Who Owns and Funds the Cameras Watching Lansing

LANSING, Mich. — Item 5.C on the Lansing Committee on City Operations agenda for Thursday, April 23, 2026 lists a discussion titled "Update from LPD on Flock Grant system and safeguards in place." The phrase "Flock Grant system" reads as if it names a funding program some grantor runs on behalf of municipalities. It does not. The name describes a service Flock Safety itself operates, in partnership with a third-party grant-research firm, that helps police departments identify federal and private grants a city can then spend on Flock subscription fees. Flock Safety is the vendor that operates Lansing's cameras under a subscription contract, and the vendor's partner is the intermediary between Lansing and the grant sources whose dollars pay Flock's invoices.

Understanding what "Flock Grant system" actually names is a prerequisite to any useful safeguards discussion. It is also a prerequisite to understanding what kind of entity operates the cameras: a privately held, venture-capital-backed Atlanta company whose most recent funding round valued it at $7.5 billion.

What the "Flock Grant system" actually is

Flock Safety and a firm called Lexipol (operating the GrantFinder platform, which Police1 now hosts after the policegrantshelp.com URL redirected) run an LPR Grant Assistance Program that helps law-enforcement agencies find federal grants (U.S. Department of Justice Byrne JAG, Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Act funding, COPS Office grants) and private grants whose dollars a municipality can spend on Flock's subscription fees. The Flock Safety blog post on grant funding describes the service directly.

The program page carries a procurement-neutrality statement attributed jointly to Police1 and GrantFinder: the service is "product- and vendor-neutral," and neither entity "benefits from, participates in, or otherwise influences the procurement of awards." That language rebuts a specific accusation of steering that this post does not make. What is left is a narrower structural observation: the vendor selling the product is also running the intermediary that helps the municipality identify which grants to pursue to pay the vendor's own fees. Grant-writing assistance is a standard vendor-side practice across many industries. Knowing that the practice exists, and knowing what "Flock Grant" on the agenda names, is the starting point for the committee's discussion.

No public record located during this reporting identifies what specific federal grant paid for Lansing's cameras, if any. Lansing's separately-listed 2024 Bureau of Justice Assistance JAG award (15PBJA-24-GG-05246-JAGX) is scoped to "handgun optics and wellness," not Flock. A 2023 BJA JAG award (15PBJA-23-GG-03112-JAGX) is labeled "Expansion of Flock Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) Safety Camera Program," but the recipient has not been independently verified as Lansing PD; the BJA funding page is login-walled to automated fetch. If that 2023 award went to another city, then no identified federal grant matches the Lansing agenda's phrasing, and the "Flock Grant system" on the agenda most likely refers to the Lexipol/GrantFinder assistance service rather than a specific award.

The company behind the cameras

Flock Group Inc., doing business as Flock Safety, is a Delaware corporation headquartered at 1160 Howell Mill Road NW, Suite 210, Atlanta. Its EIN is 82-0594875. It was founded in 2017 by Garrett Langley (the current CEO), Paige Todd (Chief People Officer), and Matt Feury. The company is privately held; no S-1 has been filed as of April 2026, and the company has not publicly said an IPO is planned or imminent. These identifying facts come from D&B and an EIN Tax ID lookup, both secondary lookups of publicly registered records.

Flock's current product lines are the Falcon fixed license plate reader, the Raven audio gunshot detection device, the Flock OS software platform that ties them together, and Flock Aerodome, a drone-as-first-responder platform the company acquired in 2024. The Lansing deployment operates Falcon cameras.

The money

Flock Safety's most recent funding round, announced March 13, 2025, raised $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. The announcement names the round's other participants as Greenoaks, Bedrock, Meritech, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator. Individual check sizes were not disclosed. Initialized is not in the Series F group but participated in earlier rounds. The eight publicly disclosed funding rounds from 2017 through 2025 sum to approximately $658 million; aggregator databases cite a higher cumulative figure that includes undisclosed bridge tranches and round extensions not itemized in public announcements.

Sacra, a private-company analyst firm, estimates that Flock reached approximately $300 million in annual recurring revenue at the time of the Series F, growing approximately 70 percent year over year. These are Sacra estimates, not audited company financials; Flock does not publish audited financials as a private company. The Sacra profile is the source. Sacra also describes Flock's per-camera pricing as roughly one-tenth the cost of incumbent license plate reader solutions from Motorola, Vigilant, and Genetec.

A publicly disclosed fixture on the cap table is Bedrock's early stake. Bedrock's own blog post discloses the firm has deployed more than $164 million into Flock across multiple rounds, and that Bedrock partner Geoff Lewis holds a board observer seat. Other investors have not published comparable exposure figures, so Bedrock being the largest Flock investor overall is not established; what is established is that Bedrock is the investor with the largest self-disclosed commitment, and the full formal board composition has not been publicly disclosed.

