Texas Governor Orders State Agencies to Halt Funding for Flock Cameras

What happened

On the night of Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026, confirmed the following day, Gov. Greg Abbott directed Texas state agencies to stop funding Flock Safety’s license-plate camera network. His spokesperson, Andrew Mahaleris, described the move narrowly: agencies were clarifying that “those funds cannot be used for Flock cameras” — wording about future spending, not about recovering money already spent. Abbott himself cast it more sweepingly: “This is something that is easily containable, easily controllable, and we’re ensuring that whether it be through criminal crackdowns, whether it be through cancellation of contracts, whatever the case may be, Flock cameras are being reduced dramatically.”

The money runs through the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority, a state agency whose board Abbott mostly appoints. The Texas Tribune found the Authority had devoted at least $30 million in grants to local police departments to build up the camera network since 2023. The Texas Department of Public Safety separately holds a three-year, $15.9 million contract tied to the same program, and the Authority’s funding comes from a 2023 law adding a $1 surcharge to every auto insurance policy in the state. Under that funding, at least 3,200 Flock cameras have gone up across Texas since 2023, nearly 1,200 of them installed by DPS.

The order came as the Texas Tribune was preparing to publish its own investigation into the state program’s spending — a sequence the Tribune’s own reporting states directly. It also followed a run of misuse cases: a Lufkin police officer was indicted in April 2026 on 100 counts of misusing public information, accused of using local Flock cameras to track 11 people over more than a year, and in the month before the order at least six Texas police departments or sheriff’s offices placed officers on leave, opened investigations, or filed charges over Flock misuse.

The order only reaches state-agency spending. It does not legally stop Texas cities or counties from funding Flock cameras with municipal tax dollars or federal grants, so coverage will keep varying by locality. Several cities had already moved on their own: Pflugerville’s council voted unanimously to end its contract and disable 28 camera readers, Hood County’s Commissioners Court voted to end its Flock relationship and later ordered cameras disconnected and covered, and Wylie’s council voted against renewing its contract. Mahaleris pointed to that pattern himself: “Almost all Flock cameras in Texas are used by cities, and those cities are increasingly canceling their contracts with Flock.”

Flock Safety’s response leaned toward continued use rather than retreat. Spokesperson Paris Lewbel called the technology “an important public safety tool for law enforcement” and said the company supports “thoughtful legislation and strong privacy, transparency, and accountability guardrails.” The episode sits alongside separate national scrutiny: U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley has been investigating Flock’s business practices, describing its network as spanning more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states with roughly 20 billion vehicle scans a month — Hawley’s own characterization, not a figure independently measured in the reporting reviewed here.

What this means (and what it does not)

The order lets Abbott appear responsive on privacy just as an unflattering investigation and a string of misuse cases were becoming public, without his office conceding wrongdoing by the appointees who run the granting agency. The Texas Tribune, whose reporting anchors most of this account, also has a stake in the story: presenting the order as something its investigation caused inflates the apparent impact of its own work. Flock Safety’s statement is built to preserve its government business — it asks for “guardrails,” not a rollback, because its revenue depends on camera contracts continuing. The Pflugerville, Hood County and Wylie officials who cancelled contracts have reason to present those votes as principled privacy decisions, even though they landed in the same window as Abbott’s order and the surrounding controversy over it.

What the order does not do, on this sourcing, is claw back the $30 million already granted to local police. The Tribune’s own account describes the directive as a forward-looking clarification of how funds can be used, not a recovery of money already spent — a distinction Abbott’s own more sweeping language, quoted above, tends to blur. Nor does the order touch city or county budgets, which is why Texas’s camera coverage is likely to stay uneven rather than disappear.

What we still do not know

No outlet reviewed for this article has published or quoted the text of Abbott’s actual directive — a letter, executive order or agency memo. Every account relies on his spokesperson’s statements and a radio interview, so it is unclear whether the order carries binding legal force or is an informal instruction agencies could decline to fully carry out. What becomes of the $30 million already granted to local departments — clawed back, redirected to non-Flock uses, or left with departments that have already installed cameras — is not established. No source found in reporting confirms any other U.S. state or municipality has frozen or reconsidered Flock funding as a result of the Texas episode; only the three named Texas municipalities are confirmed to have acted on their own. Flock Safety has not put a figure on its financial exposure from Texas cancellations. The Lufkin officer’s case and the six other department investigations are all still pending — an indictment, an investigation or a leave, not an adjudicated outcome. And The Verge’s own reporting on the order’s scope could not be read in full for this article; automated retrieval of the site was blocked, so its contribution here rests on a search-engine summary rather than a direct read of the story.