Pflugerville uses Flock Safety license plate readers at various locations around the city. If you have driven through certain intersections, your plate has likely been scanned and logged.
In practice, each scan can include the plate number, timestamp, location, and an image of the vehicle. That data is stored by the vendor for a defined retention period. Law enforcement can then search the system, and sharing settings can determine what outside agencies can query local data.
The bigger policy question is not whether the system exists. It is what rules govern it. What is the actual retention period? Which outside agencies can query our local data? Were those sharing arrangements affirmatively approved by Council or simply carried administratively under the contract?
Those are the questions I have raised with staff and the City Attorney. My position is straightforward: public safety tools should be subject to public rules. If a city system collects location-linked data on residents and visitors, the public should know how long it is retained, who can access it, and what oversight exists.
That is why I have also pushed for a formal Council-level approval process for surveillance technology contracts and material changes to data sharing.
I raised direct questions with staff and the City Attorney about the retention period, interagency access, and the actual governance structure behind the current Flock setup. I pushed to treat this as a broader oversight issue rather than a one-off vendor controversy. If a system is collecting location-linked data, the public deserves to know what is being kept, who can search it, and how those rules were approved.