Texas City Demands $2M for Flock Public Records

Flock public records are turning into a price war. That's the short version. In North Richland Hills, a Fort Worth suburb, city officials told one advocacy group it would cost $2.3 million to fulfill a request for documents about the police department's use of Flock Safety's AI-enabled license plate cameras, a figure that surfaced Monday after the Texas Tribune obtained the correspondence. But that's not the whole story. To justify it, the city claimed that searching roughly a terabyte of communications about "errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system" would consume about 14 years of staff labor billed at $15 an hour.

The sticker price landed like a brick. Phil Mynona called the fee "ludicrous." He filed the request under a pseudonym on behalf of the Texas Privacy Coalition, and he said it appeared engineered to smother his inquiries, which isn't the kind of welcome anyone chasing public records hopes to find waiting in their inbox. He has chased similar Flock public records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies nationwide. The results, he said, are wildly inconsistent. Some departments handed over 400,000-plus pages at no charge. Others quoted $5,000. But KPRC, a Houston news station, was told it would owe up to $121,000 for comparable material, and that number, stacked beside the free pages and the five-thousand-dollar quotes, tells you everything about how little consistency they've got.

Fourteen Years of Typing

The arithmetic behind the $2.3 million demand deserves a second look. Fourteen years of labor at $15 per hour works out to a salary line item, not a records search. North Richland Hills officials framed the estimate as the honest cost of combing through a terabyte of email, chat logs, and internal correspondence. In practice, that framing converts a routine transparency obligation into a project no small nonprofit or local newsroom could underwrite.

Public records law exists so citizens can audit government power. No corporate budget needed. When a city prices a request into the seven figures, the practical effect is a denial dressed up as a quote, and that's a fact. Mynona's group isn't the only one hitting that wall. Anti-surveillance advocates and journalists across the country are reporting similar quotes, and the pattern suggests the fees track the sensitivity of the material rather than the labor involved, which means they're charging you for what you're asking about, not for the work it takes to find it, and that's a problem for anyone who thinks they can't afford to watch the watchers.

What the High Fees Might Be Hiding

These documents concern a technology. It's one that has repeatedly generated uncomfortable headlines, over and over, in ways that keep making people squirm. Flock's automated license plate readers photograph every vehicle that passes a camera, building a searchable database of movements. Police departments have used that database to stalk strangers and people in their personal lives.

So far, Flock has not introduced meaningful reforms to address what critics call its stalker cop problem, and that's the part critics can't let go.

Texas shows why the underlying records matter. It's the sharpest illustration we've got. Last week, a former Texas officer, Zachary Anthony Klein, reportedly pleaded guilty to 100 felony counts of misuse of official information, and he agreed to that plea in exchange for the state dropping stalking-related charges against several people. Klein's Flock abuse, along with another officer's, came to light only after USA Today filed a public records request that triggered an investigation, then an arrest. But Governor Greg Abbott responded by halting Flock funding and stopping permit issuance.

We're seeing that repeatedly. Police flag whatever they'll call suspicious patterns of movement, and federal agents were using ALPRs to monitor cars making day trips across the border and back to manufacture a basis to stop them, interrogate the drivers, and search them. It's a pattern. I think Flock is going to automate that, using AI where cops can set alerts for those kinds of travel patterns.

That warning comes from Michael Soyfer. He's a lawyer at the Institute for Justice. He's studied Flock camera abuse. He's litigating several Fourth Amendment cases too. And his concern isn't only what police do with the data today, because he's also worried about what AI makes possible tomorrow, when pattern-of-life alerts, automated suspicion flags, and cross-referenced travel histories could all be generated at scale, and each one carries the risk of a false accusation that ruins someone's week or year.

Denials, Not Just Dollars

Money is only one obstacle. The Texas Department of Public Safety has asked the Attorney General's Office for permission to withhold the entirety of the Flock data that the Texas Tribune requested. That denial arrived after the agency had already answered an identical request covering earlier weeks. Refusing the same category of records twice, with a legal opinion sought in between, is not a cost problem. It is a disclosure problem.

