LYNNWOOD, Wash. — The Lynnwood City Council voted unanimously on Monday to cancel its contract for Flock Safety license plate reader cameras. The decision follows months of controversy regarding privacy and potential unauthorized access by outside agencies, including agencies at the federal level.
The cameras, located at various intersections in Lynnwood, including 196th Street Southwest and 36th Avenue West, have been disabled since October after a University of Washington report revealed that out-of-state and federal agencies, like U.S. Border Patrol, were accessing the system without permission.
Lynnwood originally approved a contract with Flock in January 2025. The cameras went live in June, but the police department acknowledged it discovered a feature allowing outside access on July 1, 2025. In a website post, Lynnwood police said that the feature was disabled at that time, and the entire program was paused in late October 2025.
Police leadership provided data on how the system was being used before the pause. Coleman Langdon, Lynnwood police chief, detailed the results of an internal audit of the camera use and said that almost 5900 searches that were performed, about 1900 of them didn’t have sufficient information in terms of the reason for the search.
“If this were my own agency, we could do counseling we could do retraining, we could do discipline,” he added.
Community opposition appeared to be a significant factor for some council members when it came to voting to end the contract. Council Member Isabel Mata noted the high volume of in-person testimony received during the public comment period.
“More than 50 people, and I’ve been tallying, have come in person to ask us to cancel the contract,” Mata said.
Other cities in Western Washington have taken similar steps to restrict or remove the technology. Auburn, Redmond, and Olympia have all limited access in one form or another.
Decisions by Western Washington municipalities come as state lawmakers in Olympia hold hearings on Senate Bill 6002, which aims to regulate license plate reader technology. Currently, there is no law for oversight of the technology.
Quinn Van Order with DeFlockLynnwood, a group lobbying against the use of Flock cameras in Lynnwood, said, “(WA Senate Bill) 6002 is a toothless law that does zero to address the issues… State law attempting to regulate a cloud service provider that doesn’t operate in the state is worth roughly the paper it’s printed on."
Van Order also responded to the decision by the city council, in a statement sent to KIRO 7:
“It is my fervent hope that Flock and any other mass surveillance vendor have no future in Lynnwood. The community spoke overwhelmingly in favor of privacy versus warrantless mass surveillance, and the council heard our voices. Yesterday was a victory for privacy, but also for civic engagement.”
Despite the controversy, some state officials defended the technology’s role in law enforcement. Washington State Rep. Jenny Graham, R-Spokane, cited high-profile criminal investigations as evidence of the cameras’ utility during a February hearing about the cameras.
“We do have issues with firearms that are illegal, drugs that are illegal that people in my district want gone, but the other thing that comes to mind is like the Bryan Kohberger case without the cameras that caught him going from WA to ID. That case may not have been solved,” Graham said.
Graham represents the region of Washington that was at the center of the investigation into the death of four University of Idaho students.
In July 2025, Kohberger, age 30, was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences for the November 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students.
It is currently not clear if the cameras could come back into use in Lynnwood if the state passes oversight legislation.