The cameras went up quietly over a few months — placed high above the road, blending into traffic infrastructure. About the size of a soda can with a small solar panel mounted above it, they sit angled toward traffic with their dark lenses pointed at passing cars.
On a cold Saturday morning in early March, small groups of people gathered beside traffic poles across the state.
Some stood in the median near a highway exit in Firestone. Others lined a sidewalk across from a cluster of mobile homes in Golden, holding hand-written signs that pointed toward the camera.
“You’re being tracked,” one sign read, an arrow pointing upward.
Drivers slowed. Some leaned out their windows and spotted a camera many had likely passed hundreds of times.
As Flock Safety racks up contracts with Colorado law enforcement, grassroots volunteers have mapped out the company’s expanding reach, documenting thousands of automated license plate reader cameras, commonly known as ALPRs, discreetly placed across major cities and far-flung corners of the state — the result of partnerships with nearly 100 Colorado police agencies and more than 160 private entities or community safety organizations, including homeowners associations.
While cops and public safety leaders say the technology solves crimes and recovers stolen vehicles, critics warn the same system can track people’s daily movements, raising concerns about wrongful arrests, data misuse and federal sharing, including for immigration enforcement.
With limited legal guidance and inconsistent oversight, the fight unfolding on roadsides and city halls is less about the cameras themselves and more about what happens when a largely invisible surveillance system expands faster than the rules meant to govern it.
Colorado lawmakers have introduced several bills this year that would set guardrails on the expanding use of the technology. Senate Bill 70 would limit how long data can be stored, exempt location data from public records requests, restrict when agencies can search it and require warrants in certain cases. A related measure, Senate Bill 71, would establish broader oversight requirements, including audits and penalties for misuse.
Eyes Off’s demonstrations on March 7 were less about confrontation than visibility — drawing attention to a surveillance system many residents didn’t realize was in their neighborhoods.
“It’s surprising how many people you talk to about Flock that have no idea it’s even there,” said Andrew Gentry, a software engineer and founder of advocacy group Eyes Off Colorado. “They’ll say, ‘I’ve never heard about it. How did it get here?’”
ALPRs are cameras mounted on infrastructure that photograph passing vehicles. The systems convert license plates into searchable text and store the images along with time, date and location data.
Organizers warn that Colorado’s growing network of license plate reader cameras builds a searchable record of where people travel, and that the data can be retained for weeks or months, depending on vendor settings and local policies. Through networked systems, agencies can search that data across jurisdictions.
Police departments say the cameras have helped identify vehicles connected to investigations — solving crimes, recovering stolen vehicles and tracking suspects. A total of 60 police and sheriff departments across Colorado utilize ALPR technology and 42 of those departments have contracts with Flock.
In Thornton, police describe the cameras as part of a broader set of tools used to support public safety, though it does not specify data retention limits, access controls or auditing practices.
In a department newsletter, Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn described ALPRs as an important tool and wrote that they monitor how the technology is used. The newsletter cited groups, including a chapter of the NAACP in Oakland, California, that argue ALPRs reduce subjective or biased policing decisions. In a recent federal case involving a similar system in Virginia, a judge ruled that a limited set of images collected over a 21-day period did not track the entirety of someone’s movements.
According to a statement from Flock, in addition to law enforcement deployments, the company also contracts with private entities like businesses, homeowners associations and community organizations. Private cameras reportedly operate under different rules — owners cannot access law enforcement systems nor is private-system data automatically available to police. However, private camera owners may choose to share the data, allowing officers to access footage when a vehicle linked to a crime is detected, depending on local policies.
For some activists, the issue wasn’t something they first encountered in policy debates or court decisions, but in their daily lives. Will Freeman, a developer and activist who runs the advocacy website DeFlock, said he noticed the spread while driving across the country from his hometown in Alabama several years ago.
When he moved to Colorado, he saw the same pattern. In Broomfield, Freeman spent months warning city officials that ALPRs would arrive. Eventually, they did.
“I started seeing them everywhere,” he said. “I was driving through places I’d always driven through, and suddenly there were these cameras. That’s when it felt urgent.”
Rollouts have occurred across Colorado, often with limited public attention. Contracts are approved as routine upgrades to public safety infrastructure, activists say, without much discussion of how the systems work or how the data is used.
“Sometimes it’s called ‘public safety equipment’ or ‘situational awareness tools,’” Freeman said. “If you’re a council member reading that on a consent agenda, you’re not thinking about mass surveillance.”
By the time residents understand the systems, activists say, the cameras are already installed. Many say modern ALPR systems operate at a different scale, collecting far more data over time. But whether that scale crosses a constitutional line remains unsettled.
“The answer is that we don’t know yet,” said Vivek Krishnamurthy, a University of Colorado law professor who specializes in digital law. “The legal system hasn’t fully confronted these issues.”
The uncertainty reflects limits of the Fourth Amendment, which was written to guard against physical searches — not persistent, digital tracking. Courts are only beginning to grapple with how those protections apply to modern technology. United States v. Chatrie exposed deep divisions in how judges interpret digital location tracking.
Krishnamurthy says the design of surveillance systems can influence how widely data is shared. When data can be accessed with a few clicks, he says, it lowers barriers that might otherwise limit its use. For activists, this is part of the urgency.
With courts offering limited guidance, the debate is now moving into state legislatures. Activists are lobbying lawmakers to support those measures, arguing that guardrails are needed before the systems spread further.
Flock says its nationwide network connects thousands of law enforcement agencies, allowing officers to search across jurisdictions in seconds. The company frequently highlights those capabilities in social media posts, where it shares examples of cases where the technology helped police identify suspects or recover stolen vehicles.
