BRAZORIA COUNTY, Texas — Small cameras positioned along roads in Lake Jackson and Pearland are doing more than taking pictures of passing traffic.
Flock Safety's automated license plate readers, commonly called ALPRs, capture license plates and vehicle information that police can later search or use to receive real-time alerts when certain vehicles pass a camera.
Supporters call the technology a powerful tool for locating stolen vehicles, wanted suspects and missing people.
Critics see something different: a growing nationwide surveillance network capable of recording the movements of millions of people who are not suspected of committing any crime.
Public records obtained by Gulf Coast Times from the Lake Jackson and Pearland police departments provide a closer look at how the technology is being used locally — including thousands of searches, dozens of cameras, significant public spending and data-sharing connections reaching far beyond Brazoria County.
Lake Jackson Says Flock Helped Resolve 182 Criminal Cases
Lake Jackson currently has five active Flock license plate reader cameras, according to records provided by the city.
The cameras were installed in June 2022 and are positioned along major routes including Highway 288, Highway 332 and FM 2004 near the Brazos River.
Lake Jackson entered into a five-year Flock contract beginning in 2023 at $12,500 per year, with a total contract amount not to exceed $62,500.
But perhaps the most significant number in the city's response is how often investigators are actually using the system.
During the previous 12 months, Lake Jackson told GCT that authorized personnel conducted 5,120 Flock searches in connection with criminal investigations.
The department said Flock served as a primary resource in the resolution of 182 criminal cases during that period.
Lake Jackson also reported no internal or external complaints, policy violations or unauthorized searches involving its Flock system.
The department's response says Flock internally retains data for 31 days, although the signed contract supplied to GCT lists a 30-day retention period.
Pearland's System Is Much Larger
Pearland's Flock operation is considerably larger.
Records show the city initially purchased 10 Falcon cameras in 2022 before adding another 21 cameras under a subsequent purchase.
A November 2025 invoice shows Pearland being billed for 30 standard Flock license plate readers and one Flock Flex reader, with an annual charge of $77,500.
Another 2025 Flock invoice supplied to GCT totaled $100,000 for FlockOS and Flock Safety Wing video-management services.
Pearland has also publicly credited Flock with helping recover stolen property. The Pearland Police Department's 2025 annual report lists approximately $271,000 in stolen vehicle recovery value associated with Flock.
The city has gone further by establishing a grant program allowing qualifying neighborhoods to receive reimbursement toward privately funded ALPR systems that can provide alerts and data to Pearland police.
The Cameras Are Part of a Much Bigger Network
The records also reveal how far the reach of a local camera system can extend.
A Flock network-sharing export provided by Pearland and dated July 16 contains 1,377 organizations with Pearland's network listed in the "Networks I'm Sharing" field.
The list includes police and sheriff's departments across Texas and the country, along with agencies including the FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service.
Nearby agencies listed include Lake Jackson, Clute, Angleton, Alvin, Houston, Brazoria County and multiple Harris and Fort Bend County agencies.
Lake Jackson's July 21 export similarly contains approximately 1,150 organization rows where "Lake Jackson TX PD" is listed as a network being shared.
Those records do not establish that every listed agency has unlimited access to every piece of local data. Flock supports different levels of network access and sharing.
Still, the scale illustrates one of the biggest differences between modern ALPR systems and a traditional police camera: information gathered in one community can potentially become useful to an investigation hundreds or thousands of miles away.
That network effect has become a major part of the debate surrounding Flock in Texas. The Texas Tribune reported this month that the technology allows law enforcement to rapidly search vehicle information collected by camera networks across jurisdictions, while privacy advocates are pushing for tighter limits and warrant requirements.
Local Policies Put Safeguards on Police Searches
Both departments have rules intended to prevent an automated alert from automatically becoming police action.
Lake Jackson's policy says ALPRs may only be used for official law-enforcement business and prohibits unauthorized access. It also says that, if practicable, an officer should verify an ALPR response through an official law-enforcement database before taking enforcement action based solely on the alert.
The department's policy calls for regular audits and restricts access to trained personnel.
Pearland's publicly available ALPR policy goes further in describing what must happen after an alert.
