Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders introduced a bill banning Flock cameras for federal use and cutting funds to local agencies that keep them, going well beyond Republican guardrails.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, joined by Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, released the Ban Flock Act on Friday. The measure would bar federal agencies from using automatic license-plate readers, often called Flock cameras, and would block federal funding to any state or local government that deploys the technology. It would also let Americans sue the federal government over rights violations tied to the readers.
The Independent reported the progressive trio framed the cameras as a mass-surveillance threat run by Big Tech.
Sanders cast the network in stark terms in the press release that accompanied the bill.
"Going to the doctor? Flock knows. Dropping your kid off at school? Flock is tracking you. Flock is always watching."
He added that America cannot become "a surveillance state where a handful of AI oligarchs profit by giving the government the power to track our every movement."
Ocasio-Cortez struck the same note.
"Across the country, Big Tech companies like Flock Safety have built a mass surveillance system to harvest Americans’ private and personal data without their consent."
"The widespread integration of this technology into American society is unconscionable," she said.
That language fits the brand moderate Democrats have tried to sidestep when AOC’s progressive record collides with swing-district reality. The bill itself is a full ban, not a set of limits.
The legislation arrived after an August Washington Post report that at least 50 law enforcement officers had been charged with or accused of misusing Flock cameras and other surveillance systems, including cases in which officers stalked women.
In that same month, more than 50 cities across the country canceled or rejected contracts for the automated readers or deactivated the cameras, according to the anti-surveillance crowdsourcing app DeFlock.
Flock Safety, the company behind the cameras, pushed back. In an August blog post the firm said its technology "assists your officers in more than one million crimes solved annually." It also announced privacy updates, including a requirement that all law-enforcement customers adopt its Audit Assistance feature by year’s end. The company said that tool had already helped lead to the arrest of several officers who allegedly abused the system.
On Friday, Flock told reporters it "strongly supports legislation establishing guardrails governing License Plate Reader use" and welcomed congressional talks on "strong policy, accountability and oversight mechanisms." An official added that the company does not operate facial-recognition technology and that it is impossible to search specifically for humans in photos taken by its license-plate readers.
Two days before the progressive bill dropped, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri announced he would introduce the Stop Flock Abuse Act. His approach sets federal guardrails rather than a prohibition.
Hawley’s measure would bar local governments from selling or sharing camera data with non-government third parties. It would ban automated license-plate reader networks from incorporating facial recognition. Agencies would have to log who searched for what data, why they searched, and who approved the query. Supervisors would audit those logs regularly and watch for red flags such as repeat searches of the same person or suspicious justifications.
Hawley called the current setup "a nightmare for individual liberties unless Congress enacts meaningful rules and accountability." He added, "Law-abiding Americans should not be treated like criminals," and said facial recognition was "ripe for abuse with AI."
The contrast is plain. One side wants to yank the technology and the federal dollars that support it. The other wants logging, audits, and hard limits on data sharing and facial recognition while leaving the crime-fighting tool in place.
Automatic license-plate readers give police a way to spot stolen cars, track fleeing suspects, and generate leads on serious offenses. Flock’s own figure of more than one million crimes assisted each year is a company claim, yet it underscores why local departments bought the systems in the first place. Stripping federal funding from any jurisdiction that keeps them would pressure cash-strapped agencies to drop a tool already in wide use.
Abuses by individual officers are real and deserve prosecution. Stalking is a crime. Searching an ex’s plates without cause is a betrayal of public trust. The right answer is accountability, firing, and jail time for the officers who cross the line, not a blanket federal ban that treats every camera as the enemy.
That distinction rarely survives contact with the activist left. The same progressive networks that turned out for AOC’s midterm rallies have long treated policing technology itself as suspect. A total ban fits the pattern: escalate from documented misuse to an industry-wide prohibition, then cut the money that keeps local cops equipped.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez reached for the strongest possible lever, defund the users and open the federal government to private lawsuits. Hawley’s bill, by comparison, targets the actual failure points: unlogged searches, third-party data sales, and facial-recognition creep. One approach preserves a public-safety capability under rules. The other removes the capability.
Voters who want both privacy and safe streets can tell the difference. So can the more than 50 cities that already walked away from contracts after the August reports. Those local decisions were responses to concrete scandals. A federal funding cutoff would turn every remaining holdout into a budget target, regardless of whether its department had cleaned up its search logs.
The Ban Flock Act also keeps Ocasio-Cortez exactly where her base expects her. Democratic Socialists and progressive organizers continue to float her name for higher office, and high-profile bills that cast corporations and police tools as joint villains feed that narrative.
Even candidates who scrub her endorsement from their websites still mine the same donor lists. The pattern is familiar: progressive branding for the activists, careful distance when the general electorate is watching. A camera ban that also hits federal support for local law enforcement lands squarely in that lane.
Merkley’s presence rounds out the progressive Senate wing. No moderate Democratic names appear on the release. The coalition is the left of the left, and the policy matches, maximum restriction, maximum funding pressure, maximum litigation risk for the federal government.
Flock says it already supports guardrails and has forced audit tools onto its customers. Hawley wrote those kinds of limits into legislative text. Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders chose the ban. Americans who dislike warrantless tracking of everyday errands still have to ask whether the cure should eliminate a system that departments credit with large numbers of solved cases.
Law-and-order conservatives have no interest in giving police a free pass to stalk civilians. They also have no interest in letting Congress defund the cameras that help catch car thieves and killers because a handful of officers turned the system into a personal toy. Discipline the abusers. Log the searches. Ban the data sales. Keep the tool.
Privacy and public safety are not opposites. A bill that pretends they are only solves the politics of one faction.
