Texas Frozen the Money. Florida Ordered the Poles Down.

Two Republican governors moved against the same camera company in four days. That is new. It is not a national ban. What actually happened On August 28, 2026, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to stop spending public funds on Flock Safety cameras. The Texas Tribune had been preparing a report that a state program, funded in part by a $1 auto-insurance fee sold as a catalytic-converter theft measure, had put at least $30 million into at least 3,200 Flock cameras. The freeze is a spending rule. It is not a teardown order. The Texas Department of Public Safety told the Tribune it would keep using the cameras it already has. After the Tribune asked why more than 2,800 agencies had searched the DPS network without agreements, DPS said it would start limiting access to agencies with signed agreements. A Tribune analysis of roughly 615,000 searches on the DPS network in June found 48% came from outside Texas, including tens of thousands from Florida and Georgia. On August 31, Florida's Department of Transportation issued a memo signed by chief operating officer Will Watts. It revoked every permit for automated license-plate readers in the right-of-way of the State Highway System, stopped new permits, and gave agencies 30 days to remove the hardware. After that, FDOT said it would take the cameras down itself. The memo's stated reasons: a "recent exponential increase in deployments," plus "concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes." Governor Ron DeSantis had called the technology "out of control" the previous week. He told reporters the state did not want "a digital A.I. surveillance state where everything we're doing is being tracked at all times." The order covers state roads. It does not cover city streets, county roads, driveways, or shopping-center poles. EFF made that limit explicit: most ALPRs in Florida sit off the state highway system. Local departments started pulling more than they had to Some agencies treated the highway memo as a cue to pause entire programs. The New York Times reported that Jacksonville's sheriff paused 150 cameras one week after the office released a video praising the same cameras for helping solve a kidnapping. Dallas said 321 Flock cameras bought with state funds would be deactivated, and that at least 300 others would remain because they were not purchased with state money. Sheriffs in Polk and Orange Counties said they would keep cameras on non-state roads. Abbott's office cited abuse of the system, including the indictment of a Lufkin, Texas police officer on 100 felony counts for allegedly searching Flock's database to track people without authorization. TechCrunch's Zack Whittaker also pointed to a year of reporting on police stalking ex-partners, cybersecurity problems, and wrongful stops. Flock, based in Atlanta, told Reuters the cameras help solve crimes and that it supports "thoughtful legislation and strong privacy, transparency, and accountability guard rails" rather than a ban. Reuters put the company's U.S. footprint at about 120,000 cameras in 49 states. What this does not do It does not delete historical plate reads. It does not stop private lots, HOAs, or city contracts that never used state highway permits. It does not stop Texas DPS from running the network it already built. If you live in Texas or Florida, the useful question is still local: which agency bought which cameras, with whose money, and who can search the feed. We have written about Flock's sales practices and local camera maps before: Flock: The Neighborhood Watch That Never Blinks and Flock cameras in a children's gymnastics room.