The City of San Marcos states that City Council voted on December 2, 2025 to discontinue its contract with Flock Safety and that all city-contracted Flock cameras had been deactivated and removed as of February 1, 2026.
The city’s official ALPR page also documents an earlier retreat from broad data sharing. Effective June 9, 2025, San Marcos Police stopped automatic sharing of license plate data with other law-enforcement agencies. Requests thereafter required a specific request, confirmation of a qualifying criminal investigation or prosecution, and an ALPR sharing and non-disclosure agreement.
San Marcos also strengthened auditing. The city says its current policy calls for monthly audits and random review of 30 searches to check lawful use and verify that searches contain a reason and case number.
WLP Analysis: safeguards did not require permanent acceptance of Flock
San Marcos is useful to the Williamson County debate because it shows two things can be true at once. A city can recognize legitimate investigative uses for ALPR data and still decide that a particular surveillance network should not continue.
Too often, the debate is presented as a choice between unlimited adoption and abandoning law enforcement. San Marcos demonstrates a third path: narrow sharing, document access, audit searches and ultimately reject a vendor relationship if elected officials conclude the risks or public concerns outweigh the benefits.
The city’s experience also undermines the argument that once cameras are installed, removal is somehow unrealistic. Government infrastructure is a policy choice, not a permanent fact of nature.
What Pflugerville and Taylor should ask
Williamson County governments reviewing ALPR contracts should compare their own practices against the safeguards San Marcos adopted before it discontinued Flock: Is automatic sharing enabled? Is a case number mandatory? Is a specific investigative nexus required? How many searches are independently audited each month? Are audit results public?
Those questions do not resolve every Fourth Amendment issue, but they expose whether a city has built meaningful limits around a technology designed to collect first and search later.
For WLP, the constitutional baseline remains straightforward: useful technology should not receive a blank check. Government power should be narrow, transparent, auditable and subject to meaningful legal limits.
Sources
This article is original Wilco Liberty Project reporting and analysis based on the linked sources. External reporting is summarized and attributed; it is not republished.