At its formal meeting on Tuesday night, the Coralville City Council voted to cancel its contract with Flock Safety and remove the two Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras already installed on city property. There had been growing community opposition to the use of Flock’s ALPR cameras in Coralville since last July when the city’s contract with the Flock came to the public’s attention.
The 3-1 vote came after the Iowa Attorney General’s Office warned the council that it needed to drop its prohibition on sharing Flock camera data with ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies or face the possibility of the city losing all state funding.
Coralville Police Chief Kyle Nicholson signed the two-year contract with Flock on May 12, 2025. The contract committed the city to paying Flock $36,000 to have four ALPR cameras installed for two years. Flock would store images and data collected by the cameras, to be located near interstate off ramps, for 30 days in a searchable database that could be used by the Coralville PD and other law enforcement agencies that the department allowed to search the database.
Nicholson’s request for the Flock cameras was included in the CPD annual budget request along with other requested items that was approved by the Coralville City Council. It was treated as a routine matter. Nicholson did not provide information about the new surveillance system, so councilmembers did not really understand what they were approving. There was also no public discussion about ALPR or Flock.
“ALPRs are not speed cameras,” the University of Iowa’s Technology Law Clinic and the ACLU of Iowa explained in a report on ALPRs in the state published in December. “They are not ‘red light’ cameras. Instead, they are cameras used along roadways throughout Iowa that take thousands of snapshots of all the license plates of the vehicles that drive by. That information can then be fed into a network of nationally shared databases that has too few privacy protections and is subject to abuse.”
At least 48 law enforcement agencies in the state use ALPRs. The ACLU of Iowa characterizes the use of ALPRs as a “warrantless, dragnet surveillance of drivers without any probable cause or reasonable suspicion” that lacks “meaningful checks and balances.”
Flock is the largest vendor of ALPRs in Iowa, providing the cameras and the data services. The company has been widely criticized for its services, including an alleged lack of adequate safeguards on how the data from cameras it stores, according to privacy advocates. There have also been high-profile incidents in other states in which law enforcement officers have misused Flock data.
Flock maintains it properly protects the data it collects and stores, and points out that it is up to municipalities to decide how long the company stores the data from the cameras and who the data is shared with.
It wasn’t until July that the public became aware of Coralville’s contract with Flock.
“When the police chief later returned to the council seeking approval for Department of Transportation permits and installation, the public became aware of the issue through the agenda packet,” Coralville City Councilmember Hai Huynh wrote in a letter to Little Village about her reasons for opposing the Flock contract published before the vote this week. “People showed up. They asked hard questions and rightfully demanded transparency, accountability, and the right to consent.”
People continued to show up at city council meetings to comment on the Flock contract. The vast majority of residents who spoke at council meetings pushed for the Flock contract to be canceled citing privacy and safety concerns. A small number of speakers supported the contract and called ALPRs important tools for law enforcement.
It was the argument that ALPRs could be an important tool for the CPD and that the department and Flock would properly safeguard the public’s privacy that a majority of the city council cited when they voted to approve installation of the cameras in September. The council also directed the police department to create a policy that would only allow other Iowa law enforcement agencies to request the city’s Flock data. In November, the council voted to narrow the policy, and only allow CPD to share Flock data with the other Flock clients in Johnson County (the North Liberty Police Department and the University of Iowa Police).
But in January, news broke that the Cedar Rapids Police Department had been allowed to access Coralville’s Flock data. Chief Nicholson said CRPD had submitted a written request to access the data, which was approved, and that was permitted under departmental policy.
A letter from the Iowa Attorney General’s Office to the Coralville City Council dated Jan. 20 caused even more concern about the Flock contract. Solicitor General Eric Wessan informed the council that he had reviewed the city’s Flock camera policy in response to a complaint that it might violate a 2018 state law that requires municipalities to fully cooperate with federal immigration enforcement agencies. Wessen said that after a review of the city’s Flock camera policy, he determined the section stating “It is against the Coralville Police Departments policy, and against our contract, for Flock data to be used for immigration” needed to be removed. If the city didn’t do so, it faced the possibility of having all state funding suspended until the change was made.
Renewed public pressure to cancel the Flock contract given the possibility the city would have to share ALPR data with ICE and the Border Patrol, led to a vote on canceling the contract being placed on the agenda for the Feb. 24 council meeting.
The discussion about canceling the contract was very brief. A majority favored doing it going into the meeting. As did almost everyone attending the council meeting on Tuesday night.
The only councilmember opposed to canceling the contract was Rich Vogelzang.
