Flock Safety gave $20,000 to the Democratic Mayors Association and $10,000 to the Republican-aligned Community Leaders of America. Then 2025 arrived — along with mounting protests, contract cancellations, and uncomfortable headlines about misuse — and Flock dropped $240,000 across the Democratic and Republican Governors Associations and both parties’ Attorneys General Associations, according to The Intercept. That’s a 700% increase over the prior three years.
Add $2 million-plus in state and federal lobbying since early 2025, per OpenSecrets, and the picture sharpens fast.
It’s a playbook — and Flock isn’t the only one running it:
- Motorola Solutions donated more than $986,000 since early 2023.
- Axon gave $225,000 to attorneys general groups over the same period, according to The Intercept.
Buying proximity to the officials who oversee procurement, regulation, and investigation isn’t an anomaly in surveillance tech. It’s standard operating procedure.
Access, Accountability, and the Appearance Problem
The officials accepting Flock’s donations are the same ones deciding whether Flock’s contracts get renewed — or investigated.
When the Democratic Mayors Association accepted $30,000 from Flock, it defended the decision: donations don’t buy influence, and members make independent decisions. The Democratic Governors Association offered the same defense. Those responses may be legally accurate, but Torin Monahan of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill cut through the careful language. He warned that recipient groups face serious “reputational risk” for accepting Flock’s money during the backlash, according to The Intercept.
The backlash itself is real and broad. Immigration officials accessed Flock’s data. Police officers used its surveillance app to surveil former romantic partners. By 2026, canceled or deactivated Flock contracts, with the activist group DeFlock tracking the wave of terminations. Criticism comes from both left and right — that’s not a niche protest movement.
Political donations are legal. Lobbying is legal. But when the company selling surveillance infrastructure to local government simultaneously funds the political networks those officials belong to — buying a table at every charity gala thrown by your regulators — the oversight question becomes genuinely uncomfortable. Stricter procurement rules and transparency requirements are the logical next fight, and that fight is just getting started.
