Six Flock Safety cameras now watch the roads in and around Monument, photographing the license plate of nearly every passing vehicle, converting it to searchable text and checking it against police “hotlists” in real time. The Monument Police Department says the system helps solve crimes and recover stolen vehicles; civil-liberties groups say such networks quietly log the movements of ordinary drivers. This is what the cameras actually capture, where they sit, how long the data is kept and who can see it — and how the town came to have them.
What the cameras are
The devices are automated license plate readers, or ALPRs — small, often solar-powered cameras made by Atlanta-based Flock Safety and mounted on poles beside the road. As a vehicle passes, the camera photographs its plate, converts the characters to text and records the make, model and color along with the time and location. Per the department’s public description of the system, the cameras do not use facial recognition and do not identify people, only vehicles.
They are not speed or red-light cameras; they do not issue tickets, and the department’s policy lists traffic enforcement as a prohibited use. Instead, each plate is checked against “hotlists” of wanted or missing-person vehicles, and an officer on duty receives an alert if a flagged plate passes a camera. Investigators can also search the stored reads after the fact to trace a vehicle connected to a crime.
How many, and where
MPD reports operating six cameras, sited — in the department’s words — at “the highest vehicle-traveled locations and outlets to the interstate.” The map below plots the Flock cameras logged in and around Monument by the crowd-sourced project DeFlock and OpenStreetMap. Not every camera a driver notices belongs to the town: the cluster at the Monument Marketplace shopping center (Home Depot and neighboring stores) is privately operated, and other readers in Woodmoor, Gleneagle, Palmer Lake and Greenland are run by other communities or private owners. Private cameras can be configured to share their data with police.
What the cameras capture — and the rules around it
MPD publishes a Flock transparency portal that lists its policies and running statistics. As of early July 2026 it reported that data is retained for 30 days; that plates are checked against the FBI’s NCIC database, NCMEC Amber Alerts and the Colorado Crime Information Center; that every search “requires a valid reason and is stored” in an access log; and that hotlist alerts must be “human verified prior to action.” The portal and Flock’s license-plate-recognition policy list prohibited uses that include immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment, and any use based solely on a protected class, and state that the data is owned by MPD and “never sold to 3rd parties.”
The portal also quantifies how much the system sees. In a recent 30-day window it reported 286,816 unique vehicles detected, 543 hotlist hits and 47 user searches — a volume that reflects Monument’s position astride Interstate 25 far more than its resident population, which the U.S. Census Bureau counted at 10,422 in 2020 and which recent estimates put above 13,000. The department’s public notice adds that ALPR data cannot be obtained by the public through an open-records request, but that if a record were used as evidence it would be reviewed for release under the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act.
How the town bought the system
According to the Flock invoice, purchase-order request and canceled check obtained by the Monument Independent, the town pays $18,000 a year — six cameras at $3,000 each — under a 24-month agreement running through 2027, charged to the “2F” public-safety fund created by the 0.5% sales tax Monument voters approved in 2021. The purchase was made “single source,” without competitive bids, on the rationale that Flock ties the department into the same system used by the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.
The buy was approved administratively by the town manager rather than by a vote of the Board of Trustees; under the department’s purchasing rules, only purchases of $25,000 or more require Board approval, and at $18,000 the system fell below that line. Flock’s technology was described to the Board of Trustees as an informational presentation on October 6, 2025; no vote was taken.
The debate
Supporters, including many law-enforcement officials and Flock itself, describe the readers as a force multiplier for small, short-staffed departments — a tool that helps solve crimes, recover stolen vehicles and locate missing people, and that lets neighboring agencies share leads across jurisdictional lines. MPD’s presentation cited local alerts tied to a retail-corridor camera that it said aided arrests and a stolen-vehicle recovery.
Critics — among them the ACLU and Colorado groups such as Eyes Off Colorado and DeFlock — argue that a network of readers builds a searchable record of ordinary people’s movements, most of whom are suspected of nothing, and that the risks lie in misuse, error and data-sharing. They point to a case reported last autumn in which a Denver-area woman was wrongly linked to a package theft through a Flock camera, and to broader concerns that data collected locally can be queried by outside or federal agencies. How Monument’s specific data-sharing settings are configured is not spelled out on the public portal.
The wider Colorado picture
Monument’s cameras operate without any new state rules governing them. In the 2026 legislative session, lawmakers considered Senate Bill 70 and Senate Bill 71, which would have capped retention, required a warrant to reach older data, restricted sharing across jurisdictions and required agencies to publish an annual count and map of their cameras. The effort died amid opposition from law enforcement and a veto threat from Gov. Jared Polis over the warrant requirement. Notably, SB 70 was co-sponsored by El Paso County’s own Sen. Lynda Zamora Wilson and opposed by El Paso County District Attorney Michael Allen along with all 23 of the state’s district attorneys. Elsewhere, Denver removed its 110 Flock cameras and moved to a different vendor, citing concerns about federal data-sharing. For now, the rules that govern the six cameras on Monument’s roads are the ones the Police Department sets for itself.
Sources & methodology
Reporting draws on the Town of Monument’s public description of the system and MPD’s Flock transparency portal (accessed July 2026; usage figures are the vendor’s rolling 30-day counts); Flock’s LPR policy; the Flock invoice, purchase-order request and town check obtained by the Monument Independent; Town Council records of Oct. 6, 2025 and the 2026 town budget; camera locations from DeFlock / OpenStreetMap and local observation; and reporting by The Colorado Sun and Colorado Newsline on Senate Bills 70 and 71 and Denver’s decision. Camera-location details reflect the best available public information and may change; the crowd-sourced data does not record each camera’s owner, so town-owned devices are distinguished by observation and MPD’s stated siting rather than a definitive registry.