Two Boulder residents filed a class-action lawsuit Wednesday in Boulder District Court challenging the city’s use of 31 Flock Safety surveillance cameras, asking a judge to declare the program unconstitutional and to bar Boulder from continuing warrantless tracking.
William Freeman, one of the plaintiffs, says the network has followed him across the city: five separate cameras capture his movements by car and bike on his commute to work, three cameras record him when he goes to a park, and several more pick him up while he goes to and from the grocery store.
The complaint alleges Boulder police have used the Flock license-plate readers continuously since Jan. 6, 2022, keeping a searchable catalog of movements that gave police broad access to records tracking people driving and biking through the city and, until June 2025, allowed law enforcement agencies outside Colorado to view the data.
Evidence cited in the filing and related reporting underlines why the system is now under scrutiny: Boulder’s Flock system was included in 5,438 database queries on Jan. 1, 2025, the national Flock network logged more than 4,000 searches citing immigration between June 1, 2024, and May 5, 2025, and Boulder’s cameras appeared in more than 100 searches by the U.S. Border Patrol before the city cut off national sharing in June 2025.
The lawsuit names Police Chief Stephen Redfearn and Dawn VanAckeren as defendants and says at least nine other Flock cameras in the city are run by the University of Colorado Boulder Police Department or private businesses. Freeman also alleges VanAckeren denied a records request he filed seeking information about how the system had tracked him.
Andy McNulty, speaking for the plaintiffs, framed the claim plainly: "Boulder cannot pretend this is about catching criminals when 99% of the people its cameras surveil every day have nothing to do with any crime," he said. "This is the kind of dragnet surveillance that turns every neighborhood into a checkpoint and every commute into a serious violation of privacy rights. The Colorado Constitution does not permit it and we intend to put a stop to it."
City officials have not accepted the plaintiffs’ characterization. City spokesperson Sarah Huntley said officials are "evaluating the claims that are being made." She added, "As this is now litigation, we will make our arguments and share our perspective through official court filings and any hearings on this matter," signaling Boulder intends to contest the suit through the courts rather than through media statements.
The complaint asks the court to declare Boulder’s Flock camera program unconstitutional and to issue an injunction preventing continued surveillance without warrants. The legal claim lands as the city moves to replace its license-plate reader contractor: Boulder opened a bidding process in March for other companies to provide automatic license plate readers, with bids due by 4 p.m. Friday and plans to shortlist vendors by mid-June for a pilot program.
The central dispute now for the court is concrete: will a judge halt Boulder’s Flock system while the case proceeds, effectively forcing the city to obtain warrants before using license-plate searches, or will the city be allowed to continue operating and selecting a new vendor as the litigation unfolds? That decision will determine whether the surveillance system is paused while constitutional questions are litigated or remains an active tool of local policing as Boulder tests replacement technologies.
