In late August, Phil Mynona filed a public records request on behalf of the Texas Privacy Coalition seeking information about how North Richland Hills uses its Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) system. The Fort Worth suburb responded with an invoice for $2.3 million, requiring payment upfront before processing the request. City officials justified the extraordinary fee by claiming that searching 'about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system' would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour. Mynona, who has filed nearly identical requests with almost 200 law enforcement agencies across the US, characterized the demand as 'ludicrous' and suggested it was intended to stifle his public records searches.
The city’s justification rests on a labor-cost calculation: $15 per hour for what officials say is 14 years of work to sift through roughly a terabyte of Flock-related communications. Mynona and other watchdog observers have labeled the figure ludicrous, arguing it is meant to deter scrutiny rather than reflect actual costs. Across Texas, fees for similar Flock records requests vary dramatically—some agencies, such as the city of Sealy west of Houston, have provided more than 400,000 pages of documents free of charge, while others have charged amounts ranging from $5,000 in Victoria to over $100,000 for outlets like Houston’s KPRC news station.
Beyond pricing inconsistencies, concerns persist about how Flock data is used. Public records requests have previously uncovered misuse, including a Lufkin Police officer sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to 100 felony counts of abusing official information through Flock camera stalking, which prompted Texas Governor Greg Abbott to halt Flock funding and pause certain installations. Despite Flock offering optional transparency portals that let agencies publish usage statistics, only 59 of the hundreds of Texas agencies using Flock cameras have adopted them, and just 16 share data with the public, leaving most surveillance activity opaque and raising worries about unchecked expansion as AI makes data processing easier.