The reckoning Golden is sitting inside
Golden’s contract does not run in a vacuum. Over roughly eighteen months, Colorado has produced a detailed record of what happens to plate-reader data once it leaves the city that collected it, and has declined to write a law about it.
How much of Colorado is watched
Reporting through 2026 put Flock Safety’s Colorado footprint at contracts with dozens of law-enforcement agencies, 42 of the state’s 60 ALPR-using police and sheriff departments by CBS News Colorado’s September 2025 count, plus well over a hundred private entities and community-safety organizations.[1][2] Golden’s own order form includes lookup access to every camera “opted in to the statewide Flock network” and to the nationwide equivalent.[3]
Around Jefferson County, Golden’s neighbors have deployed, and in several cases already reversed course:
| Jurisdiction | Status | Who said so |
|---|---|---|
| Golden | 11 cameras contracted July 2023, five-year term; readers reported live from late 2021. No public vote found. | The city's own signed order form; Denver7[3][4] |
| Lakewood | Council voted unanimously on September 21, 2026 not to renew its 16-camera contract; it ends January 30, 2027. | Lakewood council recording[5] |
| Denver | Ended its Flock contract; all ~110 cameras removed by March 2026; switched to Axon. | 9News, Denverite[6] |
| Englewood | Council voted September 8, 2026 to end its Flock contract; a follow-on Axon contract failed 3–3. | The Gazette[7] |
| Arvada | 15 cameras on a paid contract from December 2025, self-renewing; documented on the sister site. | deflockarvada.com[8] |
| Elsewhere in Colorado | Fort Collins, Steamboat Springs and Moffat County cancelled; Douglas County, Longmont and Durango switched to Axon; Commerce City approved a $4.5 million five-year Flock contract in April 2026. | The Gazette[7] |
The Colorado cases
The concerns residents raise about Flock trace to documented Colorado and national incidents, not to speculation. These are the incidents.
Denver: 1,400+ immigration-related searches
Audit logs reported by Colorado Newsline showed Denver’s Flock data touched by more than 1,400 immigration-related national searches between June 2024 and April 2025, with logged justifications including “ICE” and “immigration.” Denver had not authorized this; the searches came through the national network.[9]
Loveland: data reached Border Patrol
Records showed the Loveland Police Department shared access to its Flock data with U.S. Border Patrol; Loveland was subsequently barred from the state network. This is the mechanism, demonstrated in Colorado: a city’s own intentions are not the only thing that determines who searches its cameras.[10]
Flock: a federal pilot it had denied
After months of public assurances that it did not work with federal immigration authorities, Flock acknowledged that federal agents had direct access to local police data through a pilot program, confirmed only after outside reporting forced the issue.[11]
Columbine Valley: the wrong woman
In September 2025 an officer came to a Denver woman’s home and accused her of package theft, saying he had tracked her car using Flock cameras. He had misidentified her; the summons was withdrawn. A small case that shows how far a plate hit travels before anyone checks it.[12]
Texas: tracking a woman seeking an abortion
Reporting in 2025 documented a Texas sheriff’s office using Flock’s nationwide network in connection with a woman who had sought an out-of-state abortion, one of the cases most cited by Colorado residents objecting to their own cities’ contracts.[12]
Boulder: sued over the cameras, and the records
In May 2026, two plaintiffs filed a class action against Boulder’s police chief and records custodian over the city’s 31-camera Flock network, calling it warrantless dragnet surveillance, after the department refused to search its own system for images of a requester’s vehicle. The city has moved to dismiss; no court has ruled.[13]
None of these incidents happened in Golden, and none of them involves Golden personnel. They matter to Golden for a structural reason. In most of them the agency whose cameras were searched was not the agency doing the searching, and often did not know until afterward. That is a property of the network, not of any particular department’s good faith, which is why the sharing settings rather than the department’s intentions are what residents need to see, and Golden’s sharing settings are not in any published record.
