Tulsa officials have celebrated a growing camera network that tracks cars around the city as a breakthrough for law enforcement, crediting it with solving homicides and reducing violent crime. The city now operates more than 100 license plate reader cameras and over 150 live-streaming surveillance cameras, all monitored from a command center in Tulsa’s city hall.
But an investigation by The Frontier, based on interviews with experts, public records, and crime statistics, found little evidence the system has meaningfully reduced crime. Legal scholars and civil liberties advocates also warn the technology may violate Oklahoma law and infringe on constitutional privacy rights.
Here are five key takeaways from The Frontier’s reporting:
- After a brief decline in late 2022 after the cameras were first deployed, violent crime in Tulsa returned to roughly the same levels as before, according to FBI data. Tulsa has seen fewer car thefts recently, but that trend began in 2021 — before the cameras were installed. Academic research in other cities increasingly shows license plate readers have little measurable impact on crime rates.
- Tulsa is short more than 100 officers, largely due to uncompetitive pay. At the same time, the city spends nearly $700,000 a year on its contract with Flock Safety and invested over $2.5 million to build its real-time information center, which employs around 20 full-time staff. Research shows that adding even a single officer can reduce violent crime — particularly in understaffed departments. Still, police leaders say they plan to keep expanding the system.
- Tulsa’s use of Flock cameras appears to conflict with Oklahoma law, which restricts the use of license plate reader technology to enforcing the state’s car insurance requirement. Last year, a judge in another county barred license plate reader data from being used as evidence in a criminal case.
- Tulsa police share data from their Flock system with an intelligence fusion center that distributes information to federal agencies like the FBI and immigration authorities. Contracts the city has signed with Flock Safety give the company broad discretion to share the footage with third parties.
- City officials and Flock Safety have publicly credited Flock cameras with the city’s recent 100% homicide clearance rate, even though Tulsa also achieved a 100% clearance rate in 2018 — years before the cameras were installed. Flock’s marketing materials portray Tulsa as a national success story and “a beacon for what modern, data-driven policing can achieve.”
