The City of Evanston said it issued a cease-and-desist order to Flock Safety on Tuesday after the company reinstalled the automated license plate readers it had previously taken down.
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, a city spokesperson said the city “has not deviated or made any changes since our decision on Aug. 26 to terminate our relationship with Flock,” noting the company had removed 19 ALPR cameras shortly after the city issued its termination notice.
But residents around Evanston noticed Monday that several of the previously removed cameras had been reinstalled.
The city said Flock had reinstalled them and that the city’s legal department “immediately issued a cease-and-desist order to Flock” on Tuesday, demanding they be taken down.
Flock subsequently agreed to remove the cameras this afternoon, the city said, but it’s unclear when they’ll actually come down or if they were ever activated by Flock.
The city’s transparency portal, which provides data shared by Flock, shows that at least 155,507 vehicles have been detected by Flock cameras in the past 30 days, with at least 128 searches. The portal says it was last updated on Tuesday.
The city terminated its contract with the controversial license plate reader company after reports from Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias in late August that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had access to Flock’s nationwide network of license plate cameras, sparking outrage nationwide.
The Evanston Police Department said it stopped collecting or sharing data with Flock after the City Council terminated its contract with the company, but the city’s termination notice to Flock isn’t set to take effect until Friday, Sept. 26.
Flock didn’t respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Giannoulias launched his investigation into Flock in June, after reports circulated that a Texas sheriff had accessed Illinois’ license plate data to possibly track down a woman who went to Illinois for abortion care.
The report, first uncovered by 404 Media, found that the Johnson County sheriff searched more than 83,000 automatic license plate readers in Flock’s system to search for the woman, including ones in Mount Prospect, potentially violating Illinois law.
Police chief Schenita Stewart told the Evanston City Council that she directed EPD to shut off Evanston’s national search feature on June 18, a feature the department called a “much-needed security blanket” that the department had relied on to search for vehicles quickly.
Several other communities had turned their cameras off or stopped sharing data, too, including Oak Park, Arlington Heights and several other cities nationwide.
Flock responded to Evanston terminating the contract in a letter to the city on Aug. 27, writing that Flock “denies categorically that it committed a breach of the [contract], or any violation of law.”
“We are aware of no legal basis for your apparent belief that the City may relieve itself of clear and unambiguous contractual obligations, simply by declaration, however emphatic, of its intention not to be bound by them,” Flock’s Chief Legal Officer, Dan Haley, wrote, requesting a 30-day “cure period” to alleviate the city’s concerns.
“Please be advised, however, that absent clear identification of the alleged breach and the contractually required opportunity to cure, we will take all necessary steps to enforce our Agreement,” Haley wrote in the letter dated Aug. 27, 2025.
The Evanston Police Department referred all questions regarding Flock to the city.
The city’s contract with Flock had been scheduled to run through Jan. 24, 2029.
Update – Sept. 24 at 3:37 p.m.:
In response to an inquiry about why Flock reinstalled the cameras, a spokesperson for the company wrote, “As we’re working through these conversations with the City of Evanston, the cameras are off and will be uninstalled.”
Flock did not answer why the cameras were reinstalled earlier in the week.
