The program
What a Flock network actually does, what Arvada's own contracts establish about Arvada's, and, at equal length because it matters just as much, the specific things those contracts leave out.
What is a Flock camera?
A Flock Safety license-plate reader is a solar-powered, cellular-connected still camera, usually pole-mounted over a road. Arvada's own contracts describe it. It photographs passing vehicles, reads the plate, and uses what Flock calls “Vehicle Fingerprint” technology to record the car itself: in the 2023 agreement's words, “type, make, color, state registration, missing/covered plates, bumper stickers, decals, roof racks, and bike racks.” So a car can be searched for even when the plate is unreadable or absent.[1][2]
Two properties make it different from a traffic camera. First, it is indiscriminate: it records every vehicle, not only vehicles connected to a crime, building a movement history of an entire population of drivers. Second, it is networked. The images land in Flock's cloud, hosted on Amazon Web Services, rather than on city property, and the platform Arvada bought lists a “State Network” and a “Nationwide Network” for plate lookups among its features.[2]
That second property is the whole of the Colorado argument. A camera bought by Arvada to find stolen cars is also, potentially, a node other agencies can query for their own reasons. The Context page collects the Colorado cases where that is exactly what happened.
Arvada runs more than one plate-reader system
“Arvada's Flock cameras” is how this usually gets described, and it is the smallest accurate description of what the documents show. The release names five separate plate-reader arrangements, and contains the contracts for only two of them.
| System | What it is | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Flock Safety LPR (formerly “Falcon”) | 15 fixed, pole-mounted cameras, 30-day cloud retention, $47,500 a year from December 2025. | The 2025 Flock contract.[2] |
| Flock Falcon Flex | One “single Falcon Flex,” Flock's self-installed plate reader. | Named in the 2025 contract as a separate agreement. Not released.[2] |
| Genetec AutoVu (in-car) | Plate readers on patrol cars. The July 2025 purchase adds 3 cars, 2 cameras each, and says Genetec “is current System used.” | The Minuteman agreement.[3] The 2022 Genetec maintenance agreement it cites is not released. |
| LexisNexis Risk Solutions | Holds a copy of Arvada's mobile ALPR data “per agreement with the Arvada Police Department.” | Policy PM 460. The agreement itself is not released.[4] |
| City-owned fixed and portable ALPR | PM 460 describes fixed readers “owned by the Arvada Police Department, the City of Arvada, and leased through third-party vendors,” and a portable category. No city-owned fixed unit appears in any released contract. | Policy PM 460.[4] |
Each arrangement keeps data on different terms. Flock deletes on a 30-day rolling basis in the cloud; patrol-car reads sit on a city server for 364 days and are also held by LexisNexis, for a period the policy does not state. A question like “how long does Arvada keep my plate?” has at least three answers, and one of them belongs to a data broker.[2][4]
What volunteers have mapped
The release contains no camera locations. The only public account of where plate readers stand in Arvada is volunteer-built: on Sept. 28, 2026, OpenStreetMap, the dataset behind the DeFlock map, held 37 reported license-plate readers inside the city boundary, 31 of them tagged as Flock Safety hardware.[6] That is more than twice the 15 Flock cameras on the 2025 contract.[2] If the reports are accurate, at least half of the Flock hardware mapped inside Arvada is not accounted for by that contract, and the map cannot say whose it is. See the map.
| Manufacturer tag | Mapped readers | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Flock Safety | 31 | Two share identical coordinates and camera direction, and may be one camera entered twice. |
| Genetec | 1 | A fixed reader, tagged as mounted on a traffic signal, 7 meters from West 58th Avenue. The Genetec purchase in the release is for readers on patrol cars.[3] |
| No manufacturer tag | 5 | Three of the five name Flock Safety in another tag (brand, operator or name). |
| Total | 37 | No reader was mapped as anything other than a single point. |
Only three of the 37 carry an operator tag. One is tagged as
privately operated, for a Lowe's store; one is tagged as operated by the Arvada
Police Department; one names Flock Safety itself. The other 34 say nothing about
who runs them. An untagged camera is not thereby a city camera, and a tagged one
is only what a volunteer wrote down.[6]
A 60-day pilot that ran about 32 months
This is the part of the record the two Flock documents tell differently, placed side by side. Neither document explains the difference, and this site does not guess at one.
