At its September meeting, the Stonewall Democrats of Dallas adopted a resolution calling for Dallas and other municipalities in Dallas County to terminate their contracts with Flock Safety.
The debate over these cameras goes beyond one organization or one political party. Texas political leaders including Democrats Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico have publicly criticized Flock cameras, while Republican Congressman Keith Self has even proposed legislation requiring federal agencies to obtain warrants before accessing this kind of data.
And the concerns being raised deserve particular attention from LGBTQ+ Texans.
You have probably seen a Flock camera without realizing what it was. They are the small, black cameras mounted on poles along roads throughout Dallas. Unlike ordinary traffic cameras, Flock’s automated license plate readers photograph passing vehicles and record information including the license plate, vehicle characteristics, date, time and camera loca-tion.
Dallas had more than 600 Flock cameras before the recent deactivation of around 300 cameras that lost state grant funding. More than 300 city-funded cameras remain while the city seeks funding to bring the whole network back online.
The question isn’t simply whether a camera photographs your car on a public street. It is what can happen when thousands of those photographs can be searched together.
A single photograph tells someone where a vehicle was at one moment. A network of cameras can reveal much more about someone’s movements over time: where they work, where they worship, where their children attend school, where they receive medical care, which political demonstrations they attend — and which LGBTQ+ bars, organizations and community spaces they visit.
For queer people, that makes a difference.
Our community knows that information that seems harmless in one political environment can become deeply personal in another. LGBTQ+ people have experienced government surveillance, police raids and the criminalization of private lives within living memory. That history should make us particularly concerned whenever the government develops a powerful new ability to catalogue and search people’s movements.
And concerns about misuse of Flock’s network are not hypothetical. Being a part of the Flock network means agencies from across the country have access to your data. There have even been reports that federal agencies, including ICE, have accessed Flock data indirectly through individual police departments.
In 2025, a sheriff’s deputy used Flock’s nationwide network while investigating a Texas woman after a reported abortion. Audit records later showed that the reason entered for one search was related to an abortion.
Whatever one’s interpretation of that case, it shows that a license-plate-reader network built for investigating crimes such as stolen vehicles can also be used to search for someone’s movements across jurisdictions.
In a time when LGBTQ+ rights are being restricted or reversed, this definitely poses an immediate threat to our community.
Dallas’ data-retention policy makes the local debate even more significant. Flock Safety now recommends a default retention period of seven days. The Dallas Police Department retains its Flock data for 365 days. That’s a full year of location data, and it raises the question of how much information about the movements of people who are not suspected of committing any crime should the city retain.
According to DPD, approximately 1,900 officers have access to the system, and Dallas shares its Flock data with more than 200 partner agencies. Police say searches require an offense type, reason and case number and that user activity is logged for auditing.
Safeguards are good, but are they actually sufficient?
During Dallas’ September budget discussions, Councilmember Adam Bazaldua proposed removing $1.5 million in funding for the city’s Flock program.
Councilmembers Paula Blackmon and Jaime Resendez joined him in supporting the proposal during a nonbinding vote; the remaining majority of council members opposed the funding cut.
Residents deserve clear answers about how long their information should be retained, which agencies should be allowed to search it, what standards should govern those searches, whether warrants should be required in some circumstances and what happens when someone misuses the system.
Those aren’t anti-police sentiments. They are questions about the boundaries we place around how far we allow local governments to monitor our personal lives.
Public safety matters to LGBTQ+ people. So does privacy. Dallas should be able to have a serious conversation about both. n
Javan Gonzalez is a local activist currently serving as communications chair for the Stonewall Democrats of Dallas.