It states that an LPR alert alone does not create probable cause for a traffic stop.
Before stopping someone, Pearland officers or dispatchers must visually confirm that the captured plate matches the wanted plate and manually verify that it is still listed as wanted through NCIC or TCIC.
Pearland also requires hotlist entries to include a case or event number and a reason the vehicle is being sought. Fixed and trailer-mounted LPR data is generally purged after 30 days unless needed as evidence or for an investigation, and system logins and transactions are subject to auditing.
Those verification requirements matter because automated plate readers are not infallible.
When a Camera Gets the Plate Wrong
There have been documented cases around the country where an incorrect ALPR hit resulted in innocent motorists facing high-risk police stops.
In Sherwood, Arkansas, earlier this year, a Flock camera misread one character on an SUV's license plate and connected it to a stolen-plate alert.
Police stopped the vehicle at gunpoint and handcuffed the couple inside while their young children, including an infant, remained in the vehicle. Officers later determined the actual plate differed from the plate identified by the system.
The Institute for Justice, a civil-liberties law firm that opposes broad ALPR surveillance, says its review has identified at least 27 cases since 2018 involving erroneous ALPR stops, detentions or arrests, including instances where cameras confused similar-looking letters or numbers.
Errors do not always come from the camera itself. Incorrect information placed on a hotlist or officers failing to properly interpret or verify a match can also result in the wrong vehicle being targeted.
That is precisely why both Lake Jackson and Pearland policies contain provisions addressing verification.
Misuse by Officers Has Added Another Concern
Accuracy is only one side of the controversy.
Recent investigations have uncovered cases in which law-enforcement personnel allegedly used ALPR systems for personal reasons.
And some of those cases have surfaced close to Brazoria County.
The Texas Tribune reported Monday that a Fort Bend County sheriff's deputy was suspended after allegedly searching one person's plate 41 times and another person's 148 times.
A Pasadena police sergeant resigned after allegedly using Flock to track and stalk another officer, while Baytown opened a criminal investigation into alleged misuse by an officer. Harris County has also blocked three deputies from using Flock while investigating possible misuse.
Similar cases have appeared nationwide.
A Washington Post investigation found dozens of officers who had been accused, charged or convicted of misusing Flock or other ALPR systems, including cases involving officers allegedly tracking wives, girlfriends, ex-partners and romantic interests.
Those cases do not mean similar misuse has occurred in Lake Jackson or Pearland.
In fact, Lake Jackson specifically told GCT that it had no complaints, policy violations or unauthorized searches during the period covered by the records request.
They do, however, explain why auditing and limits on who can conduct searches have become central to the national debate.
Flock Is Changing Some of Its Rules
The controversy has also prompted changes from Flock itself.
The company announced this month that it plans to require law-enforcement searches to be tied to case numbers, expand automatic reviews designed to identify abnormal search activity and reduce its default license-plate data retention period from 30 days to seven days beginning Jan. 1.
Flock has said the changes are intended to strengthen accountability while preserving the crime-fighting value of the system.
Crime-Fighting Tool or Too Much Surveillance?
For supporters, the numbers supplied by local police make the argument.
Lake Jackson says the system was a primary resource in resolving 182 criminal cases in a single year. Pearland reports hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen vehicle recoveries connected to Flock.
ALPR systems can alert officers within seconds when a vehicle associated with a stolen-car report, warrant or missing-person investigation crosses a camera.
For critics, the concern isn't necessarily whether Flock can help solve crimes.
The question is how much information should be collected about everyone else in order to accomplish that goal — and how widely that information should be searchable.
That debate is now spreading across Texas, where communities are reconsidering contracts, demanding additional safeguards and, in some cases, shutting cameras down altogether.
The records obtained by Gulf Coast Times show both sides of that debate playing out locally: a technology police say is being used thousands of times and helping solve criminal cases, connected to a data-sharing network far larger than Brazoria County itself.
Gulf Coast Times is not taking a position on whether Flock cameras should remain in use. This report is based on public records and documented incidents and is intended to give residents a clearer picture of what the technology does, how local departments use it and why it has become the subject of a growing debate.