March 2023: the order form
A Flock “Services Agreement Order Form,” signed for “CO - Arvada PD” by the chief of police and DocuSign-stamped March 28 and 29, 2023, prices 40 Falcon cameras at $2,500 each a year, “Flock Safety Advanced Search” at $2,500, and a $350-per-camera installation fee: $116,500 for year one, $102,500 a year after.[1]
The pilot is the first 60 days of the initial term, with an “option to cancel contract at no cost.” The year-one invoice is due once the final camera count is settled “and the Pilot Period has concluded.”[1]
December 2025: the contract
The Master Services Agreement signed December 3 (the chief) and December 9, 2025 (Flock's Chief Legal Officer) recites that on or about March 29, 2023 the parties entered a “Pilot Agreement” under which Flock provided “a Pilot Period of the Flock Services at no cost to Arvada.”[2]
“Under the Pilot Agreement, 12 Flock Safety LPRs are currently installed and operating, and three additional Flock Safety LPRs are pending installation.” The new contract covers 15, supersedes the pilot, and starts billing: $52,750 at signing.[2]
On the documents' own dates, cameras were running under a “pilot” from roughly March 2023 to December 2025, about 32 months, against a pilot period the 2023 form sets at 60 days. The release contains no invoice, purchase order, payment record, amendment or extension for that period, so this site cannot say whether Arvada paid anything before December 2025, whether the pilot was formally extended, or why the camera count fell from 40 quoted to 15 contracted. A records request for the pilot-period invoices and any extension would settle it.
What Arvada pays for, from December 2025
| Line | Quantity | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Flock Safety Platform: Essentials, LPR cameras (“fka Falcon”), Advanced Search | 1 / 15 / 1 | $47,500 a year |
| Standard Implementation Fee, $350 per camera | 15 | $5,250 once |
| Discount (professional services) | $4,500 | |
| Year one, billed at signing | $52,750 | |
| Each renewal year after | $47,500 |
The platform lists Advanced Search, which “includes Convoy Analysis, Multi Geo Search, and Visual Search,” plus “Unlimited Custom Hot Lists” and “Vehicle Fingerprint Search.” The purchase was made “in accordance with the sole source provisions of Arvada's Purchasing Ordinance”: no competitive bid.[2]
Flock owns the cameras, “shall have final discretion to veto a specific location,” and may terminate if the city moves one. No camera location appears anywhere in the release; the contract refers to a “Deployment Plan” that was not attached. The only location the city has put in writing is in its policy: fixed readers “throughout the City of Arvada, to include but not limited to the Olde Town Transit Hub and various intersections.”[2][4]
What the order form says the platform can reach
The order form's list of included FlockOS features is the plainest statement in the release of what the network is for:
“State Network (License Plate Lookup Only) Allows agencies to look up license plates on all cameras opted into the Flock Safety network within your state.”
“Nationwide Network (License Plate Lookup Only) … a nationwide system boasting 10 billion additional plate reads per month.”
“Community Network Access: The ability to request direct access to feeds from privately owned Flock Safety LPR cameras located in neighborhoods, schools, and businesses.”
These are features Arvada gets: searching other agencies' cameras, and asking for private ones. Whether Arvada's own 15 cameras are opted in for other agencies to search is a configuration setting, not a contract term, and no document in the release records it. That setting is the single most important fact about the program, and it is unpublished.[2]
What has been published does not agree with itself. In September 2025, CBS News Colorado reported that, of the Colorado agencies that provided their data, “most allow law enforcement nationwide to search their cameras, including Arvada.”[7] In December 2025 the chief's memo to council said access to Arvada's network “is granted to local and state law enforcement agencies in Colorado only,” and in February 2026 a police slide told council: “We decide who has access - currently only CO LE agencies.”[8] Eyes Off Colorado, a volunteer watchdog project, read Flock's transparency page for Arvada as listing 72 organizations with access, all of them in Colorado.[9] No released document shows the setting itself, records a change, or explains the difference from what CBS found.
The transparency page is where the city points. Its own ALPR page says the Flock portal lists “the number of cameras in use,” the organizations that can access Arvada's Flock data, search counts and vehicle volumes, and that it updates daily.[10] Those figures are the vendor's summary rather than a city record, and they change; this site quotes them only as others have read and dated them.
