State Rep. John Bucy III, an Austin Democrat, filed House Bill 331, which would bar Texas government agencies from using automatic license plate readers. State Rep. Brian Harrison, a Midlothian Republican, filed HB 8471, which would let police keep using the cameras but require a warrant and limit their use to violent crime investigations.

Harrison, who sought restrictions on Flock cameras in a previous session, said he believes Republican support for the technology contributed to the party's losses in the November election.

"This was a contributing factor to Republicans being defeated because the Republican leadership of the state of Texas had been supporting Flock cameras and forcing Texas taxpayers to fund their own warrantless surveillance for many years," Harrison said.

Both lawmakers said they are confident this session will be different and that legislators will pass limits on the cameras.

"I think this is an issue that goes beyond Republicans and Democrats," Bucy said. "I think it was all over the campaign trail from both sides of the aisle."

The bills arrive months after Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to stop using state money to purchase or operate the cameras. In Dallas, that decision affected nearly half of the police department's network of more than 600 Flock cameras.

Police say the cameras have helped them find stolen vehicles, locate missing people and solve violent crimes. But with a network of roughly 120,000 cameras nationwide, critics say Flock has built a far-reaching surveillance system capable of producing searchable records of where vehicles have been seen, including those belonging to people not suspected of any crime.

Flock Safety is among the most widely used providers of automated license plate readers in the country. Each time a vehicle passes, a camera captures a still image and converts information into searchable data: the license plate, vehicle type, time and location. The system can also identify characteristics such as a bumper sticker, roof rack or missing hubcap. That information is stored in a database authorized users can search.

Flock says its cameras track vehicles, not people. In practice, a series of sightings can reveal where a person has traveled. When one Texas television station gave Dallas police the plate number of a station vehicle, the department found Flock cameras had captured 87 images of it around North Texas in a single month.

The technology's investigative value was evident in the case of Aniya Edwards, a 20-year-old killed after leaving a Dallas music studio. Detectives found a Flock image of her Hyundai alongside a black Dodge. Additional cameras captured the two vehicles miles apart and seconds apart, and four snapshots spanning more than 20 miles extended the trail to the area where police said an attempted robbery occurred and Edwards was shot. The lead, combined with other evidence, helped identify a suspect arrested on a capital murder charge. Dallas police say Flock cameras have helped solve more than a dozen murder cases this year, roughly 18% of all homicides.

But a review of search logs from departments across Texas found that not every search was clearly tied to an investigation. Dallas records from 2023 through 2025 included reasons such as "info," "LOC" and "none," and the single letter "I" appeared nearly 30,000 times over the three-year period. Assistant Chief William Griffith said officers likely had legitimate reasons but failed to explain them in the system, and that weekly supervisor reviews found no misuse.

Concerns about misuse are not hypothetical. Former Lufkin police officer Zachary Klein pleaded guilty to 100 felony counts of misuse of official information and was sentenced to five years in prison. A Texas Rangers investigation found he conducted more than 25,000 improper Flock searches, about 18,000 of them involving plates associated with three people, including his former girlfriend and members of her family, according to the Angelina County District Attorney's Office.

Flock has added safeguards, including standardized search categories modeled on the FBI's crime data system, a shorter recommended data-retention period and software to flag unusual searches. In an August 2026 interview, CEO Garrett Langley told a reporter, "I don't think that Flock created police abuse," and when asked about the women involved, added, "It's horrible, and I apologize."

The city of Wylie, about 20 miles northeast of Dallas, let its contract lapse this fall after audit records showed outside agencies across the country had conducted thousands of searches that could have included data from its six cameras, with reasons including curfew, loitering, illegal dumping and traffic analysis. "We can't control another department on how they access data on our citizens, and so that's a concern for us," Mayor Matthew Porter said.

Even a full retreat by government agencies would not necessarily remove vehicles from Flock's database. The company's first customers were homeowners associations, and its cameras are also used in retail parking lots, apartment complexes and neighborhoods. Private customers decide whether to share their data with police, meaning legislation aimed only at government-owned cameras could leave a parallel network in place.

For Texas communities, the debate now moves to the Legislature, where two lawmakers from opposite parties agree that the status quo of warrantless, searchable vehicle tracking is no longer tenable.