chief Gibson said Flock would remove the cameras on its own schedule, and that they would remain active until removal.
Facing the same funding uncertainty, several Texas cities chose to wait. Murphy chose removal. After the Governor’s funding freeze, Flock began granting Texas agencies 90-day payment pauses, letting them keep grant-funded cameras running at no cost while waiting to see whether the state restores the money. Dallas, Addison, New Braunfels, and Johnson County were granted that pause and kept their cameras on. Murphy opted for removal instead.
What this is, and what it is not. This is a decision to stop using Flock, and it deserves real credit. It is not a ban, and it is not finished. The cameras stay on until Flock collects them. The contract, the annual cost, and the retention period were never published. No warrant requirement, no retention limit, and no public-vote requirement was adopted, so if the state restores the funding, nothing on the books prevents a return. Those remain the asks.
Source: Bob Wieland, “Murphy to discontinue Flock cameras,” Murphy Monitor, October 6, 2026. Statewide context on Flock’s 90-day payment pause: The Texas Tribune, October 2026.
It does not just read your plate.
Flock cameras are automated license plate readers, but that undersells them. Every passing car is photographed and analyzed by machine vision that catalogs make, model, color, and distinguishing features: bumper stickers, roof racks, even dents. Flock trademarked the profile it builds and calls it "Vehicle Fingerprint."
Each read is stamped with a location, a date, and a time, and uploaded to a database. Do that at every camera, every day, and the result is a searchable map of where ordinary residents go: to work, to church, to a clinic, to a partner's house. You did nothing wrong, and you are in it anyway.
Crucially, the data does not stay in Murphy. Agencies across the country can query it, and that sharing is a feature of the product, not an accident of one bad actor.
"It only reads license plates."
You will hear this from officials. Flock's own sales material describes machine vision that identifies vehicles by features and captures cars "with the absence of a license plate." A system you can search without a plate is not a system that only reads plates.
What Murphy has told residents, and what it hasn't.
Murphy's Flock cameras were first approved on December 3, 2024, when the council voted 5 to 0 to accept a state "Catalytic Converter Theft" grant (Senate Bill 224) to purchase them (Resolution 24-R-1115). The police department and Flock Safety staff presented the item. Then, on May 5, 2026, the council again voted unanimously to seek another SB 224 grant, for the 2027 fiscal year, to keep the program funded. Police Chief Jeff Gibson leads it.
Both votes happened in public council meetings, funded through grants rather than the regular budget. What residents were never shown is the actual contract, the locations, the annual cost, or the renewal terms, and residents themselves were never asked to vote on whether Murphy should run license-plate surveillance at all. On October 6, 2026, the council opted to end the program and give Flock 30 days’ notice to remove its four cameras. The camera count became public that same day, through a newspaper, not the city.
The grant is aimed at catalytic-converter theft. The cameras do far more.
The state program Murphy used (SB 224) exists to fund catalytic-converter and auto-theft prevention. Flock cameras are general-purpose: they log every vehicle for any law-enforcement query and feed a nationwide network. Residents asked the council to explain the gap between that narrow justification and the broad reach. In the end, the funding half of the question is part of what closed the program: on October 6, 2026 the council cited uncertainty over reimbursement under the paused grant as a reason to remove the cameras.
The votes were on the record. The terms never were.
The council approvals were public, but the contract, the locations, the yearly cost, and the retention period never were. Residents paid for this system, through grant money and the local match these grants require, without ever being shown what it was or getting to vote on whether Murphy should have it. The program is ending, but that disclosure gap has still not been closed, and it is the reason a future council could repeat the entire cycle.
Wylie went first. Murphy followed.
On August 25, 2026, after a resident campaign, the Wylie City Council voted 7 to 0 to end its Flock contract and committed to designing any future program in public. Six weeks later, on October 6, Murphy’s council opted to have its own cameras removed. Across Texas, El Paso voted to take down 150 cameras, and more than a dozen other cities and counties have shut theirs off since the Governor’s funding freeze.
Murphy funded these cameras with money the state exposed, and the Governor cut it off.
The "Catalytic Converter Theft" grant Murphy used, Senate Bill 224 (the Deputy Darren Almendarez Act), is paid for by a $1 fee added to every Texas auto insurance policy in 2023, sold to the public as a way to fight catalytic-converter theft. A Texas Tribune investigation published August 30, 2026 found that the state board administering that money, the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority, whose members are mostly appointed by Gov. Abbott, has quietly steered at least $30 million of it into more than 3,200 Flock cameras across Texas.
