The Custer County Sheriff’s Office has ended its contract with Flock Safety and removed the county’s automated license plate reader cameras, closing a surveillance program that officials credited with helping locate suspects and stolen vehicles in several serious investigations.
The decision has a connection to Cañon City because one of the cases cited by the sheriff’s office involved a vehicle stolen during an armed carjacking in Silver Cliff. Investigators used the Flock system to locate that vehicle in Cañon City. Other agencies began and later ended a pursuit, after which the suspect drove north on Highway 115, according to the information released by the sheriff’s office.
The suspect later fired at officers and civilians while driving on the highway, carjacked two additional vehicles and was ultimately arrested by Colorado Springs police. The source does not identify the suspect or say that Cañon City officials operated the cameras. The Cañon City connection described by the sheriff’s office is the vehicle’s location and the subsequent pursuit.
A Flock contractor removed the remaining equipment from Custer County this past weekend. The sheriff’s office said it originally had three cameras and used the system for investigative alerts, including notifications when vehicles connected to local warrants entered the county.
Camera system used after 2023 triple homicide
The sheriff’s office also pointed to a November 2023 triple homicide in Custer County as a major example of how the technology was used. While deputies were still working at the crime scene, they issued a nationwide Be on the Lookout alert for the suspect.
A deputy in a neighboring county used Flock to locate the suspect’s vehicle at a Walmart in Salida. Salida police and the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office responded and searched the area, but the vehicle had already left by the time law enforcement arrived.
The following morning, a Flock camera in Santa Fe, New Mexico, recorded the vehicle. Investigators used that information to estimate when it would reach Albuquerque. A U.S. Marshals Task Force, together with state, county and local officers, then used the estimate to position officers ahead of the vehicle.
Officers spotted the vehicle and conducted a high-risk traffic stop. The suspect was arrested, and the sheriff’s office said nobody was injured. The case was one of the serious investigations the agency cited when explaining why Flock had been considered a useful investigative tool.
How access to the data changed
When Custer County first installed the system, the cameras shared license plate data with law enforcement agencies anywhere in the country. The sheriff’s office said the information was automatically deleted after 30 days, a period it described as below Colorado’s one-year storage limit.
The county later narrowed access so that only Colorado law enforcement agencies could use its data. The source also notes that Colorado law prohibits agencies in the state from sharing license plate reader data with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
State law also prohibits sharing data related to reproductive health care services. Those safeguards did not resolve all of the concerns surrounding the system, however. The sheriff’s office said reports from across the country described officers misusing license plate reader databases for searches unrelated to criminal investigations.
Those reports troubled Sheriff Smith, according to the agency. At the same time, an increasing number of Custer County residents contacted the sheriff’s office to raise privacy concerns and ask that the cameras be removed.
Contract cancellation and damaged equipment
The sheriff’s office said it notified Flock on March 24 that it wanted to cancel the contract. The agency made that notification in a Facebook post, according to the report.
The equipment’s removal followed damage to two camera poles. In early August, a vandal used a reciprocating saw to cut down two Flock camera poles on Highway 69 north of Reed Road. The source does not say whether the vandal was identified or whether the damage was connected to the contract cancellation.
The remaining cameras and equipment stayed in place until a Flock contractor removed them this past weekend. With that work completed, the sheriff’s office said the contract is now over.
No replacement cameras planned for now
Custer County does not currently plan to install license plate reader cameras from another company. The sheriff’s office also said it does not plan to install photo radar cameras that had previously been discussed.
The agency acknowledged that other vendors offer similar license plate reader technology. It said those systems could raise similar privacy concerns, meaning the decision was not based only on the Flock brand or on the performance of the particular cameras installed in Custer County.
For now, the county is ending the program despite the role officials said it played in locating the suspect in the triple-homicide investigation, tracking vehicles tied to local warrants and finding the vehicle involved in the Silver Cliff carjacking. The removal means the Custer County Sheriff’s Office will not have those Flock alerts available under the ended contract.
The supplied report does not describe any change to Cañon City’s own camera systems, police technology or policies. It also does not state that Cañon City had a Flock contract. Its local relevance is tied to the stolen vehicle found in the city and the pursuit that continued north on Highway 115.