Students Push Colleges to “De-Flock”

In September, Emory University removed a dozen license plate–reading cameras from its campus in Atlanta and declined to renew its contract with Flock Safety, the company that sells and operates the automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) and other mass-surveillance technology. For the coalition of Emory students and employees who had spent months pushing the university to “de-Flock,” this was a victory. 

“It was a big deal for us,” said Tony Torres, a sophomore biology major at Emory and president of Emory Students for Socialism, which was part of the DeFlock Emory coalition. “We made it very clear that these cameras were unneeded surveillance considering we already have regular security cameras.” 

Removing the cameras “does not represent a retreat from cultivating a culture of safety,” Emory spokesperson Laura Diamond told Inside Higher Ed in an email. “Importantly, this decision retains institutional control over our safety infrastructure. Emory will continue to invest in safety measures to protect students, faculty, staff, patients, visitors, and guests while maintaining a campus environment that is safe, welcoming, and consistent with our mission and values.”

Through campus protests, petitions, meetings and teach-ins during the spring and summer, DeFlock Emory broadcast their concerns about the devices: Opaque data-sharing agreements could leave undocumented students vulnerable, the cameras could be hacked, institutions could use them to retaliate against student protesters and they could make students who fear being surveilled less likely go to class, see their friends or seek medical attention when they need it.

Such concerns aren’t unique to DeFlock Emory. College students across the country—including at Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Florida and the University of North Georgia—are mobilizing to de-Flock their campuses. And like Emory, other institutions are nixing their contracts. Cornell University announced last week it had not renewed its contract with Flock Safety and would be removing the cameras. Pennsylvania State University officials also announced earlier this month plans to end their contract with Flock. 

But for many student activists, including Torres, the fight doesn’t end when the cameras come down.

Fighting Crime With Flock

A Flock Safety spokesperson declined to share how many colleges and universities currently use the ALPRs, but a recent study identified at least 150 institutions that employed the surveillance tech as of May. They included large public institutions like Ball State University in Indiana, Tarleton State University in Texas and the University of Tennessee; two-year colleges like Hudson Valley Community College in New York and Jefferson College in Missouri; and liberal arts colleges such as Claflin University in South Carolina. 

ALPRs allow institutions to track which vehicles come and go from campus by capturing a “point in time image of the rear of a vehicle,” the Flock spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed in an email. The cameras don’t use facial recognition and cannot identify anyone inside the vehicle or whom the vehicle is registered to. ALPRs have helped campus police investigate and solve crimes; for example, Flock assisted law enforcement in tracking, identifying and later finding the shooter who killed two students at Brown University in December. A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign spokesperson said earlier this month that the university’s 20 license plate readers have been essential to investigating suicidal or missing persons, sexual assault cases, aggravated battery, and vehicle theft. 

“Students deserve to feel safe at school and Flock license plate recognition technology has a measurable impact on helping to solve crimes and increase public safety,” the Flock spokesperson wrote. “We understand that schools and universities must evaluate public safety technology, and we respect each institution’s authority to make those decisions, but taking away these tools could impact the safety of students.”

Students’ concerns about Flock most often center on who can see the recorded data and when. According to the spokesperson, Flock doesn’t sell its data, and “customers control their data and sharing relationships.” Greater control over data sharing is a new offering, said Torin Monahan, a media and technology studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who authored the recent study on how campus police use Flock. 

“Since they’ve received so much negative media attention, they have changed the defaults on their data sharing so that it’s much more restrictive now than it used to be,” he said. 

As the DeFlock movement gained steam on college campuses last year, investigative journalists discovered that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, with the help of local and state police, were using Flock data to assist with removal and deportations. Flock maintains it does not contract with ICE or “any subsidiary of the Department of Homeland Security,” the company spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. 

But Monahan said it’s not that simple. Flock clients can choose to share their data with nearby institutions and other police departments, and anyone with access to that network can tap into it. Though ICE officers may not have direct access, they can receive information from the system via local and state police. 

