An investigation finds US homeowners associations teaming up with police to install Flock Safety's license plate surveillance cameras, without telling residents
At a city council meeting in June 2021, Mayor Thomas Kilgore, of Lakeway, Texas, made an announcement that confused his community. LinkedIn: Gerry Kennedy . Tweets: @monsieuramerica , @georgiagee14 , @sarahsholder , @claireatki , @mediajustice , and @theintercept LinkedIn: Gerry Kennedy : Ok this isn't Dystopian!!! Yea right — Now let's put this in an insurance perspective. The HOA has assumed HOA coverage with General Liability … Tweets: @monsieuramerica : “We thought we were just being a partner with the city,” Bill Hayes, chief operating officer of Legend Communities, which oversees the Rough Hollow Homeowners Association, said at the meeting. “We didn't go out there thinking we were being Big Brother.” https://theintercept.com/... Georgia Gee / @georgiagee14 : NEW: I found that hundreds of homeowner associations are partnering with police to install license plate surveillance technology. Police now have access to communities' movements across the country — without them even knowing. @theintercept https://twitter.com/... Sarah Holder / @sarahsholder : good @theintercept story on police encouraging homeowners' associations to acquire license plate readers: https://theintercept.com/... @FolaAk and I found similar coordination between HOAs, Flock and police in our 2021 investigation: https://www.bloomberg.com/... Claire Atkinson / @claireatki : Last October, in Kechi, Kansas, a police officer was arrested for improperly using Wichita Police Department's Flock license plate reader technology to track the location of his estranged wife. https://twitter.com/... @mediajustice : You can count on surveillance capitalism to monetize fear and distrust while dodging accountability wherever possible. Your local HOA is Flock's business model. https://theintercept.com/... @theintercept : “What are the consequences if somebody abuses the system?” said Dave Maass, director of investigations at @EFF. “There are repercussions of having this data, and you don't have that kind of accountability when it comes to a homeowners association.” https://theintercept.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Flock's growth model has been police-first: by early 2021, emails showed the company had built a nationwide camera network through 500+ police departments, and neighborhood-level fights — like the bitter Colorado HOA debate that same year — previewed how contentious residential deployments would get. The Intercept's investigation adds the transparency gap to that arc: HOAs such as Legend Communities in Lakeway, Texas, were partnering with police to install Flock cameras without telling the residents they govern.
First-order effects
- Residents in HOA-governed neighborhoods covered by the investigation learn their movements were being logged by police-accessible cameras their associations installed without disclosure, putting HOA boards like Legend Communities under immediate trust and liability pressure.
Second-order effects
- Crowdsourced transparency efforts such as DeFlock, which has already mapped 5,600+ plate-reader locations, gain a new use case as residents map cameras their own HOAs never disclosed, and police departments face pressure to require consent and notice before private-camera integrations.
Third-order effects
- If undisclosed private-public camera partnerships keep surfacing, the pattern points toward disclosure mandates and audit rules for police data-sharing with HOAs and businesses — the same accountability pressure that later produced bipartisan scrutiny of Flock's data handling and Flock's own restrictions on cross-state agency access after misuse reports.
The trend: Private camera networks are being fused into policing through quietly negotiated HOA and police partnerships, and each transparency failure is pushing the sector toward mandatory disclosure and data-use rules.