A Judge Says Warrant Required

Flock public records fights are unfolding against a shifting legal backdrop. The company maintains its license plate readers serve public safety, and courts have largely agreed that police can access Flock databases without implicating the Fourth Amendment. But that consensus may be cracking. Last week, a federal judge in Oklahoma, Sara Hill, ruled that an officer conducted an unconstitutional search by querying a Flock database simply because a woman's license plate was registered in California.

Hill called Flock's network "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance." Its technology, he said, amounts to a "large-scale, dragnet-type surveillance system" that should require a warrant. A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media the company had nothing to do with the case and expects the ruling to be an outlier that will be appealed and overturned, a position the company is clearly counting on as this fight moves forward. The decision sets no binding precedent. But it may prove influential. It's one of the first to recognize that Flock searches can violate the Constitution.

Scale is the reason the ruling matters. Audits reviewed by 404 Media found more than a hundred thousand warrantless searches of the Flock system every month. Sometimes innocent people pay the price. One man spent a month in jail based on a Flock alert that, he argued, should itself have shown officers he was five miles from the crime scene.

Transparency Portals Nobody Uses

Flock does offer agencies an optional tool for disclosure. These "transparency portals" log statistics such as the number of cameras, vehicles scanned, and police searches in a given area. Company spokesperson Andrew Smith said the portals "give agencies a public-facing way to publish information about their [ALPR] programs, including policies, usage, and access rules to help communities better understand how the technology is being used."

Adoption is thin. Hundreds of Texas agencies run Flock cameras, yet only 59 use transparency portals, and just 16 of those share data with the public. For residents trying to learn where cameras sit, who reviews the footage, how often the data is queried, and how long it is retained, the portals are mostly a dead end.

• More than 200 agencies have received Flock records requests from the Texas Privacy Coalition.
• Some departments released over 400,000 pages for free; others charged $5,000.
• KPRC was quoted as much as $121,000 for Flock records.
• Only 16 of 59 Texas agencies with transparency portals publish data publicly.
• Audits show over 100,000 warrantless Flock searches per month.

Without warrants required by courts or transparency mandated by state and local officials, the cameras will keep logging movements the public cannot see or contest. Advocates warn that AI will widen the aperture, making it cheaper to process data across an ever-growing network and easier to build the automated suspicion tools Soyfer describes. The $2.3 million quote in North Richland Hills may look absurd on its face. But it fits a broader pattern: when the records get expensive enough, nobody has to say no. The price says it for them.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did North Richland Hills tell an advocacy group it would cost to fulfill its Flock public records request?

City officials told the group it would cost $2.3 million to fulfill a request for documents about the police department's use of Flock Safety's AI-enabled license plate cameras. The figure surfaced Monday after the Texas Tribune obtained the correspondence.

How did North Richland Hills justify the $2.3 million price tag for the records?

The city claimed that searching roughly a terabyte of communications about "errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system" would consume about 14 years of staff labor billed at $15 an hour. Officials framed the estimate as the honest cost of combing through a terabyte of email, chat logs, and internal correspondence.

Who is Phil Mynona and what did he say about the fee?

Phil Mynona filed the request under a pseudonym on behalf of the Texas Privacy Coalition, and he called the fee "ludicrous." He said it appeared engineered to smother his inquiries, and he has chased similar Flock public records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies nationwide.

What did the federal judge in Oklahoma rule about querying a Flock database?

Judge Sara Hill ruled that an officer conducted an unconstitutional search by querying a Flock database simply because a woman's license plate was registered in California. Hill called Flock's network "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance" and said its technology amounts to a "large-scale, dragnet-type surveillance system" that should require a warrant.

What are Flock's transparency portals and how widely are they used in Texas?

Flock offers agencies an optional tool called "transparency portals" that log statistics such as the number of cameras, vehicles scanned, and police searches in a given area. Hundreds of Texas agencies run Flock cameras, yet only 59 use transparency portals, and just 16 of those share data with the public.