Flock

An Illinois College Tried To Cancel Its Flock Contract. Flock Refused.

Elgin Community College even tied garbage bags over the cameras, but Flock technicians just cut them down.

Joe Lancaster | 10.13.2026 1:45 PM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Illustration: Feng Yu/Dreamstime/Charles McClintock Wilson/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)

Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company worth more than $8 billion, manufactures automated license plate readers (ALPRs), cameras that capture images of license plates and store them in a database that police can search.

Recently, the company has been under intense scrutiny over concerns about privacy and the cameras' capacity for misuse, leading some cities to cancel their Flock contracts. But it turns out that getting rid of Flock is easier said than done.

"When Elgin Community College hired Flock Safety to install six surveillance cameras in April 2025, President Peggy Heinrich thought they would 'enhance the safety and security of students,'" Lisa Kurian Philip reported last week at the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Chicago-area school signed up for a one-year contract with the company. It was not alone: Five of Illinois' 12 public universities, plus four of its community colleges,

But Heinrich began to have second thoughts as she learned more about how the cameras can be used—for example, Flock allowed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to access over 80,000 of its cameras. In September 2025, ICE arrested a student near Elgin's campus.

More than half of Elgin's students are Latino, Heinrich told the Sun-Times, and enrollment began to........

© Reason.com