Sherman, Howe and Marietta drop Flock cameras; Cooke County still runs 16

Sherman has joined a string of Texoma cities turning away from Flock license plate cameras. Its city council voted 7-0 on Oct. 19 to let the city's Flock agreement run out and to take down the 11 readers the city owns, KXII and KTEN reported. In Cooke County, the sheriff's office still runs 16 Flock cameras, according to the company's public transparency page for the office, which GvilleTX checked on Nov. 10.

Sherman's vote did not switch the cameras off that night. The mayor said removal would take time, and the stations' reports give no date for the last reader to come down. The vote covers only city-owned cameras; readers that other agencies own inside Sherman were not part of it. Council members cited public opposition and privacy worries, and council member Clay Barnett asked what happens to Sherman's data once it leaves the city, KXII reported. Any future city camera will need a council vote and a public hearing first.

Who else stepped back

Sherman is not alone in the region. The actions differ, and the difference matters: some cities let a contract expire, some voted down a plan before it started, and some covered cameras that are still on their poles.

• Marietta, Okla. The city council voted 6-0 on Aug. 20 "to not go forward with the Flock camera," according to the meeting minutes. Five cameras had run there on a trial.
• Thackerville, Okla. Police said in early September that the department would end its Flock contract. KXII reported officers covering the cameras starting Oct. 26.
• Howe. City officials announced Oct. 22 that the city will not renew, saying residents did not want the cameras, KTEN reported.
• Wylie. The council voted 7-0 on Aug. 25 not to renew its six-camera agreement, which ran out Oct. 31, CBS Texas and FOX 4 reported.
• Princeton. The council voted 5-1 on Sept. 8 to stop using license plate readers. None of the department's units was running at the time, the Princeton Herald reported.
• Plano. More than 90 cameras went dark at the end of August after state money for them ended, NBC DFW reported. They stayed on their poles, switched off.
• Hood County. Commissioners ended the county's Flock contract in April and had the cameras covered by mid-August, FOX 4 and Texas Public Radio reported. Granbury, the county seat, kept its own cameras.

Two other votes in the area are often counted as Flock rejections but were narrower. Bowie's council voted 4-2 on July 28 against a TxDOT agreement that would have put cameras on state highway right-of-way, NewsChannel 6 reported; police said they would look at city locations instead. Wichita County commissioners turned down an agreement with Electra on Sept. 8 for cameras outside Electra's city limits. Electra's own contract stands.

Who is keeping them

Ardmore's city commission voted to put Flock on the ballot in February, and a motion to cover the cameras until then failed 3-2, KTEN reported. Carrollton's council voted 6-1 in September to expand its program. Dallas, Addison and Johnson County reached an Oct. 2 arrangement that keeps service running, the Texas Tribune reported. Denton police had 10 cameras running as of August, KETR reported.

Cooke County's 16 cameras

The transparency page lists all 16 as license plate readers and says the office keeps their data for 30 days.

Over the 30 days before Nov. 10, deputies ran 106 searches of Flock data, and the readers logged 6,011 hits against hotlists. Those lists are the national crime database (NCIC) and Amber Alerts from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Hits have dropped since summer. The page showed 16,316 hits for the 30 days before Aug. 10, and 13,302 for the 30 days before Aug. 22.

The office shares its camera data with 1,336 organizations, seven of them federal, including the FBI, and receives data from 775. Sherman police, Denison police, Thackerville police, Bowie police and Lindsay police appear on both lists as of Nov. 10. A city's vote on its own cameras does not remove its police department from those lists. Marietta does not appear on either one.

Lindsay police have a Flock account that can see other agencies' data. We have not confirmed that Lindsay owns or runs cameras of its own.

What deputies searched for

The same page posts a public log of every search in the past 30 days, with the officer's name hidden. The log GvilleTX downloaded on Nov. 10 lists 106 searches from Oct. 11 to Nov. 9, each with the offense type entered for it. Wanted persons and warrants led with 43 searches, followed by theft with 18, stolen vehicles with 8 and vandalism with 7. Threats or harassment accounted for 6. Kidnapping or abduction, missing persons and reckless driving had 5 each. The other 9 covered stolen property, drugs, forgery, robbery, burglary and a hit-and-run.

The log also records how many camera networks each search reached. That number topped 1,000 in 61 of the 106 searches, and the widest search reached 5,849.

The page states that every search needs a reason and an incident number and that access logs are audited monthly. It lists immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment, stalking and personal use among the prohibited uses.

The bigger count

The pullback reaches well past Texoma. The Texas Tribune reported on Sept. 24 that at least 14 Texas cities and counties had shut off more than 900 Flock cameras after the state took back its funding in late August. Some of those, Dallas among them, later turned service back on. A Newsweek analysis of DeFlock data, reported by Jalopnik on Oct. 4, counted 149 cities and counties nationwide that canceled or rejected contracts or turned off cameras from January through August 2026. Who Approved This, a site that tracks these decisions over several years, listed 332 endings as of Nov. 10: 243 canceled, expired or rejected, and 89 suspended.

Elsewhere in Texas, the list since August includes Pflugerville, Leander, Bastrop, Manvel, Liberty Hill, Hutto, Kyle, Midland and Taylor. League City voters rejected continued use on Nov. 3, and the city began covering its cameras two days later, Click2Houston reported.

The 16 readers in Cooke County are still recording, and the next 30-day count will show on the same public page.