The data terms, as written
- Retention: 30 days, and also up to a year. The order form sets “Retention Period: 30 Days.” The attached security addendum says data from cameras bought by a police agency is kept per rules set by elected officials, “but no longer than one (1) year.” Both contracts carry both numbers and never reconcile them.[1][2]
- Ownership: the city owns its data and “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data.” But the city grants Flock a “perpetual, royalty-free right to use and distribute” anonymized data, and permits its use for “the training of machine learning algorithms.”[2]
- Immigration: the 2025 contract bars Flock itself from handing over footage under “an immigration subpoena that has not been authorized by a federal court,” and requires seven days' notice to the city before other legal disclosures. That clause governs Flock's disclosures. It says nothing about other agencies searching through the lookup networks.[2]
- Audit: “Customers do not have the right to independently audit Flock directly.” No term requires search logs, who searched which plate and why, to be kept for or delivered to the city.[2]
Renews on its own, and hard to leave early
The 2025 contract's term for the cameras “shall commence on the date of the last Party's signature,” December 9, 2025, and runs 12 months. It then “will automatically renew for no more than four successive renewal terms” unless either side gives notice “at least thirty (30) days prior to the end of the then-current term.” By this site's arithmetic, the first renewal falls around December 9, 2026, and notice would be due around November 9, 2026.[2]
Stopping it mid-term is harder than in most city contracts. There is no termination for convenience. The city may end it “in the public interest” only “upon approval by its City Council through resolution at a City Council business meeting,” with 30 days' notice, and fees already paid are not refunded. The other exits are a change in law that makes the service unlawful, non-appropriation, or an uncured breach.[2]
No council vote brought the program in: the chief signed every contract in the release. But the one clause that lets Arvada leave early on policy grounds is written around a council resolution. The body that was never asked to approve the contract is the only one that can end it for the public interest. Non-renewal, by contrast, needs only 30 days' written notice, and the contract does not say who in the city must give it.[2]
Who actually runs the cameras
On paper, the police department does, end to end. The Flock customer of record is “CO - Arvada PD,” used even as the 2025 order form's “Legal Entity Name.” Customer notices go to a police commander. The chief of police signed the 2023 order form, the 2025 contract, and the July 2025 Genetec purchase. Each carries blocks for the City Clerk's attestation and the City Attorney's approval as to form; on the 2025 contract both are signed. No signature from the City Manager or Mayor appears on any of them.[1][2][3]
The signatures track the city's purchasing rules. Under the ordinance in force in March 2023, a department director could approve any budgeted contract up to $199,999.99, and council approval by resolution began at $500,000; a multi-year contract the city can end within its first year is measured by its first-year amount. Both Flock deals, at $116,500 and $52,750 for their first years, fell under the director's line, and a December 16, 2025 rewrite of the ordinance lowered that line to $149,999.99 without changing the council threshold.[11] Council's routine window onto contracts of this size is a weekly list from the city manager, and the policy that creates the list covers “formally solicited” contracts as written.[12] The 2025 agreement recites that Flock was bought sole source, with no solicitation.[2]
In practice, the plate readers feed a larger apparatus. Policy PM 461, effective July 16, 2026, creates the Arvada Real Time Information Center (ARTIC), which “consolidates information from multiple sources, including … automated license plate readers (ALPR), camera systems at City facilities, body-worn cameras, unmanned aircraft systems (drones), law enforcement databases, and open source intelligence.” A commander runs it and reports to the Field Services Deputy Chief. The cameras are not a standalone gadget; they are one input to a live monitoring center.[5]
The in-car system has a separate paper trail. Arvada issued Request for Bid 25-PD-061 on June 30, 2025, for plate readers on three patrol cars, specifying “No Substitute on Genetec AutoVue brand product. Genetec AutoVue is current System used.” Minuteman Security Technologies, already Arvada's Genetec maintenance contractor since a November 2022 agreement, won it at $75,615.26: six cameras, a five-year warranty and installation.[3]
What the city still has not disclosed
A watchdog site is only as honest as its account of what it failed to find. The request asked for all contracts and paperwork between the city and Flock. Each row below is something the release itself points to, and does not contain.
