For months, San Marcos has been circling the question that’s reshaped policing debates across Central Texas: What do we really get from a citywide network of license plate scanners? On Tuesday, Dec. 2, the discussion finally came to a head – though not in the clean yes-or-no way people expected.
The majority of San Marcos City Council members didn’t technically vote to end its contract with Flock Safety. Instead, members deadlocked 3-3 on whether to extend the agreement for another year. One member, Lorenzo Gonzalez, abstained. Because the city had already sent Flock a nonrenewal notice on Nov. 20, the tie means the contract simply runs out.
No majority, no renewal, no more automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from Flock.
San Marcos adopted Flock in 2022 with 14 cameras. By June, staff floated adding 19 more – a large enough expansion to surpass Austin’s numbers, which was the city with the most cameras in the state before it ended its contract with the company in June. That proposal drew criticism at the June 3 San Marcos Council meeting.
“There is no reason that San Marcos needs to have 33 Flock cameras. The city of Austin, with the population tenfold of that of San Marcos, only has 40, and allowing our police department to operate 33 cameras … is complete overreach,” Caldwell/Hays Examiner’s Sam Benavides said at the June 3 meeting.
That expansion failed, setting the stage for this week’s narrower decision: pay between $43,000 and $46,000 for one more year of service, according to purchasing manager Veronica Bradshaw, or let the system go dark.
Public comment reflected the split.
“The idea of Flock is a nice one: increased safety,” says resident Fisher Schaefer. “The reality, however, is that safety is not a guarantee for Flock being utilized by our city, and there are cons, too. Cons like privacy and abuse that Hays County considered when they ended their contract.”
Schaefer is referring to Hays County’s decision to make the same call in October, scrapping its Flock system over privacy worries and questions about how the data was being used.
San Marcos Police Chief Stan Standridge pointed to recent cases to make the opposite argument. He highlighted the Halloween weekend shooting that killed one person and injured several others. Downtown cameras caught the suspect vehicle’s direction of travel, but not the plate – Flock’s ALPRs helped with the latter.
Standridge said SMPD queries the system about 2,000 times a month.
“I have a ton of [return on investment], just Sunday night there was a burglary … 36 hours later, our detectives identified the vehicle with stolen items courtesy of Flock,” Standridge says.
He added that violent crime in San Marcos is up 13% this year, arguing the department needs every investigative tool it can get, but ALPRs are not the “end all be all.”
Council Member Amanda Rodriguez pressed him on whether that qualified as a “return on investment.”
“Wouldn’t a return be that [SMPD’s work] isn’t so laborious, and people have what they need?” she asked. “… We have all of these detailed conversations as a body, which I really remain heavily patient with. I guess what I am losing patience for, though, is the lack of investment in things that actually show a return, and this is not showing a return.”
ALPRs aren’t new – early versions appeared in British policing nearly 50 years ago – but the technology is now everywhere. By 2013, 77% of U.S. police departments serving cities over 100,000 were already using ALPRs, a figure that’s only grown as systems got easier to deploy.
Texas is no exception: Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and dozens of smaller agencies have installed some form of plate-tracking network, each stirring its own debate over safety, data retention, and who gets swept up in the scan.
Austin ended its own pilot ALPR program this summer after public concern over data access and misuse. An Austin Chronicle investigation also revealed that APD officers made database queries without required case numbers, violating department policy and deepening public distrust.
Nationally, Flock has faced lawsuits over improper data-sharing, mistaken detentions linked to ALPR alerts, and disputes about how long the company retains plate data, including a Norfolk, Virginia, case that a federal judge allowed to proceed this year after residents argued the city’s 170-camera network amounted to warrantless mass surveillance.
With the tie vote in San Marcos, the contract will lapse. Eight cameras in downtown San Marcos will continue operating for traffic and public-safety monitoring, but those do not read license plates.
But San Marcos may not be finished with license plate readers – only with Flock. Council members ended the discussion by saying they’ll explore other ALPR options, starting with the systems the city already uses for parking enforcement.
This article appears in December 12 • 2025.