Murphy is running license-plate surveillance. Most residents never got a say.
The city operates Flock Safety cameras that photograph and log passing vehicles into a searchable database. It bought them in 2024 with a catalytic-converter-theft grant and voted again in 2026 to keep the money flowing, all without a published contract, a disclosed camera count, or a vote by the people being recorded.
It does not just read your plate.
Flock cameras are automated license plate readers, but that undersells them. Every passing car is photographed and analyzed by machine vision that catalogs make, model, color, and distinguishing features: bumper stickers, roof racks, even dents. Flock trademarked the profile it builds and calls it "Vehicle Fingerprint."
Each read is stamped with a location, a date, and a time, and uploaded to a database. Do that at every camera, every day, and the result is a searchable map of where ordinary residents go: to work, to church, to a clinic, to a partner's house. You did nothing wrong, and you are in it anyway.
Crucially, the data does not stay in Murphy. Agencies across the country can query it, and that sharing is a feature of the product, not an accident of one bad actor.
"It only reads license plates."
You will hear this from officials. Flock's own sales material describes machine vision that identifies vehicles by features and captures cars "with the absence of a license plate." A system you can search without a plate is not a system that only reads plates.
What Murphy has told residents, and what it hasn't.
Murphy's Flock cameras were first approved on December 3, 2024, when the council voted 5 to 0 to accept a state "Catalytic Converter Theft" grant (Senate Bill 224) to purchase them (Resolution 24-R-1115). The police department and Flock Safety staff presented the item. Then, on May 5, 2026, the council again voted unanimously to seek another SB 224 grant, for the 2027 fiscal year, to keep the program funded. Police Chief Jeff Gibson leads it.
Both votes happened in public council meetings, funded through grants rather than the regular budget. What residents have never been shown is the actual contract, the number of cameras, the locations, the annual cost, or the renewal terms, and residents themselves were never asked to vote on whether Murphy should run license-plate surveillance at all.
The grant is aimed at catalytic-converter theft. The cameras do far more.
The state program Murphy is applying to (SB 224) exists to fund catalytic-converter and auto-theft prevention. Flock cameras are general-purpose: they log every vehicle for any law-enforcement query and feed a nationwide network. Residents can fairly ask the council to explain the gap between the narrow justification and the broad reach, and who pays if the grant does not come through. State grants like this typically require a local cash match, so Murphy taxpayers are on the hook either way.
The votes are on the record. The terms are not.
The council approvals are public, but the contract, the camera count, the locations, and the yearly cost are not. Residents pay for this system, through grant money and the local match these grants require, without ever being shown what it is or getting to vote on whether Murphy should have it. A grant covering the bill is not the same as a community deciding it wants the surveillance.
Wylie, right next door, just walked away.
On August 25, 2026, after a resident campaign, the Wylie City Council voted 7 to 0 to end its Flock contract, and committed to designing any future program in public, with residents at the table. Murphy's neighbor proved this is winnable. The only difference is that someone in Wylie asked.
This is not hypothetical. It has a track record.
Misuse is documented and criminal.
At least 27 officers across 18 departments in 9 states have been disciplined, fired, or charged for abusing license-plate systems, including using them to stalk former partners. In August 2026 a Texas grand jury indicted a Lufkin police officer on 100 felony counts for using Flock to track eleven people; the department shut its own cameras off. Four employees of the Savannah, Georgia police department were arrested the same week.
It is not even reliable.
When Roseville, California audited its own Flock alerts, 71 percent were wrong. The Los Angeles Police Department found 161 cars wrongly flagged as stolen in two months and dropped Flock. Misreads have consequences: innocent people have been pulled from their cars at gunpoint over a plate the system got wrong.
Security failures are the pattern, not the exception.
In December 2025, researchers found at least 60 Flock cameras streaming live to the open internet with no password, including footage of a playground. State audits in Illinois caught Flock giving federal agencies access to local data that cities never approved. Every safeguard the company has added arrived only after it was caught.
Cities are leaving, fast.
DeFlock's national tracker counted 106 communities that had canceled, rejected, deactivated, paused, or banned Flock or ALPR programs as of August 21, 2026, with at least a dozen more documented exits not yet logged. In Texas alone that includes Hood and Guadalupe counties, Bandera, Lago Vista, San Marcos, Austin, and now Wylie. Murphy would be joining a growing mainstream, not going out on a limb.
The data license outlives the contract.
Flock's terms grant the company an "irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide" license to use a city's camera data to improve its own products, a license that survives even after a city cancels. The Texas Tribune reported in August 2026 that Flock retains that right with no expiration after termination, and Fortune reported, citing an LAPD Inspector General audit, that Flock's contracts let it use collected data "for any purpose in Flock's sole discretion," including to train machine-learning algorithms. Cancel the contract and Murphy's residents are still in the training data.
A single photo is settled law. A weeks-long map of you is not.
Courts have long allowed one photograph of a car on a public road. Flock's network is different in kind: it assembles a searchable, weeks-long history of everywhere a vehicle goes, queryable by thousands of agencies. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held that this kind of aggregated movement record requires a warrant when it comes from a cell phone. A federal challenge to a Virginia city's Flock network, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, is on appeal at the Fourth Circuit. No court has finally settled the question either way, and Texas has no state law limiting ALPRs.
