College Station renews Flock contract despite audit concerns

24 September 2026. [AI first draft. Verify every fact against the source before publishing.]

College Station's city council is scheduled to vote Thursday on renewing its contract with Flock Safety, the automated license plate reader and camera network operator. The timing comes as local watchdog group DeFlock BCS has spent months auditing search logs and records across Bryan and College Station, raising questions about how the technology is actually being used.

The three local agencies operating Flock networks vary dramatically in scale. Brazos County Sheriff's Office operates 10 cameras, Bryan Police operates 17, and College Station operates 84. Both Bryan and College Station police describe their systems as motion-activated, meaning cameras trigger on any movement rather than targeting specific vehicles. Both departments state that officers can only search vehicle-related images in the system. However, DeFlock BCS disputes this characterization, citing audit logs showing College Station using a "freeform search" feature allowing officers to search using descriptive terms like "black backpack, blue pants" rather than license plates. Bryan Police acknowledged briefly testing similar search capabilities in 2025 but stated the department no longer uses that feature. Additionally, audit logs showed a January 2026 Bryan Police search logged as "immigration retention," though the department stated this was connected to investigating a social media threat of violence, not immigration enforcement. All three agencies list immigration enforcement as a prohibited use in their transparency portals.

DeFlock BCS also flagged the volume of out-of-county searches accessing Brazos-area camera data, reporting approximately 3 million searches of network data compared to 30,000 to 40,000 searches by local College Station and Bryan police. Brazos County Sheriff Wayne Dicky indicated that statewide search counts may be misleading because every connected system registers each search regardless of whether local data was actually accessed. DeFlock BCS raised broader concerns that Flock's expanding capabilities including drones, vehicle-mounted readers, and integration with traffic cameras are outpacing local policy development and oversight capacity [verify: search volume claims and audit methodology].

Residents can review their own city's Flock contract renewal dates, access published transparency portals, and file public records requests for search logs and audit reports to evaluate how the technology is being deployed in their jurisdiction.

Read the original reporting: kbtx.com.