Did City Council vote on these contracts?

Not in the way a major purchase is sometimes approved. The purchasing documents show these Flock awards were administrative purchases “reported on the weekly report to Council,” not items carried by a recorded council vote. No council vote approving these specific awards appears in the records reviewed here or in the reporting found.

City Council's documented involvement came later and informally. In an October 2026 budget session, Councilmember Gianina Horton asked the Police Department to remove Flock cameras from Aurora high schools, and Councilmembers Alison Coombs, Amy Wiles, Ruben Medina, and Alli Jackson agreed, according to Colorado Politics.^[1]

How many cameras does Aurora have?

The two largest purchase orders price the cameras as lots and give no count. The public figure comes from the Police Department itself: in October 2025, Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain said the city had about 100 Flock systems and that he hoped the number would grow as the program expanded, in a demonstration reported by KDVR/FOX31.^[2]

Chamberlain framed the system as targeted rather than blanket surveillance: the technology, he said, “alert[s] to a hit where somebody has taken your property and is now driving it around… it's not about a mass thing of surveillance on everybody.” The report did not address how long data is kept or whether it is shared with other agencies.^[2] (The Master Services Agreement sets a rolling 30-day deletion default; see The Program.)

A third figure comes from neither the City nor the vendor. Volunteers mapping cameras in OpenStreetMap, the dataset behind the DeFlock project, had recorded 293 plate readers inside Aurora's city boundary as of October 13, 2026, 267 of them tagged as Flock Safety hardware. That is more than two and a half times the chief's “about 100,” but the two numbers do not compare cleanly: the crowdsourced data includes private Flock cameras at stores and shopping centers, can carry cameras since removed, and misses any camera nobody has mapped. It is the only public location evidence there is. See the Map.

The school cameras, switched off

This is where the paper trail meets the news. Purchase Order 25P0207 (March 2025) funded $66,600 for 20 cameras tied to the Police Department's School Resource Officer unit. In October 2026, Colorado Politics reported that the Aurora Police Department turned off 12 Flock cameras in the parking lots of five Aurora high schools — Aurora Central, Gateway, Hinkley, Rangeview, and Vista PEAK — installed in 2025 under a contract of about $65,000, a figure that matches the purchase order.^[3]

Chief Chamberlain told the council's Public Safety, Courts and Civil Service Policy Committee that Flock would remove the cameras within three weeks unless the Aurora Public Schools board voted to start its own Flock contract. The district said it has no contract with Flock. Cameras that the department had installed at Cherry Creek Public Schools campuses were removed earlier, in May 2026, at the district's request.^[3]

The Aurora Education Association opposed the cameras. Its president, Linnea Reed-Ellis, said “many of our members are deeply concerned about the decision to install third-party Flock surveillance cameras,” citing privacy and a lack of community input. Police defended them as “intended to help keep students safe,” crediting a high-school camera with helping arrest four juveniles in an armed carjacking.^[3]

The drone program, in operation

The documents show the City bought a six-drone Drone as First Responder (DFR) program. Aurora now runs it publicly: the Police Department operates an online DFR flight dashboard, which states that “DFR operations are managed through the Real-Time Information Center (RTIC) to supplement and enhance traditional patrol responses” and that “the DFR program strictly prohibits the use of drones in ways that violate an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy.”^[4]

The hardware comes from Flock's 2024 acquisition of the drone company Aerodome. Flock and Aerodome announced their partnership in July 2024, pairing Flock's license-plate readers and audio sensors with drones that can be dispatched automatically when a sensor registers a hit.^[5] It is that automatic pairing — a license-plate network able to launch a drone — that civil-liberties groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have criticized as an escalation of routine surveillance.^[6]

Data sharing, ICE, and Colorado law

Much of Colorado's Flock controversy concerns whether license-plate data reaches federal immigration authorities. No reporting found places Aurora in that controversy. The documented problems have been elsewhere: a coalition reported that Denver's Flock logs showed more than 1,400 ICE-related searches since June 2024; Loveland police ran Flock searches labeled “ICE” on behalf of the ATF; and Boulder shared data with a national network reachable by federal agencies until it restricted access in 2025.^[7]

Colorado law prohibits law-enforcement agencies from sharing license-plate-reader data with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for immigration purposes. Flock, for its part, says it does not work with immigration authorities and that each client controls its own data.^[8] Whether Aurora shares its Flock data outside Colorado, and with whom, is not established by these documents or the reporting found — it remains an open question that a records request on Aurora's sharing settings could answer.