On federal lobbying, OpenSecrets data shows Flock reporting $690,000 in spending across the first three quarters of 2025. What Flock lobbied for, against, or on which specific bills is not summarized on the OpenSecrets client page; the underlying LD-2 filings have not been pulled for this post.

What Lansing is actually paying for

Flock prices its camera deployments on a per-camera annual subscription of approximately $2,500 to $3,500 per camera per year, plus a one-time $250 install fee, bundled to include hardware, cellular backhaul, hosting, and software. That pricing information is disclosed in the Campbell, California permit FAQ and in news coverage of other city deployments. One publicly disclosed rate-increase instance is documented: Elmira, New York disclosed in December 2023 that Flock raised its rates from $2,500 to $3,000 per camera unless the city signed a five-year extension, though one disclosed instance on its own does not establish a pattern.

Michigan's Department of Technology, Management and Budget awarded Flock Group Inc. a MiDEAL cooperative contract, MA250000000832, effective June 3, 2025 through June 2, 2030, with up to five one-year renewals. MiDEAL is a state-run cooperative purchasing vehicle that individual Michigan municipalities can opt into; it does not itself spend money, but it provides pre-negotiated terms any participating municipality can buy against. The reported contract ceiling is $2.626 million, per Govtech reporting. The figure has not been independently verified against the contract PDF text for this post; the DTMB contract-hosting pages returned intermittent fetch errors during preparation.

Whether Lansing has drawn on MA250000000832 and for how much is not established in publicly posted city records, and the camera count itself has not appeared in any publicly posted Council document either. City Pulse reports approximately 20 Flock cameras operating in Lansing, based on user-submitted data from the crowdsourced deflock.me mapping project.

The same City Pulse article reports a verbal statement about Lansing's safeguards, attributed only to a source named "Gulkis" with no first name or title given in the article. A person identified as Jordan Gulkis has served as the Lansing Police Department's Public Information Director in recent local coverage. WLNS reporting, for example, identifies "Jordan Gulkis, LPD Public Information Director" in a police-incident story. An official city-hosted asset on Lansing's CivicPlus content platform also carries the title "PUBLIC INFORMATION DIRECTOR JORDAN GULKIS" (the asset at `content.civicplus.com/api/assets/8ccaf5d4-507f-42fa-b20f-2b898987ab61` returns an access-denied error to external readers, so the identification rests primarily on the WLNS attribution and the name match). The PIO is a civilian communications role, not a sworn-officer role with operational authority. On the strength of the name match and the role fit, the Gulkis quoted in City Pulse is most plausibly Jordan Gulkis speaking in the PIO capacity:

Access is tightly controlled, even within Lansing's police department, and activity is audited to ensure its use aligns with departmental policy and that data is only saved longer than 30 days when it is part of a criminal investigation.

Statement attributed to "Gulkis," City Pulse, April 2026

That sentence, as City Pulse reported it attributed to Gulkis, is the most specific public characterization of how Lansing's Flock deployment operates. No written policy document containing those safeguards has appeared on the city's website or in any CivicClerk committee packet per the sweep conducted for this post. The verbal version of the safeguards claim is the version that currently exists.

Laid out against what has appeared in a published city document, the gap between "what has been said" and "where it lives in writing" looks like this:

What has been said	Where it lives
Approximately 20 Flock cameras operate in Lansing	User-submitted data on the crowdsourced deflock.me map, surfaced by City Pulse. No posted Council document.
Access is "tightly controlled"	Verbal attribution to "Gulkis," City Pulse April 2026. No policy document.
Activity is "audited"	Same verbal attribution. No audit report, no published policy.
Data is kept longer than 30 days only for criminal investigations	Same verbal attribution. No posted retention schedule.
The funding source for the deployment	Not identified in any published Council document, budget line, or grant award. The April 23, 2026 committee agenda references a "Flock Grant system" but names no specific grant.

Scale and customer base

Flock reports operating in 49 U.S. states with 5,000-plus law-enforcement agencies and 6,000-plus municipal or private customers using its cameras; these figures are reported by the company itself on the Flock Safety homepage, and Truthout reporting notes Flock "won't disclose the total" camera count. The 20-billion-plus vehicle scans per month figure is Flock self-reported. Cities that have canceled, declined to renew, or replaced Flock contracts in 2025–2026 include Santa Cruz, California (canceled on a 6–1 vote in January 2026), Denver, Colorado (replaced Flock with an Axon contract), Mountain View, California, and Ferndale, Michigan, among others documented by Hoodline.