Even a lawmaker who voted for the fee was stunned. Rep. Brian Harrison: "In a million years, I never could have even contemplated that this would be used to fund what is effectively warrantless surveillance."
Then, on August 28, 2026, Gov. Abbott ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras, specifying "all state agency funds." That is the exact grant program Murphy relied on, and the one it voted in May 2026 to keep tapping for fiscal year 2027. On October 6, 2026, the council answered the question this section used to pose: rather than keep funding a camera network residents never voted for, it opted to have the cameras removed, citing that reimbursement was no longer certain.
This is not hypothetical. It has a track record.
Misuse is documented and criminal.
At least 27 officers across 18 departments in 9 states have been disciplined, fired, or charged for abusing license-plate systems, including using them to stalk former partners. In August 2026 a Texas grand jury indicted a Lufkin police officer on 100 felony counts for using Flock to track eleven people; the department shut its own cameras off. Four employees of the Savannah, Georgia police department were arrested the same week.
It is not even reliable.
When Roseville, California audited its own Flock alerts, 71 percent were wrong. The Los Angeles Police Department found 161 cars wrongly flagged as stolen in two months and dropped Flock. Misreads have consequences: innocent people have been pulled from their cars at gunpoint over a plate the system got wrong.
Security failures are the pattern, not the exception.
In December 2025, researchers found at least 60 Flock cameras streaming live to the open internet with no password, including footage of a playground. State audits in Illinois caught Flock giving federal agencies access to local data that cities never approved. Every safeguard the company has added arrived only after it was caught.
Cities are leaving, fast.
DeFlock's national tracker counted 106 communities that had canceled, rejected, deactivated, paused, or banned Flock or ALPR programs as of August 21, 2026, with at least a dozen more documented exits not yet logged. In Texas alone that includes Hood and Guadalupe counties, Bandera, Lago Vista, San Marcos, Austin, and now Wylie. Murphy would be joining a growing mainstream, not going out on a limb.
The data license outlives the contract.
Flock's terms grant the company an "irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide" license to use a city's camera data to improve its own products, a license that survives even after a city cancels. The Texas Tribune reported in August 2026 that Flock retains that right with no expiration after termination, and Fortune reported, citing an LAPD Inspector General audit, that Flock's contracts let it use collected data "for any purpose in Flock's sole discretion," including to train machine-learning algorithms. Cancel the contract and Murphy's residents are still in the training data.
A single photo is settled law. A weeks-long map of you is not.
Courts have long allowed one photograph of a car on a public road. Flock's network is different in kind: it assembles a searchable, weeks-long history of everywhere a vehicle goes, queryable by thousands of agencies. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held that this kind of aggregated movement record requires a warrant when it comes from a cell phone. A federal challenge to a Virginia city's Flock network, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, is on appeal at the Fourth Circuit. No court has finally settled the question either way, and Texas has no state law limiting ALPRs.
This is not a partisan complaint.
In August 2026, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) both condemned Flock's network as mass surveillance within days of each other. Two federal bills restricting ALPRs are Republican-sponsored: the PRIVACY Act (Rep. Keith Self, R-TX) and the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act (Rep. Tim Burchett, R-TN). In August 2026, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) opened a formal Senate investigation into the company. In Texas, deep-red Hood County and deep-blue Austin both dropped the company for the same reasons. Flock's own CEO, Garrett Langley, told TechCrunch in August 2026 that "there's no regulation, there's no accountability, and we think that's wrong."
Bring it into the open. Then let residents decide.
This is not anti-police, and it was never a demand to ban every tool forever. It is a demand for daylight and consent. The October 6 decision removes the cameras, but none of the following was adopted as policy, which is why a future council could repeat the cycle. We are asking the Murphy City Council to:
Publish the contract.
Release the Flock agreement, the locations, the annual cost, the retention period, the renewal terms, and the grant application, so residents can finally see what the program was and what it cost.
Hold a real public hearing.
Put surveillance policy on a posted agenda where residents can speak and the council must respond, not bury it in a routine grant vote.
Require a warrant, limit retention, block outside access.
Any camera program should require a warrant for searches, delete data quickly, and technically prevent outside agencies from searching Murphy's data without one.
Put it to a public vote.
