Moffat County Sheriff Kills Flock Safety License Plate Camera Contract

Steamboat Springs —The wind through the pines near Craig carries a distinct chill in late summer, but the real shift on the ground is quieter. On August 13, deputies at the Moffat County Sheriff’s Office stopped logging into a specific software dashboard. They didn’t turn off the hardware, but they walked away from it. That was the day Sheriff Chip McIntyre announced the end of an era for automated surveillance in the county.

The Moffat County Sheriff’s Office is killing its contract with Flock Safety when it expires on December 31, 2026. It is not an early termination; it is a non-renewal. For context, the system has been operational since April 12, 2024, under a special-use permit from the Colorado Department of Transportation. The Sheriff’s Office currently hosts 10 cameras, all leased directly from Flock.

Let’s do the math on the money involved. The annual contract totals $30,000. The Sheriff’s Office pays $13,500 of that, plus any repair costs. The rest is split with the Craig Police Department and the regional All Crimes Enforcement Team. In a county where every dollar in the budget is scrutinized, $30,000 for ten cameras sounds manageable until you consider what those cameras actually do. They capture images of license plates and vehicles, recording the plate number, date, time, location, vehicle make, model, and color. That data doesn’t just sit in a local server room. It flows into Flock’s national network, shared among participating law enforcement agencies across the country.

McIntyre was blunt about why the plug is being pulled, even though he admitted the cameras "proved useful in several major investigations." He didn’t say the system failed. He said it cost too much in privacy and data control.

“The decision comes from weighing that investigative value against the cost, privacy concerns, the amount of data being collected and shared, and the fact that the data itself is not under our exclusive control,” McIntyre wrote in an email interview.

The timeline here is messy, and it matters. Discussions about bringing Flock cameras to Moffat County began in 2023 between the Craig Police Department and the Sheriff’s Office. Former Sheriff KC Hume approved the original contract on August 22, 2023. But McIntyre noted that the Flock system was not specifically discussed at a regular or special public meeting before it went live. No separate community consultation took place. The funding was simply included in the Sheriff’s Office budget and went through the county’s public budget process. That is a technicality that satisfies legal requirements but ignores how the technology has evolved since then.

McIntyre acknowledged this gap in hindsight. “When the system was initially considered, it was viewed primarily as a local investigative tool,” he said. “I have also heard the questions and concerns raised by members of our community. Those concerns deserve to be considered alongside the needs of law enforcement.”

The cameras will remain physically installed until the end of the year, but they are effectively dead weight for local law enforcement as of August. The data they collect is still being sent to Flock’s servers, but local deputies are no longer using it for active investigations.

For neighbors in Craig and Steamboat, this means the automated eyes on your license plate will stop feeding into local case files in a few months. The $30,000 annual cost will vanish from the Sheriff’s Office budget in 2027. It is a rare case of local law enforcement looking at a popular, high-tech tool and deciding the privacy trade-off isn’t worth it. The cameras stay up for a few more months, but the conversation is over.