In one Facebook post, Flock said its cameras helped law enforcement in Pagosa Springs arrest a man suspected in the killings of three women in Utah. Supporters point to this as evidence the systems are powerful investigative tools, notably in serious crimes that cross jurisdictional lines. Critics say those successes can obscure broader questions about collecting data on people not suspected of crimes.
“Of course it’ll help solve crime. … It’s mass surveillance,” Freeman said. “By the nature of surveillance, you’re going to know where people are.”
As the systems scale, activists say, so do the risks. In addition to plate numbers, ALPRs can log vehicle characteristics, but optical character recognition is not always perfect, raising the possibility of misreads that could link an innocent driver to an investigation.
Flock says its systems are designed to reduce bias by relying on vehicle data rather than personal identifiers, and that agencies retain ownership of and decide how the data they collect is shared, while standard retention periods limit length of storage. For grassroots activists, those safeguards do not outweigh concerns about building large, searchable databases of people’s movements.
Errors and misuse have already surfaced. In Atlanta, a police officer was accused of using the system to look up a former romantic partner. In Texas, license plate reader data was reportedly used in an abortion-related investigation. In Colorado, Chrisanna Elser filed a lawsuit after she was wrongly linked to a package theft.
Elser said the experience reshaped how she thinks about privacy and policing; she now keeps extensive personal records of her own. She said her concerns are less about the technology itself, and more about how — and by whom — they are used. She has not received any apology or clear explanation from law enforcement about how she was identified.
“I was in the vicinity at that time, but if (law enforcement) would have done their proper due diligence — They would have not wasted my time and they wouldn’t have wasted their time,” Elser said.
A review of statewide data shows thousands of these cameras installed across Colorado, with concentrations varying sharply by county. The data is compiled from public records and existing community reporting and was cross-checked where possible.
The technology has spread rapidly in part because of its subscription model. Flock installs and maintains the cameras while departments pay an annual fee — an arrangement activists say appeals to agencies facing tight budgets.
“When a company says, ‘hey, we’ve got a sweet new product that is able to do basically all of your policing for you, and it’s only a fraction of the cost of a human,’” Gentry said, “it looks like a pretty good deal to anyone on a city council trying to stretch a budget.”
Dozens of Colorado cities use some form of ALPR technology. But the same networked design that allows agencies to share data fuels concern about how widely that data can circulate, prompting shifts in how cities approach the technology.
That debate is now reaching city halls across Colorado. In Denver, officials ended a contract with Flock and approved a one-year deal with Axon after a narrow 7-6 city council vote. Council President Amanda Sandoval cast the deciding vote.
City leaders say Axon includes stronger privacy protections and fewer cameras. Activists argue that the underlying model remains the same and the city approved a new surveillance system without first establishing clear rules for its use.
Shannon Hoffman, a project manager with Coloradans for the Common Good, said Denver’s decision reflects a deeper inconsistency in how officials describe Denver’s identity and how policy is implemented. She added that for communities with heightened surveillance, effects are compounded by concerns tied to the expansion of data infrastructure in their neighborhoods.
“In a sanctuary city,” she said, “supporting a technology that could be used to target immigrants is not consistent behavior.”
Axon’s system is integrated within its broader suite of police technologies, including body cameras, and allows departments to set policies around retention and searches. City officials have said those policy controls were part of the consideration in Denver’s decision.
For activists, their concern is not which company operates the cameras, but the existence of databases tracking where vehicles travel over time. Even when departments follow policy, some argue that enforcement can be inconsistent. Access logs and audits are not public and oversight often depends on internal review.
Some critics have also raised concerns about Axon’s broader business ties. In a March opinion column published by the Denver Westword, state Representative Javier Mabrey argued that the company has existing contracts with federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and warned this raises questions about how surveillance technology is used beyond the local level. Axon has said its ALPRs operate under local control and that agencies set their own policies for data access and use.
Unlike traditional advocacy organizations with paid staff and formal leadership, Colorado’s anti-surveillance movement has emerged in a decentralized way. Many consist of only a handful of volunteers coordinating online through platforms like Discord and Signal. DeFlock and Eyes Off Colorado rely on volunteers who track camera installations, gather public records, testify before city councils and organize demonstrations.
In Thornton, activist Steve Mathias founded Thornton For All, and compares the technology to other investigative tools that society has deliberately limited.
“We need DNA and fingerprints to solve crimes too, but we wouldn’t take DNA from every person in the city,” Mathias said. “When you get one picture, that’s a picture. … When you collect thousands … that’s a film of someone’s life.”
Wendy Berger, a member of Coloradans for the Common Good and B’nai Havurah Synagogue, pointed to the Jewish prayer Shema, which emphasizes the affirming of shared experience. For Berger, technology that collects and stores data about communities can carry real harm across generations, especially for immigrant communities and groups with histories of being tracked or profiled.
“If it’s dangerous for our neighbors, it is dangerous for us too,” Berger said.
For Isabella Nevin, an organizer with the political group Our Revolution, the issue extends beyond policing technology. She said surveillance intersects with broader concerns, including immigration enforcement and reproductive rights. Nevin said she tries to make the issue more personal.
“I ask people, ‘How do you feel about someone knowing where your daughter goes to school?’” she said. “How do you feel about someone knowing the gas station you go to?”
Nevin grew up on the Western Slope and often organizes in parts of the state where trust in police is high. In places with a large concentration of military contractors, support for law enforcement can be even stronger.
For other residents, particularly immigrants, she said, concern shapes behavior — whether people attend protests, community events or even routine activities.
“People don’t want their plates read because they’re worried that data might get shared and lead to immigration enforcement,” she said. “That’s not just one person staying home. That’s someone not participating in their community.”