Flock Cameras in Montgomery County: TEXAS UPDATE!

TEXAS FLOCK UPDATE!!!!

Governor Greg Abbott ordered a halt to state funding for Flock Safety’s license plate cameras in late August, following a Texas Tribune investigation into how the state quietly spent tens of millions of dollars building out the network. /blog/flock-cameras-montgomery-county/

Cities across Texas are canceling their Flock contracts, and the backlash is coming from both sides of the political aisle. Here’s what actually changed, what Flock cameras in Montgomery County still look like on the ground, and what Texas law does and doesn’t require.

Quick Facts

• Gov. Abbott ordered Texas state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras on August 27, 2026.
• A Texas Tribune investigation found the state’s Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority steered at least $30 million toward Flock camera grants, using money from a $1 fee the legislature added to Texas auto insurance policies back in 2023. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-greg-abbott-flock-cameras-order-state-money/
• Montgomery County has 271 Flock cameras and ALPRs on the Texas Privacy Coalition’s statewide map. https://www.newsweek.com/map-reveals-texas-flock-camera-hotspots-as-abbott-blocks-funding-12383534
• Pflugerville and Hood County have already canceled their Flock contracts; more than 50 cities nationwide have done the same since the start of the year
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has ordered Flock cameras removed from Florida’s state highways within 30 days — this backlash isn’t just a Texas story
• A Texas congressman’s federal bill would require a warrant before federal agencies can access Flock data at all

What Flock Actually Is

• Flock Safety builds AI-powered cameras that photograph every license plate that passes, not just plates tied to an active investigation
• Each camera logs the plate number, vehicle make, color, and distinguishing features, along with the exact date, time, and location of the scan
• Officers can search that data across Flock’s national network, which links thousands of camera systems across the country, not just the cameras their own department owns
• Some contracts, including Harris County’s, pair the cameras with gunshot-detection sensors on the same poles

Where Flock Cameras Are Watching in This Area

• Conroe police have run their own Flock system since 2020, separate from the county’s newer cameras
• The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office has run Flock cameras around The Woodlands since February 2026, after the township funded 30 cameras through its FY2026 budget
• Harris County renewed its Flock contract through June 2027 in a May 2026 vote, and Houston police reported access to around 3,500 cameras as of 2024
• A Conroe resident’s public-records fight over the city’s Flock contract reached the Texas Attorney General’s office this summer, which ordered the city to release records it had tried to withhold. His Change.org petition to cancel the contract has drawn more than 1,200 signatures

Abbott’s Funding Freeze: What Actually Changed

• The order stops state agencies from funding Flock cameras going forward — it doesn’t ban existing cameras or force any department to shut its system down
• Most local systems, including Montgomery County’s, run on city, county, or township money rather than the state grants Abbott targeted, so the order doesn’t automatically touch them
• The freeze followed reporting that the state’s Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority had quietly helped install more than 3,200 Flock cameras since 2023, using money from a fee lawmakers originally passed as a catalytic-converter theft measure, with no legislative debate over using it this way
• Abbott cited a Lufkin police officer facing charges for using Flock to track a former girlfriend, and said flatly that “no private person should have access to Flock cameras”
• The backlash crosses party lines: progressive state lawmakers have run ads blaming Abbott for the network’s growth, while conservative U.S. Rep. Keith Self introduced a federal bill requiring a warrant before federal agencies can query Flock-style data at all, with co-sponsors from Arizona and Georgia

Texas Law: What Still Doesn’t Exist

• No statewide statute requires a warrant before police search Flock’s database — Abbott’s order changes funding, not the underlying legal framework
• State lawmakers have tried three times to pass ALPR-specific rules, and none of the bills made it out of committee
• Rep. Self’s federal PRIVACY Act would only bind federal agencies querying the data. It wouldn’t touch how Texas police departments use their own Flock systems, and it’s still sitting in committee
• Without statewide rules, each department, HOA, or management district still sets its own retention and search policy, and those policies still vary widely

The Chatrie Question

• On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States, ruling 6-3 that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they pull a person’s Google location history through a geofence warrant
• The decision builds directly on Carpenter v. United States (2018), which held that people keep a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their movements, even when a company technically holds the underlying data
• Chatrie is a cell-phone case, not a license-plate case — the Court didn’t rule on Flock or any ALPR system
• The open legal question is aggregation: a single camera catching one plate looks like ordinary public observation under United States v. Knotts (1983). A searchable, nationwide network that can reconstruct months of a person’s movements starts to look like the comprehensive tracking Chatrie and Carpenter both protect
• The political and legal pressure are starting to mirror each other: the same aggregation argument driving the Chatrie-based lawsuits is showing up in Abbott’s own language about a “network” that lets “no private person” access the data

Bottom Line

• All 271 Flock cameras in Montgomery County are still running, but the political ground under them has shifted hard in the last two weeks.
• Abbott’s order stops new state funding. It doesn’t touch Montgomery County’s township-funded cameras or force anyone to remove existing systems.
• Between a pending Supreme Court-adjacent doctrine, a federal bill requiring warrants, and a governor now calling the network a Fourth Amendment concern, the legal and political tools that could become available are creating a climate that will force this issue to be addressed. 

Contact The Meyers Firm

If Flock or another ALPR system shows up in your case, the search log matters as much as the photo. Call 936-766-5171 or email meyerspaulesq@gmail.com to talk to Paul NOW!