CivicScope
A dashboard for journalists, civil liberties lawyers, and local civic groups to track public-sector ALPR contracts, vendor data-sharing policies, and camera footprints city by city.
investigative journalists and civil liberties attorneys
- Contract database searchable by city, vendor, expiration date, and data-sharing terms
- Side-by-side comparison of municipal surveillance policies across jurisdictions
- Auto-generated public records requests tailored to each city's ALPR contract
- Exportable evidence packs for FOIA lawsuits and council testimony
Multiple US cities are renegotiating or terminating Flock contracts at the same time, creating a window of public-records activity that reporters and advocates want to act on while the contracts are being rewritten.
30+ US cities canceled Flock contracts since 2024 per NPR/stateofsurveillance.org, with active FOIA-driven investigations (Hartford PD, Colorado Border Patrol pilot, MN journalist wrongly tracked) and multiple journalist toolkits already on GitHub, indicating concrete current workflow demand.Why some cities are canceling Flock license plate reader contracts ↗30+ Cities Have Canceled Flock Safety Contracts ↗
Adjacent tools exist (haveibeenflocked.com for lookups, placa.ai's canceled-cities list, lprmaps.com community map, EFF Atlas of Surveillance, DeflockYourCity toolkit) but none combines contract text + vendor terms-of-service changes + camera footprints in a turnkey journalist dashboard — the integration layer is open.Flock FOIA External Guidance ↗GitHub - DeflockYourCity/flock-alpr-toolkit ↗
Target buyers are mostly non-profit newsrooms, ACLU/EFF-style legal nonprofits, and pro bono civil-liberties attorneys — documented FOIA tooling ecosystem (MuckRock, Inside Investigator) operates on grants/low budgets, suggesting thin willingness to pay premium SaaS pricing.FOIA reveals inconsistencies with Hartford PD's claims about Flock ↗Flock vs. FOIA: The Suppression Manual ↗
ALPRs have been deployed for 20+ years (DHS, EFF references) and Flock alone operates in 5,000+ agencies; even as some cities cancel, replacement vendors and renegotiated contracts keep public-records demand alive for years — a durable policy beat, not a fad.Automatic License Plate Readers - Homeland Security ↗
Contract PDFs and council minutes are obtainable but FOIA processes are slow and resisted (Flock actively coaches agencies to block requests per footnote4a), so building a continuously updated, structured dataset across thousands of jurisdictions is a significant ongoing data-engineering burden, not a one-time scrape.Flock vs. FOIA: The Suppression Manual ↗