Conroe’s adopted budget preserves $127,500 a year for a 51-camera Flock Safety contract, even as Dallas prepares to cut 321 cameras and other Texas governments pull back from the technology.
The Conroe City Council did not hold a separate vote on Flock. Members approved the city budget 4-2 Thursday with the camera funding included.
At least 23 Texas governments had ended agreements, declined renewals, suspended use or reduced Flock deployments as of September 6, as previously reported by The Dallas Express. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) also issued an August 27 directive barring state agencies from spending state money on the cameras. His order did not affect locally funded systems such as Conroe’s.
The system logged roughly 894,000 “unique scans” while investigators searched 642 during the previous 30 days, Buckholtz said. Since August 2025, the Crime Reduction Unit has made 202 warrant arrests, with Flock playing a role in 84, police reported.
Conroe’s contract sets a 30-day retention period. The city’s public presentation did not include its sharing list, complete search logs or case-by-case results. No complaint or evidence of local misuse had surfaced, Buckholtz said.
Flock represents a different kind of government power, and “it deserves a fundamentally different level of scrutiny before we keep paying for it,” Council Member David Hairel said. Hairel and Council Member Shana Arthur cast the budget’s only opposing votes.
Dallas narrows sharing but leaves gaps
Dallas had 684 cameras as of Tuesday. DPD plans to cancel 321 state grant-funded units on September 15, leaving about 360, as The Dallas Express previously reported. The Dallas City Council authorized a three-year contract worth up to $5.74 million through June 14, 2028.
A council majority also rejected a nonbinding proposal to remove $1.5 million in local Flock funding, as The Dallas Express previously reported. The vote signaled support for keeping locally funded cameras after the state-supported units go dark.
DPD’s September 8 update treated Flock as the primary factor in 15 homicide cases in 2025 and 13 through September 8 this year. Six days earlier, police told council members that Flock had assisted 14 murder cases in 2026. The department has not reconciled the totals or definitions. Police also credited Flock in about 50 business robberies this year.
DPD said it had narrowed direct shared search access from more than 1,500 agencies to 202 Texas agencies, with no federal or out-of-state agency currently included, as The Dallas Express presentation gave the previous count as 1,508. Sgt. Adam Reinhart corrected the slide during the meeting.
The 1,508 figure does not mean every agency searched Dallas records. Public records reviewed by DX did not include either agency roster, an exact date for the federal cutoff or a federal-query history.
DPD records also conflict on retention. The current presentation says 365 days, while the department’s posted general order says 30 days.
Published counts of Dallas searches in 2025 also differ sharply. WFAA reported more than 800,000 based on Flock logs it reviewed. The accounts do not establish whether they measured the same activity.
An incomplete audit from the Danville, Illinois, Police Department captured 17 Dallas-user searches labeled “ICE+ERO” in 2025 and one labeled “ICE+Suspect” in 2024, The Barbed Wire reported. Those labels do not show that federal officers requested the searches, received information or had direct access.
Weekly audits flag about 60 entries that initially lack a case or CAD number, police said. That does not automatically make a search improper. One audit found a policy violation involving an incorrect case number and led to summary discipline, Maj. Gabriel Candelaria of Internal Affairs said. Officials did not identify the search, purpose or employee.
Some cities walk away
Pflugerville voted unanimously on August 25 to end Flock use rather than approve an $87,500 annual agreement for 28 cameras. City figures and a later update attributed 435 arrests and 257 recovered stolen vehicles to Flock from fiscal 2023 through July 2026 but did not explain how officials counted the results.
A resident who reviewed city audit records counted nearly 1.6 million outside-agency searches over six months, Community Impact reported. The number shows the scale of outside access, but not whether the searches produced hits or broke any rules.
Wylie’s council voted 7-0 to stop automatic renewal while leaving negotiations open. The department owned eight cameras, five then operating, and its contract cost about $27,000 a year, police said. The system kept records for 30 days, and police reported no known local misuse.
Lufkin police suspended Flock after authorities accused Zachary Anthony Klein, then a Lufkin officer, of using the system to track an ex-girlfriend. A grand jury later indicted Klein on 100 counts of misuse of official information. An arrest affidavit alleged he searched the woman’s plate more than 10,000 times. The charges remain allegations.
Cities still lack a common measure
Fort Worth police cite one of the clearest benefits. A 2023 city record listed 258 cameras in the Flock system and $531,000 in total annual Flock spending, including livestream integration and FlockOS. The cameras helped officers make more than 2,000 arrests since 2020, Police Chief Eddie Garcia said. The city did not publish how it calculated the arrest total.
A non-peer-reviewed study of 216 agencies estimated an 11% decline in reported motor-vehicle theft associated with Flock deployment. But motor-vehicle-theft arrest clearance rates had started rising during the final three months before deployment, making it harder to credit Flock for the increase. Researchers found no overall improvement in how quickly agencies recovered stolen vehicles.
Police can point to arrests and solved cases. Cities still do not report false hits, outside access, misuse or results per taxpayer dollar in a consistent way. Without that accounting, taxpayers cannot compare what the cameras deliver or who can search the data.
Provided by Dallas Express
