The program

A Flock Safety license-plate reader is a solar-powered, cellular-connected still camera, usually pole-mounted over a road. Golden’s own order form describes the “Falcon” it bought as “an infrastructure-free license plate reader camera that utilizes Vehicle Fingerprint® technology to capture vehicular attributes,” and describes the search those attributes feed: “vehicle type, make, color, license plate state, missing / covered plates, and other unique features like bumper stickers, decals, and roof racks.” So a car can be searched for even when the plate is unreadable or absent.[1]

Two properties make it different from a traffic camera. First, it is indiscriminate: it records every vehicle, not only vehicles connected to a crime, building a movement history of an entire population of drivers. Second, it is networked. The images land in Flock’s cloud rather than on city property, and the FlockOS package Golden bought lists a “State Network” and a “Nationwide Network” for plate lookups among its included features.[1]

That second property is the whole of the Colorado argument. A camera bought by Golden to find stolen cars is also, potentially, a node other agencies can query for their own reasons. The Context page collects the Colorado cases where that is exactly what happened.

The billing terms: Initial Term 60 months, Renewal Term 24 months, payment Net 30, “Annual Plan - First Year Invoiced at Signing,” Retention Period 30 days. The form lists a $27,500 “Discounts” line applied against the Flock Safety Platform; it does not itemize what list price the discount was taken from. The five-year total is the form’s own figure: $137,500.[1]

By executing the form, the customer also agreed to Flock’s standard Terms of Service as posted at flocksafety.com. Those terms are the vendor’s, they can change, and the copy in force in July 2023 is not part of the signed document, so this site quotes only what the signed pages themselves say.[1]

• Retention: 30 days. The order form’s header sets “Retention Period: 30 Days.” Nothing on the signed pages says what happens to a plate read that has been copied into a hot-list alert, an investigation, or another agency’s search results before day 30.[1]
• Alerts wired to federal data: the included features list “Real-Time NCIC Alerts on Flock ALPR Cameras”: “alert sent when a vehicle entered into the NCIC crime database passes by a Flock camera,” plus “Unlimited Custom Hot Lists” any administrator can populate.[1]
• Audit tooling exists: the “Flock Insights/Analytics page” is described as a reporting tool covering “user and network audits, plate read reports, hot list alert reports, event logs, and outcome reports.” The system can log who searched what; no term requires those logs to be published, and none has been.[1]
• Renewal rides the budget: “Renewal is subject to annual budget appropriation,” the form’s own words. Every year Golden appropriates money for this line, it is choosing the program again.[1]

The initial term is 60 months and “shall commence upon first installation and validation of Flock Hardware,” a date the record does not contain. The agreement then “will automatically renew for successive renewal terms of the greater of one year or the length set forth on the Order Form,” which sets 24 months, “unless either Party gives the other Party notice of non-renewal at least thirty (30) days prior to the end of the then-current term.”[1]

Counted from the signature date, July 11, 2023, the initial term would end July 11, 2028, and the 30-day notice would come due by June 11, 2028. If the term instead began when hardware was installed and validated under this form, the real dates are later. Either way, missing the window commits the city to another two years at a time, not one.[1]

On paper, the police department does, end to end. The Flock customer of record, and even the form’s “Legal Entity Name,” is “Golden (CO) Police Department.” The signature for the customer is Police Chief Joe Harvey’s, dated July 11, 2023, over a block that names his title and nothing else: no City Clerk attestation, no City Attorney approval as to form, no City Manager, no Mayor, no resolution number. The accounts-payable contact is a city finance address; the billing runs through the city.[1]

The chief who signed it has since left. Joe Harvey stepped away from the role in January 2026 and announced his retirement that February, after roughly forty years in policing; Deputy Chief Mike Hendershot served as interim chief while the city ran a national search, and in July 2026 Golden named Michele Wagner, a former Lakewood police sergeant and chief investigator for the First Judicial District DA’s office, as its next chief.[3][4] The contract the previous chief signed runs on regardless: that is what a 60-month term with self-renewal means.

In August 2026, answering a resident’s published demand that the cameras come down, Chief Wagner wrote that the department has “a policy with parameters, guidance, rules and an audit process,” that it continues “to evaluate the benefits of Flock against the concerns of the public,” and that it “will be hosting a study session with Golden City Council.”[5] The policy she describes is exactly the kind of record this site publishes, and it is not yet in this record; neither is a date for the study session.