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Before reworking a contract for AI-powered license plate surveillance, town councilors await a scoping report that will show what’s negotiable and how much time that would take.
Councilors voted to request the report in early December, with an expected due date of Jan. 5, 2026, according to Susan Scarlata, town’s director of external affairs.
This is the first step responding to privacy concerns some Jacksonites have raised over the 28 mounted cameras that help the Jackson Police Department solve crime.
Potential topics for renegotiation include how many cameras the town has and how it stores data.
Contract termination with Flock Safety, owned and operated by Flock Group Inc., is also on the table.
“There’s value to the system,” Jackson Mayor Arne Jorgensen said in an interview. “But if we get a sense that someone is using it in a way that is inappropriate, and that Flock may not have been completely upfront with us, then one of the options would be to terminate our agreement.”
Councilors approved an original $184,000 contract in 2023 in a 3-2 vote. Then, Jorgensen voted against the initial contract, saying at the time he was wary of Jackson police resources aiding law enforcement that he didn’t see as a “priority” for town, such as criminalized abortion access. He later voted to auto-renew the contract at just under $90,000 per year.
Data hasn’t yet gone to ICE, but could it?
The town’s probe of its two-year contract is less a reaction to any discrete incident and more a response to general security concerns and a rising community fear of immigration enforcement. This year, the Teton County Sheriff’s Department has changed policies to hold immigrant detainees longer for ICE, resulting in a transfer uptick.
In the last two years, the Jackson Police Department has fulfilled 23 requests for license plate recognition data from mostly local and state agencies, according to Lt. Russ Ruschill. That, however, has not included the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“We have never filed a request of any kind for ICE,” Ruschill said. To protect active cases, Ruschill declined to name the other requesting agencies.
But under President Trump’s immigration enforcement, town councilors wonder if local data could fall into outside hands without council or police permission.
Jorgensen addressed that concern directly, saying he would “push to stop” the contract if he “ever got a sense that our data was being used to further the crackdown on immigration happening in this country, and it’s not benefiting our community.”
He’s interested in adding a contract provision mandating Flock Safety to notify town officials, as well as the police department, if a government agency attempts to obtain data.
Batten down the hatches
Adding provisions for data-sharing wouldn’t be new safeguards but could beef up those already in place.
The town’s contract is purposefully restrictive and stringent, Jorgensen said. It prohibits Flock Safety from sharing any local data with federal and state agencies, including ICE, the Wyoming Highway Patrol and the National Park Service, without proper authorization. The police manual states the department will conduct audits quarterly.
And in two years, there have been no known data breaches, according to a town statement.
Town policy requires police officials to sign off on a query of the database. And unlike some of the other 6,000 towns with Flock contracts across 49 states, Jackson has disabled out-of-state data of photos, time stamps and location data through Amazon Web Services.
“We are trying to hold close control over the database,” Jorgensen said.
That hasn’t stopped some residents from worrying.
Jackson resident Hunter Singleton recently notified town officials of various ways that surveillance cameras could be hacked, referencing a white paper from a CUNY Queens College sociologist and podcaster Joseph Cohen. According to Cohen, someone could join a camera’s wifi and enable debug access or permissions to see detailed system data.
Flock Safety disputes the claim that the cameras could easily be hacked.
Flock Safety Public Relations Manager Paris Lewbel told KHOL that the company cloud platform has never been hacked.
“Data from Flock cameras is securely stored in the cloud and encrypted with the same level of protection relied on by government agencies to safeguard sensitive information,” Lewbel wrote in an email.
He said Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) data is stored in a compliant “Amazon Web Services GovCloud” for added security.
Councilors will weigh the fear of hacking – regardless of permission settings – against the use of the license plate readers (often abbreviated to LPRs), which Ruschill said help solve crime within the department often.
“Anecdotally speaking, I hear daily stories from officers who use the LPR system to solve a variety of cases,” Ruschill said in a text. Providing more detail on investigation types would take more time, he said.
Flock Safety says its technology provides law enforcement with real-time alerts to prevent and solve crimes such as car theft, burglary, assaults and missing person cases. It records a vehicle’s specific features, including make, model, license plate, color, and other unique information.
But the possibility of any U.S. federal agency or even a foreign country accessing Jackson data doesn’t sit well with Mark Jackowski, a Jackson trial lawyer and former federal prosecutor.
“The Flock system — is it a benefit or are we putting ourselves more at risk of being a monitoring state?” he asked in an interview with KHOL.
Working out the kinks
In 2023, Jackson became the first town in Wyoming to use the license plate readers in an effort to reduce crime.
Since then, news agencies across the U.S. have reported on instances of Flock Safety camera data being misused or accessed for unauthorized purposes.
A 2025 Illinois state audit revealed that Flock Safety allowed ICE and CBP to access data from towns near Chicago. Some towns later deactivated cameras and terminated contracts.
The state issued a notice that Flock Safety violated a new state law prohibiting data sharing for investigations concerning reproductive healthcare or immigration enforcement.
In response to KHOL’s request for comment, Flock Safety shared its online statement refuting part of the saga that a Texas official had searched Illinois data to “target people seeking reproductive healthcare” and said the search rather helped locate a missing person.
Facing public scrutiny, Flock Safety has acknowledged that the company has upped its game when it comes to federal agency data requests complying with local laws.
Customers can now control data-sharing settings with the option that federal agencies must explicitly define when they are requesting data, according to Flock Safety.
