Effort to reconsider Flock contract in Park Ridge comes up short

In July, Park Ridge aldermen approved a yearlong, $24,000 contract with Flock Safety for eight license-plate reading cameras.

Now an alderman who was absent for the July vote said he’d like to revisit the agreement.

The company and its supporters argue the cameras provide a powerful tool for law enforcement, as it allows police to track stolen vehicles or missing or wanted persons across a city and even into other jurisdictions.

But over the past year, civil rights advocates have pushed back, arguing that giving a private company real-time data about the movement of every vehicle invites widespread abuse.

Consequently, popular opinion — even within local city hall chambers — is shifting. Last year, Evanston and Oak Park ended their Flock contracts, while Arlington Heights this year approved a new contract but with penalties embedded in it should Flock misuse local data.

“When I talk with mayors across the country, there’s widespread concern about this,” said Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, a Democratic candidate for Congress in November’s election.

At the Aug. 3 Park Ridge City Council meeting, Alderman John Moran asked for the Flock camera contract to be brought back for debate. He wasn’t present for the July vote, at which fellow council member Fred Sanchez and one member of the community spoke out against the new contract.

Moran’s August motion failed 3-3, and he said afterward he has no plans to revisit the debate until the contract ends. But he does expect some sharp scrutiny next year when the contract is up for renewal, noting he’s received emails and letters from constituents who are unhappy with the cameras.

“I think that Flock, when it came to us a year ago now, it was at a time when the biggest concern in Park Ridge was property crime,” he said.

Since then, however, reports of the cameras being used inappropriately began growing.

In 2025, a Texas sheriff’s officer searched the database of 83,000 cameras across the nation, including some in Illinois, to search for a woman who’d left the state to get an abortion.

Also in 2025, the Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias announced Flock was illegally handing over Illinois data to immigration officials. Giannoulias has since asked local authorities to double-check their agreements with Flock to make sure they don’t violate state law.

Moran said that’s exactly what he did and, in his opinion, it comes very close to violating the law.

For example, he said there’s language in the contract that “exonerates Flock if they do anything that might be seen as outside of the contract.”

“My concern now is, what was presented to us as a wonderful new advancement in policing, the negative side of that is showing,” he said. “There’s some unintended uses and unintended consequences of signing up with Flock.”

Jesse Wright is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.