The Los Angeles Police Department is walking away from Flock Safety, one of the biggest names in automated surveillance cameras, and the reason has less to do with cost than with civil rights.
According to TechCrunch, the LAPD let its contract with Flock expire rather than renew it, citing "serious concerns" over civil liberties and privacy. TechCrunch notes that the department was one of Flock's largest government customers, which makes the decision more than a routine bit of procurement housekeeping.
Engadget reports the same outcome from a slightly different angle, describing the non-renewal as driven by data privacy concerns and confirming that Los Angeles law enforcement will stop using Flock cameras.
Flock's technology is widely used by police agencies to automatically read and log vehicle information, building searchable records of where cars have been. For a department the size of the LAPD to publicly back away from that capability, and to name civil liberties and privacy as the cause, is a notable break from the general direction of police surveillance adoption in recent years.
Neither source provided in this brief details what specifically prompted the concerns, what data was collected, or whether Los Angeles plans to replace the system with another vendor.
Why it matters: When one of a surveillance company's marquee customers ends a contract over privacy rather than performance, it signals that civil-liberties objections are starting to carry real commercial weight in the market for police technology.