“There are many, many other communities that understand the value and the logic of having license plate readers in their communities,” Vogelzang told his fellow councilmembers, reading from a prepared statement before the vote. “They have experienced actual proven successes by having Flock cameras in their communities.”
“They understand that law-abiding persons do not need to be concerned about having license—” he said, causing the people attending the meeting to burst into laughter, which made him pause his statement.
Vogelzang did not acknowledge the laughter, but started reading the statement again.
“They understand that law-abiding persons do not need to be concerned about having license plate reader cameras in their community.”
Vogelzang then suggested the people opposed to the contract who had filled the council chamber month after month did not represent the true beliefs of Coralville’s residents at large. He said “the silent majority of our community … many of whom I have spoken with over the last seven or eight months,” support the use of Flock cameras because they support law enforcement.
He continued, saying, “regardless of what we’ve been told, regardless of how you may feel and regardless of what you may think,” canceling the contract and removing the cameras “would take an important tool away from the police and constitute a “failure to provide safety benefits for the greater good of our community and to the majority of our community.”
Vogelzang favored changing city policy to allow immigration agents access to the Flock data.
Councilmember Katie Freeman pushed back on the notion that there was a silent majority supporting Flock cameras, pointing out that supporters had the same opportunities to weigh in at council meetings as opponents, and “they’ve chosen not to come and speak to us directly.”
“They chose just to speak to you, apparently,” Freeman said, noting that most citizens who had contacted the other councilmembers wanted the contract canceled.
“We heard some support for these cameras six months ago,” Councilmember Mike Knudson said, but lately he hadn’t “talked to anybody, including some very conservative friends of mine” who still supported the cameras.
“Supporting the cancellation of this contract does not mean that we don’t support our police department,” Councilmember Hai Huynh said, before the council voted to end the contract and remove the two cameras that had already been installed.
According to the Flock transparency portal for the Coralville Police Department, the two cameras detected 147,812 unique vehicles in the last 30 days, and 85 searches had been run on Coralville’s Flock data during the same period.
The complaint that caused the Iowa Attorney General’s Office to review Coralville’s Flock camera policy was filed by HC van Pelt, a software engineer who lives in northeastern Iowa. Van Pelt isn’t a supporter of increased surveillance or assisting ICE, he’s a privacy advocate who is trying to bring greater transparency to the activities of Flock and the law enforcement agencies that use its services through his site, HaveIBeenFlocked.com. The site has a search engine that lets users check to see if an agency has searched Flock databases for their license plate.
In a post on the site explaining why he filed the complaint with the attorney general’s office, van Pelt wrote, “Coralville’s policy was always performative. Its prohibitions were unenforceable, and various aspects made no sense or made specific reference to the laws they facially clashed with.” By filing the complaint, van Pelt said he wanted the council to face the fact that its attempt to prevent sharing information with ICE and other federal agencies was meaningless. The council would then have to decide whether to amend the policy to share the data, defy the attorney general’s office or cancel the contract removing the possibility of a conflict with state law by removing the cameras.
During Coralville City Council meetings last year, time for public comment was often extended because so many people wanted to address the issues around the Flock contract. On Tuesday, the public comment period was kept to 15 minutes.
“We’ve heard most everything over the last few months about ALPRs,” Mayor Laurie Goodrich said at the beginning of the comment period. “… I don’t think this time needs to take a lot of time.”
Seven members of the public spoke. All of them asked the council to cancel the contract. But the first speaker, Linda Mullen of Coralville, had an additional request: “I’m asking for this council to be honest and forthright on the record tonight during your discussion about how we got here.”
“Nine months ago, a $36,000 surveillance contract was signed by the Coralville police chief without this council’s knowledge, with no legal review and no chance for the public to weigh in,” Mullen said. “In Coralville, this council must approve all contracts, but that didn’t happen here. You didn’t even see the contract until months after it was signed.”
Mullen said the record appears to indicate the decision to enter into a contract with Flock was made by Chief Nicholson and City Administrator Kelly Hayworth.
“So I have a request of council tonight. I think to restore public trust after this procedural debacle that you need to establish an independent inquiry — made public, in writing — that identifies where the policy and law were broken, who’s responsible and most important, what specific changes, including potential personnel changes, you will make so that a contract of this size and nature can never again be signed without your knowledge and approval,” Mullen said.
Councilmembers are not allowed to respond to comments made, and aside from Councilmember Knudson’s saying he hoped the council would have a “discussion of purchasing policy soon,” there was no mention of the issues Mullen pointed to during the council’s discussion.