This is not a partisan complaint.
In August 2026, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) both condemned Flock's network as mass surveillance within days of each other. Two federal bills restricting ALPRs are Republican-sponsored: the PRIVACY Act (Rep. Keith Self, R-TX) and the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act (Rep. Tim Burchett, R-TN). A congressional investigation into Flock is Democratic-led. In Texas, deep-red Hood County and deep-blue Austin both dropped the company for the same reasons. Flock's own CEO, Garrett Langley, told TechCrunch in August 2026 that "there's no regulation, there's no accountability, and we think that's wrong."
Bring it into the open. Then let residents decide.
This is not anti-police, and it is not a demand to ban every tool forever. It is a demand for daylight and consent. We are asking the Murphy City Council to:
Publish the contract.
Release the Flock agreement, the camera count and locations, the annual cost, the renewal terms, and the grant application, so residents can see what they are paying for.
Hold a real public hearing.
Put surveillance policy on a posted agenda where residents can speak and the council must respond, not bury it in a routine grant vote.
Require a warrant, limit retention, block outside access.
Any camera program should require a warrant for searches, delete data quickly, and technically prevent outside agencies from searching Murphy's data without one.
Put it to a public vote.
A surveillance network that records every resident should be adopted by the residents, not slipped through on a grant cycle.
See the readers reported near Murphy.
This map shows automated license plate reader locations reported by the community through DeFlock. It may be incomplete, and it includes cameras just outside the city, but it shows how the net is drawn. Because Murphy has not published its own camera count or locations, resident-reported maps like this are one of the few public windows into the program.
Source: community-reported ALPR locations via DeFlock. Not an official city map.
Contact the Murphy City Council.
Council meets on the first and third Tuesday of each month at 6:00 p.m. in the Council Chambers, 206 N. Murphy Road, Murphy, TX 75094. Residents may speak during the public-comment portion of each regular meeting. Ask the City Secretary how to sign up before the meeting starts. Main line: (972) 468-4000.
A short, personal note works best. Tell them you're a Murphy resident, that you were surprised to learn the city runs license-plate surveillance, and that you want the contract published and the program put to a public vote before any renewal or expansion.
| Seat | Name | |
|---|---|---|
| Mayor | Scott Bradley | sbradley@murphytx.org |
| Place 1 | Elizabeth Abraham | eabraham@murphytx.org |
| Place 2 · Mayor Pro Tem | Scott Smith | ssmith@murphytx.org |
| Place 3 | Deborah Ison | DIson@murphytx.org |
| Place 4 · Deputy Mayor Pro Tem | Ken Oltmann | koltmann@murphytx.org |
| Place 5 | Kevin Kelley | k.kelley@murphytx.org |
| Place 6 | Jené Butler | jbutler@murphytx.org |
Subject: Please publish the Flock contract and put it to a vote Dear Mayor Bradley and Council Members, I am a Murphy resident. I recently learned that our city operates Flock Safety license-plate surveillance cameras, and that in May the council voted to seek grant funding to keep them. I was surprised, because I never saw a public discussion, and the contract, camera count, and cost do not appear to be public. I am asking the council to: 1. Publish the Flock agreement, the camera count and locations, the annual cost, and the renewal terms. 2. Hold a public hearing on surveillance policy. 3. Require a warrant for searches, limit data retention, and block outside agencies from searching our data without one. 4. Put any future camera program to a public vote. Next door in Wylie, the council just voted 7-0 to end its Flock contract. I am asking Murphy to at least have the conversation in the open. Thank you, [Your Name] [Your Street]
"Hi, my name is ____ and I live in Murphy. I'm calling to ask the mayor and council to publish the city's Flock camera contract, the number of cameras, and the cost, and to hold a public hearing and a vote before renewing or expanding the program. I'd support cameras only with a warrant requirement and real limits. Thank you."
Add a sentence of your own before sending. A few personal words count for more than a form letter.
Reasonable questions, straight answers.
Isn't this just anti-police?
No. Nothing here asks Murphy PD to give up legitimate tools. A stolen-car hit or an AMBER Alert works exactly the same under a warrant rule. The objection is to logging every resident's movements, with no warrant and no public oversight, and to doing it without ever asking the public.
Don't the cameras help solve crime?
Individual cameras have helped in individual cases, and no one disputes that. The question is whether solving some crimes requires a permanent, searchable record of everyone else's daily movements. Meanwhile the systems are unreliable at scale (Roseville's own audit found 71% of alerts wrong) and the data leaves the city entirely.
How do you know Murphy even has these?
The Murphy Monitor reported the council's May 5, 2026 vote authorizing the police department to seek a state grant to fund Flock cameras "already in use." What the city has not disclosed is the contract, the camera count, or the cost. That gap is exactly what this campaign is asking the city to close.
What do you actually want?
Publish the contract. Hold a real public hearing. Require a warrant, limit retention, and block warrantless outside access. Then put any future camera program to a public vote. Daylight and consent, before renewal or expansion.
We condemn vandalism. Full stop.
Cameras around the region have been damaged and covered. We do not support that, and we ask you not to do it. It is illegal, it undercuts our argument, and it hands the program an excuse. This campaign works one way: through public records, public meetings, and public votes. We win in the open, not by touching the equipment.