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Bexar County Sheriff | Flock Safety plate readers

The Sheriff's Office publishes a Flock Safety page on the county website: 33 plate reader cameras, reads kept for 30 days, and more than 750,000 vehicles detected in a month. We did not find the contract on the Commissioners Court's agendas from 2018 to September 2026.

At a glance

Cameras
33 license plate reader cameras, on the office's page on 16 September 2026 [1]
Vehicles detected
757,912 unique vehicles in the 30 days before 16 September 2026 [1]
Searches
432 in the same 30 days, with 2,725 hotlist hits [1]
How long reads are kept
30 days. The audit trail of who searched is kept indefinitely [1]
Uses the office rules out
Immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment or intimidation, use based only on a protected class, and personal use [1]
Who approved it, and at what cost
Not found on the Commissioners Court's agendas from January 2018 to September 2026, apart from a $135 invoice [2]
Where the cameras are
Not published [1]

How it happened

  1. Context

    A $135 Flock invoice on the consent agenda

    Item 29 asks the Court to approve the Sheriff's Office paying several Fiscal Year 2026 invoices, one of them $135 to Flock Safety for tools and hardware. It is the only Flock item on the agendas we read. [2]

  2. Coverage

    The office's Flock page

    The Sheriff's Office page on the county website lists 33 cameras, 30-day retention, the uses it prohibits and its search rules, with figures for the previous 30 days. [1]

Flock Safety sells plate reader cameras on a subscription. Each camera photographs passing vehicles and records the plate and the vehicle’s appearance, and the images go to Flock’s cloud, where agencies with access can search them.

What the Sheriff’s Office publishes

The Sheriff’s Office has a Flock Safety page on the Bexar County website. It links the office’s transparency portal on Flock’s site and sets out its policy and its figures.[1]

The page lists what the cameras detect as “License Plates, Vehicles”, and what they do not detect as “Facial recognition, People, Gender, Race”. It says “Data is used for law enforcement purposes only”, and that the data “is never sold to 3rd parties”. The uses it prohibits are “Immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment or intimidation, usage based solely on a protected class (i.e., race, sex, religion), or personal use.”

Searches are limited to criminal investigations, and “A case number and reasons for the search are required to conduct a search”. On retention it says “Flock data is only retained for 30 days. However, an audit trail of the users who accessed the system is stored indefinitely.”

On 16 September 2026 the page counted 33 plate reader cameras, 757,912 unique vehicles detected in the previous 30 days, 2,725 hotlist hits and 432 searches.[1] A hotlist hit is an alert on a plate entered in a state or national list, such as a stolen vehicle or an Amber Alert.

Volunteers have mapped 531 devices in Bexar County that record Flock Safety as the manufacturer. The page does not say which of them, if any, are the office’s 33.

What the Commissioners Court record shows

We read the Commissioners Court’s agendas from January 2018 to September 2026. The only Flock item we found is a $135 invoice for tools and hardware, one line in a group of Sheriff’s Office invoices on the consent agenda of 28 April 2026.[2] We did not find a Flock contract, order form or renewal on those agendas. The agendas are not the whole record: an agreement can reach the Court as part of a grant or under a title that does not name the vendor, and the Court’s minutes and backup documents were not part of this review. Who approved the office’s Flock subscription, and what it costs, remain open.

On the map

The community has mapped 550 devices of this type in the county on OpenStreetMap. These are community reports: the vendor and operator of each point are unverified, and none is confirmed to belong to this system. See them on the map →

Street names from reverse geocoding — © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

What we do not know

What you can do

Show up

Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have confirmed where each of them meets in Bexar County and how public comment works there.

How to show up in Bexar County →

Protect yourself

Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.

Surveillance Self-Defense →

Sources

  1. 1.
    Bexar County Sheriff's Office, "Flock Safety" page on the county website · Primary document · · accessed
  2. 2.
    Bexar County Commissioners Court, agenda, 28 April 2026, item 29 (a scan) · Meeting record · · accessed

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