| Missing record | Where it is referenced | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| The Falcon Flex agreement | 2025 Flock contract, recitals | A Flock contract, squarely inside the request, not produced.[2] |
| Pilot-period invoices, POs, extensions | 2023 order form billing terms | Would show whether 32 months of cameras were free, paid, or extended.[1] |
| Sharing / network settings | 2025 order form feature list | Which agencies can search Arvada's cameras, and whether national lookup is on.[2] |
| Deployment Plan (camera locations) | Both Flock agreements | Where the 15 cameras are.[1][2] |
| LexisNexis agreement | PM 460 §460.6 | A data broker holds Arvada's patrol-car plate reads, on terms nobody has published.[4] |
| RM 460.1 and the administrator's procedures | PM 460 §460.4.1; PM 461 §461.10 | The operating rules PM 460 delegates: training, monitoring, purging.[4][5] |
| 2022 Genetec agreement and its IT provisions | Minuteman agreement §2.2, §6.4 | The terms under which the in-car system's data is handled.[3] |
| Search audit logs | PM 460 §460.7; 2025 order form “Insights & Analytics” | Who searched which plate, and why. The system is described as able to log it.[2][4] |
The Falcon Flex agreement, the pilot-period invoices and any pilot extension are Flock paperwork and fall inside the request as written; the rest are adjacent records that a follow-up request would need to name. None of this establishes that Arvada has done anything improper. It establishes that everything the public now knows about this program came out of a records request, and that the parts that would show how the network is actually used are still out of view.
Eight questions the record does not answer
- Are Arvada's cameras opted into Flock's state or national lookup networks, and which agencies can search them today? Published statements conflict; see the lookup networks.
- Did Arvada pay anything between March 2023 and December 2025, and was the 60-day pilot formally extended?
- Where are the cameras? Fifteen Flock units, one Falcon Flex, and the patrol cars carrying Genetec readers.
- What does the Falcon Flex agreement say, and why was it not produced?
- How long does LexisNexis keep Arvada's plate reads, and who can search them there?
- Which retention figure governs the Flock data: the order form's 30 days, or the security addendum's one year?
- Have the audits PM 460 says “should” happen ever happened, and what did they find?
- Who decides whether the contract renews in December 2026, and will the public hear about it before it does?
Sources for this page
- City of Arvada / Flock Group Inc., Services Agreement Order Form, Government Agency Agreement, Information Security Addendum and CJIS Security Addendum, DocuSign-dated March 28–29, 2023 (29 pp.), obtained under the Colorado Open Records Act. PDF
- City of Arvada / Flock Group Inc., Master Services Agreement with Exhibits A–E, signed December 3 and 9, 2025 (67 pp.), obtained under CORA. PDF
- City of Arvada / Minuteman Security Technologies, Inc., Agreement for automated license plate recognition systems, not to exceed $75,615.26, DocuSign-dated July 21, 2025, with Request for Bid 25-PD-061 and bid response (24 pp.), obtained under CORA. PDF
- Arvada Police Department, Policy Manual PM 460, “Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR),” effective June 11, 2025, obtained under CORA. DOCX
- Arvada Police Department, Policy Manual PM 461, “Arvada Real Time Information Center (ARTIC),” effective July 16, 2026, obtained under CORA. DOCX
- OpenStreetMap surveillance data: Overpass API query for nodes tagged
man_made=surveillanceandsurveillance:type=ALPRinside the City of Arvada boundary (OSM relation 112912), retrieved Sept. 28, 2026. JSON · Exact query and method - Shaun Boyd, “Crime fighter or mass surveillance? In Colorado, license plate readers are high-tech and widespread,” CBS News Colorado, September 22, 2025. cbsnews.com
- City of Arvada, City Council workshop packet, February 10, 2026 (agenda item 2.B), containing the chief's memo of December 22, 2025 and the police department's slides. PDF
- Eyes Off Colorado, Frequently Asked Questions: “Arvada listed 72 organizations, all in Colorado.” eyesoffcolorado.org
- City of Arvada, “Automated License Plate Reader Cameras” (city web page). arvadaco.gov
- Arvada City Code, Chapter 82, “Purchasing and Contracts.” Municode
- City of Arvada, Administrative Policy 3300.08, “Administrative Policy and Procedures Related to the Purchasing Ordinance,” §1.3.1. PDF