--- title: "Texas Suburb Wants $2.3 Million for Records on Police Use of Flock Cameras" description: "Other Texas agencies released similar records for free, and the state police are now trying to withhold search data they once handed over." author: "rews desk" published: 2026-10-05T22:37:56Z modified: 2026-10-06T02:24:04Z url: https://rews.cc/a/texas-suburb-wants-2-3-million-for-records-on-police-use-of--0c6e60 language: en tags: ["surveillance", "privacy", "ai", "police", "flock", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Texas Suburb Wants $2.3 Million for Records on Police Use of Flock Cameras *Other Texas agencies released similar records for free, and the state police are now trying to withhold search data they once handed over.* By rews desk · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/texas-suburb-wants-2-3-million-for-records-on-police-use-of--0c6e60 ## In brief - North Richland Hills billed a privacy advocate $2.3 million, due up front, for records on police use of Flock cameras - The city based the bill on $15 an hour for more than 14 years of work searching about a terabyte of communications - Sealy released more than 400,000 pages for free, while other agencies quoted $121,000 and $70,000 - A Lufkin officer got five years after pleading guilty to 100 felony counts tied to database searches - Texas DPS has asked the attorney general’s office to let it withhold Flock search data it once released A Fort Worth suburb has billed a privacy advocate $2.3 million, all due up front, for records on how its police use Flock license plate cameras, The Texas Tribune reported on Monday. North Richland Hills priced the job at $15 an hour, which \[it put at more than 14 years of work\](\), to search about a terabyte of communications on the cameras’ errors, possible misuse and effectiveness. A city spokesperson confirmed the invoice to the Tribune and declined to answer questions. The Tribune has a similar request pending with the city. The man who asked goes by Phil Mynona. It’s a pseudonym, which he uses because he believes his job in the tech industry could be at risk over his advocacy, according to the Tribune. He filed the request in late August for his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, and has sent nearly identical ones to about 200 law enforcement agencies. He called the bill “ludicrous.” “This is a crazy outlier, I think the highest that we received in some amount was \[$5,000\] from Victoria, Texas,” Mr. Mynona told the Tribune. Prices for the same kind of records have been all over the map. Sealy, west of Houston, recently gave Mr. Mynona more than 400,000 pages at no charge. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office quoted the Houston television station KPRC $121,000. Irving wants $70,000 for records that Carrollton released free, according to the conservative outlet Current Revolt. Requests like these have turned up abuse before. A USA Today records request set off an investigation and a department-wide audit in Lufkin that caught an officer, Zachary Anthony Klein, searching police databases about his former girlfriend, her family and men she had dated, \[The Next Web reported\](\). Records showed 45,318 searches over 210 days. One plate had been queried 3,470 times. On Sept. 30, Mr. Klein was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to 100 felony counts of abusing official information. The audit flagged a second officer for potential misuse, according to Texas Department of Public Safety records cited by the Tribune. Gov. Greg Abbott pointed to the Lufkin case when he moved against Flock, \[blocking state funding for the cameras in August and pausing some installations in September\](\). His state police have been releasing less. In July, the Department of Public Safety gave the Tribune a full list of searches on its Flock network, its own and those of thousands of other agencies, with officer and plate numbers blacked out. An identical request in early August returned only the department’s own searches. On a third request, the department withheld everything and asked the attorney general’s office for permission to keep all the search data secret, including what it had already released. It did not respond to the Tribune’s request for comment. The department runs more than 900 of the estimated 13,000 Flock cameras in Texas, part of a national network of more than 100,000. The Texas Department of Transportation and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice have also fought requests that would show where cameras sit. Flock, based in Atlanta, leaves disclosure to the governments that buy its cameras. Andrew Smith, a company spokesperson, told the Tribune that its optional transparency portals give agencies “a public-facing way to publish information about their \[license plate reader\] programs, including policies, usage and access rules to help communities better understand how the technology is being used.” Fifty-nine Texas agencies use the portals, covering more than 2,600 cameras. Sixteen of them publish their search records. Live Oak posts an interactive map of its cameras, and Corinth lists their street locations online. Michael Soyfer, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice who is litigating several cases against Flock use on Fourth Amendment grounds, told 404 Media that without more openness the company could end up automating the tracking that has led to false suspicion and wrongful arrests. “Federal agents were using ALPRs to monitor cars making day trips across the border and back to manufacture a basis to stop them, interrogate the drivers, and search them,” Mr. Soyfer said. “I think Flock is going to automate that, using AI where cops can set alerts for those kinds of travel patterns.” In Europe, the same information isn’t something anyone has to pay for. The EU’s law enforcement directive requires police systems to log every search and disclosure, including who searched, when and why, and to hand those logs to the data protection authority on request, The Next Web noted, though the logs go to the regulator, not the public. Britain’s national standards for plate readers, updated in July, require audit trails of every search and delete national read data after 90 days. Last week, a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled that a warrantless Flock search was unconstitutional mass surveillance. By 404 Media’s count, police run more than 100,000 such searches a month. ## Sources - [Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/texas-city-demands-2m-for-public-records-on-flock-usage/) — Ars Technica - [Texas city wants $2.3M for public records on police Flock use](https://thenextweb.com/news/flock-records-fee-texas-eu-logs) — thenextweb.com