A surveillance network that records every resident should be adopted by the residents, not slipped through on a grant cycle.
See the readers reported near Murphy.
This map shows automated license plate reader locations reported by the community through DeFlock. It may be incomplete, and it includes cameras just outside the city, but it shows how the net is drawn. Murphy never published its own camera count or locations. The count became public on October 6, 2026 through the Murphy Monitor, the day the council moved to remove the cameras. Resident-reported maps like this were one of the few public windows into the program.
Source: community-reported ALPR locations via DeFlock. Not an official city map.
Contact the Murphy City Council.
Council meets on the first and third Tuesday of each month at 6:00 p.m. in the Council Chambers, 206 N. Murphy Road, Murphy, TX 75094. Residents may speak during the public-comment portion of each regular meeting. Ask the City Secretary how to sign up before the meeting starts. Main line: (972) 468-4000.
A short, personal note works best. Tell them you're a Murphy resident, that you were surprised to learn the city runs license-plate surveillance, and that you want the contract published and the program put to a public vote before any renewal or expansion.
| Seat | Name | |
|---|---|---|
| Mayor | Scott Bradley | [email protected] |
| Place 1 | Elizabeth Abraham | [email protected] |
| Place 2 · Mayor Pro Tem | Scott Smith | [email protected] |
| Place 3 | Deborah Ison | [email protected] |
| Place 4 · Deputy Mayor Pro Tem | Ken Oltmann | [email protected] |
| Place 5 | Kevin Kelley | [email protected] |
| Place 6 | Jené Butler | [email protected] |
Subject: Thank you for discontinuing Flock, and please publish the records Dear Mayor Bradley and Council Members, I am a Murphy resident, and I want to thank the council for its October 6 decision to discontinue the city's Flock Safety license-plate cameras and give the company notice to remove them. I appreciate you taking the concerns about the lack of regulation and the funding uncertainty seriously. To finish the job, I am asking the council to: 1. Publish the Flock agreement, the locations, the annual cost, the retention period, and the renewal terms, so residents can see what the program was. 2. Hold a public hearing on surveillance policy. 3. Require a warrant for searches, limit data retention, and block outside agencies from searching our data without one. 4. Put any future camera program to a public vote. The cameras are coming down, but nothing on the books prevents a future council from bringing them back if the state restores the funding. Putting these protections in writing is what makes this decision last. Thank you, [Your Name] [Your Street]
"Hi, my name is ____ and I live in Murphy. I'm calling to thank the mayor and council for the October 6 decision to discontinue the city's Flock cameras. I'd also ask them to publish the contract, the cost, and the retention period, and to require a warrant and a public vote before any camera program comes back. Thank you."
Add a sentence of your own before sending. A few personal words count for more than a form letter.
The conversation isn't over.
The cameras are coming down, but the council can take this up again at any time, especially if the state restores the funding. Leave your email and we'll let you know when there's news, a meeting, or a moment your voice matters.
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Follow DeFlock Murphy on Facebook →Reasonable questions, straight answers.
Isn't this just anti-police?
No. Nothing here asks Murphy PD to give up legitimate tools. A stolen-car hit or an AMBER Alert works exactly the same under a warrant rule. The objection is to logging every resident's movements, with no warrant and no public oversight, and to doing it without ever asking the public.
Don't the cameras help solve crime?
Individual cameras have helped in individual cases, and no one disputes that. The question is whether solving some crimes requires a permanent, searchable record of everyone else's daily movements. Meanwhile the systems are unreliable at scale (Roseville's own audit found 71% of alerts wrong) and the data leaves the city entirely.
How do you know Murphy even has these?
The Murphy Monitor reported the council's May 5, 2026 vote authorizing the police department to seek a state grant to fund Flock cameras "already in use," and on October 6, 2026 reported the council's decision to have Flock remove its four cameras. What the city still has not disclosed is the contract, the annual cost, or the retention period. That gap is exactly what this campaign is asking the city to close.
What do you actually want?
Publish the contract. Hold a real public hearing. Require a warrant, limit retention, and block warrantless outside access. Then put any future camera program to a public vote. Daylight and consent, before renewal or expansion.
We condemn vandalism. Full stop.
Cameras around the region have been damaged and covered. We do not support that, and we ask you not to do it. It is illegal, it undercuts our argument, and it hands the program an excuse. This campaign works one way: through public records, public meetings, and public votes. We win in the open, not by touching the equipment.