Monahan is also suspicious of the company, which has been accused of lying to, ignoring or misleading its clients. In April, the Oshkosh City Council in Wisconsin rescinded its Flock contract after company representatives told the council the software did not create “heat maps” that tracked vehicles, which turned out to be untrue, WBAY reported. Flock officials called the situation “one small misconception” and stood by its explanation. In September, Flock reinstalled a camera in Dayton, Minn., “without authorization,” after the city voted to end its Flock contract, the local government said in a Facebook post. Flock later told government officials it would take up to 60 days to remove the equipment. 

When enrollment at primarily Latino Elgin Community College dipped after ICE officers detained a student in a campus parking lot in September 2025, the college sought to cancel its contract with Flock “out of an abundance of caution,” President Peggy Heinrich told the Chicago Sun Times earlier this month. Flock refused, arguing it had not breached the contract. In response, Elgin officials offered to pay out the remaining five months of the contract as long as the cameras were taken down, but Flock never replied, Heinrich said. College staff then covered the cameras with black trash bags and zip ties—a move other municipalities have taken while they wait out existing Flock contracts—but workers in an unmarked van removed the bags, according to Heinrich. Flock uninstalled the cameras for good in April, when Elgin’s contract expired. 

“We’re just doing everything we can here to be sure this feels like a safe place for our students to come,” Heinrich told the Sun Times. “We want them to come here and to be able to focus on learning.” 

A ‘Wake-Up Moment’

As part of his research, Monahan has spoken with campus police officers about how they use Flock. In general, the departments have significantly upgraded their surveillance efforts in recent years, he said. 

“They have some amazingly high-tech integrated surveillance systems with drones, with facial recognition technology, with Flock and other ALPR technologies, real-time crime centers,” Monahan said. “They have an elaborate arsenal in place of high-tech surveillance equipment that really seems overpowered for what their day-to-day needs are, and also incredibly expensive.”

Some institutions spend tens of thousands a year on Flock technology. For example, according to recent contracts obtained by Inside Higher Ed via Freedom of Information Act requests, Old Dominion University in Virginia pays $33,974 a year for about a dozen cameras. East Tennessee State University pays $15,000 a year for five cameras. 

The timing is not coincidental. After pro-Palestinian student encampments sprang up on campuses in the spring of 2024, universities “invested heavily in surveillance equipment, in part to document and interrupt any future campuswide protests,” Monahan said. “They had cameras and equipment before the protests, it’s just that these systems have intensified notably since then.” 

Declan Rooney, a sophomore public policy major at the University of Delaware, is relatively new to the nationwide DeFlock movement. He first noticed the cameras around his grandfather’s house in Bethany Beach, Del., over the summer, and later learned that the University of Delaware has 10 Flock ALPRs.

“When I saw them around Bethany, it was this wake-up moment,” Rooney said. Surveillance “is affecting me, affecting my personal life and my family … and most of the people around me had no clue what Flock cameras were or why they were put up.”

Back on campus in August, Rooney founded DeFlockUD, which currently counts about 30 members. Their second meeting was held this week, and the students will soon meet with campus police and university leaders to discuss the surveillance tech. Buzz about Flock is already spreading in Wilmington, where the university is based. The city removed four Flock cameras in August.

In a statement, a University of Delaware spokesperson said the university is using the cameras to “investigate incidents, resolve crimes and support appropriate law enforcement activity” and that the campus police force has “strong policies governing how its personnel may access, use, retain and share ALPR data. Those policies reflect the University’s expectation that ALPR data be used only for legitimate law enforcement purposes and establish limits on access, sharing and retention.”

Institutional transparency about the cameras is important, Rooney said, but greater regulation won’t quell his concerns; he’s against the cameras in principle. Even if the Flock cameras eventually come down—as they did at Emory, Elgin and Cornell—Rooney wants to ensure that they will not be replaced by cameras from a similar vendor, like Axon or Motorola Solutions, two of Flock’s biggest competitors. At Emory, Torres said his group is pushing for the same—a complete moratorium on surveillance technology like Flock. 

“Flock is evil, obviously … but the people at the University of Delaware—the police chief, he just wants to police more easily. It makes sense why he would seek to implement this technology. And so it’s our responsibility to fight back and say why we’re against it,” Rooney said. “Somebody will get hurt using this network—it’s only a matter of time.”