Time remaining until the earliest date the contract's non-renewal notice could come due
Calculating.
until June 11, 2028, the earliest day the 30-day non-renewal notice could come due, counted from the contract’s signature date. The decision can be made any budget season before it. How to take action →
By this site’s arithmetic from the signature date, the initial term has run out and the contract now renews in 24-month blocks. Each renewal still needs an annual appropriation. How to take action →
Eleven Flock cameras. Five years. $137,500. One signature: the police chief’s. Documented here.
The City of Golden, Colorado has Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader cameras over its streets. The city’s signed contract with Flock, a five-page order form executed July 11, 2023, is published in full here: eleven “Falcon” cameras and the FlockOS platform, $27,500 a year for an initial term of 60 months, signed for the customer, “Golden (CO) Police Department,” by the chief of police.[1] Golden’s plate readers were first reported live in late 2021, about twenty months before that form was signed; the record on this site contains no earlier agreement.[2]
This is an independent watchdog site, critical of how Golden has run and disclosed that program. Every claim is footnoted to a named public source, and every place the record still goes silent is marked as silent rather than filled in.
A note on scope. This site covers only the City of Golden, the Jefferson County seat, and only its police department’s plate readers. Flock cameras run by neighboring agencies, businesses or homeowners’ associations inside Golden are not the city’s, and a camera on a pole does not say whose it is. deflockgolden.com is an independent public-record compilation, not affiliated with the City of Golden, the Golden Police Department, or Flock Safety, Inc.; nothing here alleges unlawful conduct by anyone. Methodology and corrections: Records. Compiled September 29, 2026.
At a glance
- Who: The Golden Police Department. The order form names the customer, and even the “Legal Entity Name,” as “Golden (CO) Police Department,” and it was signed for the customer by Police Chief Joe Harvey on July 11, 2023. It cites no City Council vote, and carries no other city signature.[1]
- What was bought: The “Flock Safety Platform”: 11 Falcon license-plate-reader cameras and the FlockOS “Essentials” package, at $27,500 a year. Initial term 60 months, renewal terms 24 months, contract total $137,500, first year invoiced at signing.[1]
- What came before: Denver7 reported “between 10 and 20” Flock readers installed across Golden from November 2021, credited with arrests within weeks, and by September 2022 CBS News Colorado reported the city had 11 cameras, the exact count signed for ten months later. The record here contains no contract covering that period: the gap, laid out.[2][5]
- What it can reach: The order form’s included features list Flock’s state and nationwide lookup networks, “all privately owned Flock devices within your jurisdiction that have been shared with you,” real-time NCIC alerts, and unlimited custom hot lists. Whether Golden’s own cameras are opened to other agencies is a configuration setting; the city’s Q&A page says sharing is limited “to Colorado law enforcement agencies,” and no document in this record shows the setting itself.[1][6]
- The rules: The order form sets a 30-day cloud retention period. In August 2026, Police Chief Michele Wagner wrote publicly that the department has “a policy with parameters, guidance, rules and an audit process” and would be “hosting a study session with Golden City Council.” The policy itself, and any audit it has produced, are not in this record.[1][3]
Bracketed citations resolve on the Records page. Every other page carries its own source list at the bottom.
Five numbers
The 11 is the city’s contracted quantity, not a verified field count; no location list appears in the record, and volunteers have mapped more Flock hardware inside Golden than the contract accounts for (see the map below). The ~20 months is this site’s arithmetic from a news report’s date to a signature date. The $137,500 assumes the price never changes, which the form does not promise either way. The 0 reflects the document itself: if a council action exists elsewhere, this site will publish it.
Where the readers are
Every reported automated license-plate reader inside Golden’s city boundary, drawn from the same OpenStreetMap data that powers the DeFlock project. The cluster at the city’s southeast is the South Golden Road / West Colfax Avenue retail corridor. Nineteen ALPR readers were mapped as of September 29, 2026, 18 of them tagged as Flock Safety hardware, which is more than the 11 cameras on the city’s contract.[1][4] If the reports are accurate, some of the Flock hardware below is not the city’s: two of the Flock-tagged readers carry an operator tag naming The Home Depot, and the other sixteen name no operator at all. The map cannot say whose any of them is.
The whole record, one page at a time
Five pages, each one self-contained and fully footnoted. No trust required. If you read one thing, read the first.
- The Program What a Flock camera does, what Golden signed for in 2023, the twenty months of cameras before the contract, and how the contract ends. Read first
- Context The Colorado cases, the law that exists, the bill that died, and the neighbors, Denver, Lakewood, Englewood, that have already walked away.7 min
- Timeline How Flock came to Golden, dated and sourced: from the November 2021 installations to the study session the chief has promised council.6 min
- The Records The primary document, its checksum, what the record still lacks, the method, and the corrections log.Reference
- Take Action The renewal arithmetic, the annual budget lever, how public comment works in Golden, and how to reach council and the chief's office.Any budget season