What the police chief has said

Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain is the program's most visible public advocate. His statements matter here for a documentary reason: they are the department's own description of what the cameras are for, how far the program should go, and what it does with the data. Each quotation below is reproduced as published, with its source and date. Where a report paraphrases him rather than quoting him, that is noted.

On what the cameras are for

In September 2025, CBS Colorado reported, in paraphrase, that Aurora's roughly 100 cameras are used to locate stolen vehicles and vehicles wanted in connection with felony warrants.^[9] A month later, demonstrating the system for KDVR, Chamberlain said:

“It's not about a mass thing of surveillance on everybody.”^[2]

In the same demonstration he said the city had “probably about ten years” of license-plate-reader experience before Flock, that Flock was “basically just taking two tools that are out there, combining them,” and that he hoped to add more systems as the program grew.^[2] The stated purpose — stolen cars and felony warrants — is the yardstick the department set for itself.

On sharing the data

Asked by CBS Colorado about passing license-plate data to other agencies, Chamberlain said:

“I think getting siloed and just holding information when you have that opportunity to pass that information along… that's collaboration. And I believe in collaboration.”^[9]

In the same interview he said, “The Flock system, without question, is a force multiplier for us,” and asked, “If we have a chance of identifying someone that's going to cause harm, wouldn't we like to stop that?”^[9] The report does not say which agencies Aurora shares with, and neither do the City's contracts; see the data-sharing section above.

On the program's permanence

At a September 30, 2026 town hall reported by Sentinel Colorado, Chamberlain acknowledged privacy and misuse concerns about license-plate readers and said:

“I hope it doesn't turn into throwing the baby out with bathwater. … We can't go back.”^[10]

He called the technology “so incredibly important and so imperative in what it allows us to do, especially in times of staffing issues,” and, as he had a year earlier, “a force multiplier.” The Sentinel's account refers to automated license-plate readers generally rather than to Flock by name; Flock is the vendor named in the City's current contracts.^[10]

On the results

Chamberlain has credited the cameras in specific cases. After an August 2026 arrest in a fatal hit-and-run of a cyclist, he said in a department statement, “I cannot stress enough how invaluable technology is in police work,” and that “the utilization of Flock in this investigation not only gave the victim a voice” but “allowed us to identify a vehicle and a driver.”^[11] On PBS NewsHour in July 2026, he described a Denver case in which a stolen car carried a 14-month-old child:

“Without that Flock technology, we might not have found that for two or three days later. … That technology saved that 14-month-old baby's life.”^[12]

In the same segment he addressed critics directly: “You can always take the stories of the worst-case scenario,” adding that “there are some stories where lives have been changed through the use of this technology.”^[12]

At a July 28, 2026 press conference reported by Denver7, Chamberlain credited a 25 percent drop in crime since 2024 to a set of strategies that, in the station's paraphrase, included Flock cameras alongside redistricting and directed patrols. The report gives no breakdown attributing any share of the decline to the cameras. Of the numbers themselves he said, “These numbers are real. These numbers are tangible,” and, of public perception, “perception becomes reality sometimes.”^[13]

On the school cameras

When council members asked for the high-school cameras to be removed in October 2026, Chamberlain's reported remarks to the council committee were procedural: the cameras were off, and Flock would remove them within three weeks unless the school district contracted on its own. No published account found records him stating a view on the decision itself.^[3]

What these statements leave open: the chief has described a narrow purpose (stolen vehicles, felony warrants) and an open posture toward sharing data with other agencies. Which agencies can query Aurora's data, and under what rules, is not stated in any of these reports or in the contracts. See Data sharing above.

Still unanswered

Even with the reporting above, some questions remain open on the public record: the exact number and location of every Flock device in Aurora; which outside agencies, if any, can query Aurora's data; and whether any of these contracts will face a formal council vote at renewal rather than an administrative report. This page will note answers as they appear in the record.