The law that exists, and the one that died
SB25-276: in force
Signed May 23, 2025, Senate Bill 25-276 bars Colorado state and local governments from making personal identifying information available for federal civil immigration enforcement except under a judicial warrant, subpoena or court order, a category that reaches license-plate data and so reaches every municipal ALPR network in the state, Golden’s included.[14]
SB26-070: killed
The bipartisan Senate Bill 26-070 would have supplied the operational rules the state still lacks: a warrant requirement for most historical searches, limits on out-of-state sharing, a ban on selling the data, mandatory access audits, and a retention cap. It cleared Senate Judiciary in February 2026, then died in late April amid law-enforcement pushback and a veto threat over the warrant provision. Companion measures, the SAFE Act (SB26-071) and a data-broker purchase ban (HB26-1037), were postponed indefinitely the same spring.[15][16]
Because SB26-070 failed, Colorado has no statewide standard for how long plate data may be kept, who may search it, whether searches must be audited, or whether out-of-state agencies may reach it. Those terms are set contract by contract, city by city. Golden’s are the ones on its order form, a 30-day retention line and a feature list, plus an internal policy the chief has described but the public has not seen. Those are the only rules that apply to Golden’s cameras, and no public body has voted on them.[3][17]
What leaving looks like
Denver is the nearest worked example: contract ended, roughly 110 cameras physically removed by March 2026.[6] Lakewood, whose contract like Golden’s was signed without a council vote, is the other: the first time the question reached its City Council, on September 21, 2026, council voted unanimously not to renew.[5] By fall 2026 the statewide ledger also included Fort Collins, Steamboat Springs, Moffat County and Englewood out; Douglas County, Longmont and Durango switched to Axon; Commerce City doubled down.[7]
Switching vendors is not the same as ending surveillance: Axon and Motorola operate similar data-sharing models, and a city can change logos and keep the architecture. Fixing the problem the Denver and Loveland cases exposed means writing the terms, retention, sharing, audits and warrants, not just changing the supplier. For Golden, whose entire public paper trail is one order form, the first step is smaller still: publishing the policy, the settings and the logs that would show how the network is actually used.
Sources for this page
- Shaun Boyd, “Crime fighter or mass surveillance? In Colorado, license plate readers are high-tech and widespread,” CBS News Colorado, September 22, 2025. cbsnews.com
- “As AI license plate readers spread across Colorado, grassroots movements push back,” The Colorado Sun, April 27, 2026. coloradosun.com
- Flock Group Inc. / Golden (CO) Police Department, Order Form, DocuSign-signed July 11, 2023. PDF, 0.8 MB
- “Golden police install license plate readers across city, make several arrests using the technology,” Denver7 (KMGH). denver7.com
- City of Lakewood, City Council meeting of September 21, 2026, official meeting recording. youtube.com
- “Denver removes all 110 Flock license plate reader cameras as contract expires,” 9News; “Denver fires Flock, prepares to switch to new roadway surveillance system,” Denverite, February 24, 2026. 9news.com · denverite.com
- Nicholas Fogleman, “Ditch or switch? Colorado governments decide fate of Flock cameras,” The Gazette, September 25, 2026. gazette.com
- deflockarvada.com, “Arvada Police & Flock: A Public-Record File,” an independent sister site built on Arvada's CORA-released contracts. deflockarvada.com
- “Frequent immigration-related searches of Denver Flock camera data revealed in logs,” Colorado Newsline, August 6, 2025. coloradonewsline.com
- “Records reveal Loveland Police shared access to license plate reader data with Border Patrol,” KRDO, August 18, 2025. krdo.com
- “Flock admits federal immigration agents have direct access to tracking data, despite previous claims,” 9News. 9news.com
- Bennito L. Kelty, “Are You Part of the Flock? How Cities Across the Denver Area Use AI Tracking Tech,” Westword, 2026. westword.com
- Class-action complaint, Freeman et al. v. Redfearn et al., Boulder County District Court, filed May 27, 2026, via Courthouse News: complaint (PDF) and “Boulder police chief faces class action over Flock cameras' warrantless surveillance,” Courthouse News, May 27, 2026. courthousenews.com
- Colorado Senate Bill 25-276, “Protect Civil Rights Immigration Status,” signed May 23, 2025. leg.colorado.gov
- “Colorado bill to limit license plate reader data access passes Senate committee,” Colorado Newsline, February 24, 2026; “Colorado lawmakers kill bill to limit police use of Flock camera data,” Colorado Newsline, April 29, 2026. coloradonewsline.com
- Colorado Senate Bill 26-071, “Use of Surveillance Technology by Law Enforcement” (the SAFE Act), postponed indefinitely May 6, 2026; Colorado House Bill 26-1037, “Ban Government Purchase of Personal Data from Third Party,” postponed indefinitely April 22, 2026. leg.colorado.gov/sb26-071 · leg.colorado.gov/hb26-1037
- City of Golden, “Council Comments” page, read September 29, 2026: Chief Michele Wagner's August 31, 2026 response describing “a policy with parameters, guidance, rules and an audit process.” cityofgolden.gov