Indianola, in central Iowa, is the latest city in the state to discontinue its use of automated license plate readers (ALPR). The decision comes as communities across the U.S. debate the technology’s uses and data transparency.
The Indianola Police Department announced on Aug. 17 that it was suspending its contract with the surveillance company Flock Safety, which creates and distributes a brand of ALPRs called Flock cameras. Waukee, in the Des Moines area, also decided to suspend the service this month.
Flock cameras take an image scan of each passing car to record its license plate number, make, model and color. Local police can access this information, without a warrant, to search for vehicles related to a crime.
Indianola Lieutenant Tye Sparks said the department started to reconsider the technology after seeing national and local debate around its privacy regulations.
“We had been receiving our own kind of feedback from the community with FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests, believing that the way that the data was kept by a third party was a lack of privacy for the individuals in our community,” Sparks said.
It hasn’t been confirmed that a third party is obtaining the data, Sparks said, but Indianola police chose to suspend the contract anyway.
“As useful as they were for us, some of those questions we didn’t have the answer for, and that’s with the third-party association involved with it,” he said.
Sparks said the cameras have helped law enforcement identify and search for vehicles potentially related to warrants or ongoing criminal investigations. He said the Flock system alerts them when it runs a license plate related to a warrant.
Sparks is expecting concerns about data from the cameras to be addressed during the upcoming legislative session, where he hopes statewide standards and regulations will be introduced to help safeguard local data.
The concerns Sparks and his department heard from residents align with concerns being raised by cities across the U.S. — that the data being collected by police departments can be obtained by a third party.
Flock cameras and immigration enforcement
A main topic of concern has been the use of ALPRs to assist federal immigration enforcement. These fears have led many cities to discontinue their contracts, including Coralville in eastern Iowa.
In September, the Coralville Police Department signed a contract with Flock Safety that stipulated the cameras would not be used to assist with immigration enforcement. But the city council discontinued that agreement after the Iowa Attorney General’s Office warned that it violated an Iowa law prohibiting local entities from impeding immigration enforcement.
Urbandale, in the Des Moines metro, amended its contract with Flock Safety in April. Urbandale Police Chief Rob Johansen said the Urbandale City Council brought up similar privacy concerns at one of its meetings.
“One of the concerns was the information being shared with other federal agencies. And it’s not; Flock does not have any federal agencies that they share any information within their system,” Johansen explained. “That was part of the inquiry, I think they were getting some concerns from the public that the information in the Flock cameras was being used for immigration enforcement and also reproductive care.”
According to reporting by NPR, there have been cases of federal agencies like U.S. Border Patrol searching local data in the U.S. even though some city officials didn’t realize it.
Johansen said that their information is not shared with outside agencies because the system has filters that users can turn off that block access to their data.
“Even if it’s not a federal agency, if it’s any agency that’s searching for those reasons — for immigration reasons or for reproductive care reasons — the data that is captured by the Urbandale cameras is not shared,” Johansen said.
Urbandale’s amended contract now requires prior written consent before Flock discloses any customer data to any third parties, including law enforcement agencies and government officials. Johansen said that even prior to the amendment, Flock has never shared information with federal agencies.
Third-party access to Flock data
Flock Safety's website states that users are in control of how and if they share data. Users can choose to share data with federal agencies and other law enforcement agencies outside of their jurisdiction. This can be a perk for officers because they can search for suspects fleeing the area. Flock Safety also has a national and statewide database that law enforcement agencies can choose to share their data with.
The surveillance company's website states that as of early 2026, “federal agencies are not part of statewide or national lookup networks,” and “any law enforcement agency using Flock can now turn off all Federal Sharing with a single toggle in Admin Settings.”
Johansen said that discontinuing the Flock system would be a big step backward for the Urbandale Police Department, but he understands the privacy concerns.
“It’s a balancing act between preventing crime and solving crime and not violating people’s rights,” he said. “The police have always had to walk that line.”
Amid the controversy surrounding ALPRs, Flock Safety announced updates to its privacy and transparency safeguards this month. Users are now required to filter searches by offense when accessing shared data and provide a case code to make a search, and Flock has decreased the data retention period from 30 days to seven.
