We’re residents asking City Council to end the city’s use of Flock license plate cameras. On Tuesday, October 6, council votes on a 2027 budget with or without Flock.
City Hall, 1290 S. Public Rd. Council will choose between two versions of the 2027 budget: one that keeps Flock and one that ends it. You don’t have to speak. Filling a seat counts.
Every number here comes from the City of Lafayette, its police department’s public Flock portal, or documents released under the Colorado Open Records Act.
Council approved the five-year contract in January 2024 as one line on the consent agenda, with no separate discussion. It runs through early 2029, but Colorado law doesn’t let a city commit future budgets without a vote of the people. So the agreement says it ends, with no penalty, in any year council doesn’t fund it. Flock then removes its cameras at its own expense. That makes the 2027 budget the real decision. After residents spoke up in September, city staff prepared two versions of the budget for October 6. Resolution 2026-24B adopts the budget with no funding for Flock, and the contract ends when this year’s money runs out. The difference is $77,500.
“Any failure of Customer’s governing body to annually appropriate adequate monies… shall terminate this Agreement… and such termination shall be without penalty or other cost to Customer.”
On September 15, eleven residents spoke about Flock at council and none spoke in favor. Council noticed. The next step is a bigger room.
Tuesday, October 6, 5:30 PM at City Hall. Council votes on Flock that night. Speak for two minutes or just sit with us.
Meeting details →Can’t come? Comments sent by 1 PM on meeting day go into the packet council reads. Ask council to pass Resolution 2026-24B, the budget without Flock. Three sentences is plenty.
City comment form →A few emails a month: meeting dates, what happened, and what’s next. Send a blank email to the address below and confirm when it writes back. Your address is never shared.
deflock+subscribe@groups.io →Flock Safety is a private company that leases license plate cameras to police. Each camera photographs passing vehicles and logs the plate, time, location, and details like make and color. Lafayette keeps the data for 30 days, and it can be searched by Lafayette police and by other agencies on Flock’s network.
Because people don’t stay in one town. Lafayette’s 30 cameras recorded nearly 450,000 different vehicles in a month, about fifteen times the city’s population. Most of those drivers live somewhere else and never had a say. It works the other way too: when you drive to a neighboring city with Flock cameras, you’re recorded there, and police on the network can search all of it at once. Flock says its network has more than 120,000 cameras in 49 states.
No. The cameras record every car that passes by, 24 hours a day.
Modestly. A 2026 University of South Carolina study found an 11% reduction in car thefts. Putting ankle monitors on everyone would also reduce crime, but we don’t let the government do that. The Bill of Rights is a list of things the government is not allowed to do.
No. Council counts heads. Coming and sitting in the room matters, and so does a short written comment.
Lafayette residents, unpaid and unaffiliated with any party or organization. It was started in 2026 by Chao Chen, who filed the records requests behind the numbers on this page, and it now includes neighbors from across town.