What this post claims, and what it does not

The post documents what is established about Flock as a corporate actor and how the funding path the April 23 agenda references actually works. It does not claim any specific operational failure by Flock in Lansing. The Lexipol/GrantFinder grant-assistance program is not alleged to be unlawful or improper; grant-writing support is a standard vendor-side practice across many industries. No specific investor is alleged to direct Lansing deployment decisions; cap-table exposure is not operational control. The cumulative private-capital raise is not alleged to be improper; the scale observation is that the entity operating the cameras is a venture-capital-backed mid-nine-figure surveillance vendor, not a public-safety nonprofit or a municipal service.

What the post does document is three things the public agenda did not make explicit: who the vendor is, how the grant program named on the agenda actually works, and that the verbal statements the City has offered to date about safeguards have not been reduced to a written document that lives anywhere public.

Also in this series

• Lansing ALPR Map. Interactive plot of 88 automatic license plate reader cameras and 104 CCTV cameras across the greater-Lansing area, filterable by operator and by Flock manufacturer. Built from OpenStreetMap; each pin links back to the underlying OSM record.
• Why Does Lansing Need Flock?. A Lansing City Council committee reviewed the LPD Flock deployment in public for the first time on April 23, 2026. The accountability chain up to that meeting, and six questions the committee's review should produce answers to.
• What the Evidence and the Record Show About Flock's Cameras. The peer-reviewed research on ALPR crime reduction, the one independent accuracy test of Flock hardware, and the 2024 to 2026 record of misuse and federal-agency access in other jurisdictions.

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Sources

Primary source: Flock Safety Series F announcement, March 13, 2025; GlobeNewswire release, same date. Series F investor list as named in both. Earlier funding rounds table drawn from Tracxn (https://tracxn.com/d/companies/flocksafety/__lfRrqBoJWA2PHkk8HJ-7MN7tlihrgTa6vvlOhfrv8eg/funding-and-investors) and primary announcements where available, including Andreessen Horowitz's Series D announcement, Flock's Series E announcement, and Bedrock's Series A announcement, which also discloses Bedrock's $164 million-plus cumulative investment and Geoff Lewis's board observer seat. Cumulative disclosed-round total of approximately $658 million is the sum of the eight named rounds; aggregator databases (PitchBook, paywalled; Tracxn) show a higher figure reflecting undisclosed bridge and extension tranches not itemized in public announcements. Annual recurring revenue ($300M estimated) and year-over-year growth (70 percent estimated) and the "roughly one-tenth the cost of incumbents" pricing comparison are from the Sacra analyst profile; Sacra explicitly labels these as estimates. Federal lobbying ($690,000, Q1–Q3 2025) is OpenSecrets client D000116304; the underlying LD-2 filings have not been pulled for this post. Company identifying facts (Delaware incorporation, Atlanta address, EIN 82-0594875, founder names) are from D&B and an EIN Tax ID lookup. Matt Feury's 2023 shift out of CTO is per a crowd-sourced TheOrg profile, not a primary record. The GrantFinder LPR Grant Assistance Program page, hosted on Police1 after the policegrantshelp.com URL redirect, is the source for the Lexipol partnership and the procurement-neutrality statement jointly attributed to Police1 and GrantFinder; the Flock Safety blog post on funding is the company's own description of the program. BJA award 15PBJA-23-GG-03112-JAGX (https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15pbja-23-gg-03112-jagx) is labeled for Flock ALPR expansion but the recipient has not been independently verified as Lansing PD. Michigan DTMB MiDEAL cooperative contract MA250000000832 is from the DTMB contract list (contract PDF at https://www.michigan.gov/dtmb/-/media/Project/Websites/dtmb/Procurement/Contracts/MiDEAL/002/250000000832.pdf; DTMB pages returned intermittent fetch errors during preparation); the $2.626 million ceiling is Govtech reporting and has not been independently verified against the contract text. Per-camera pricing ($2,500–$3,500/year plus $250 install) is the Campbell, California permit FAQ and Elmira, New York Council coverage, which also reports the one disclosed rate-increase instance. Lansing-specific camera-count (approximately 20) and the "Gulkis" statement are both from City Pulse, April 2026; the Gulkis identifier is reported only by surname in the article, without first name or title. Cancellations documented in KQED, 9News, and Hoodline. The agenda-item text ("DISCUSSION: Update from LPD on Flock Grant system and safeguards in place") is from the April 23, 2026 Committee on City Operations agenda archived locally at `data/archive/civic-clerk/committee-on-city-operations-agenda-2026-04-23.pdf`, page 1. Truthout coverage of Flock's scale: Truthout, which notes Flock "won't disclose the total" camera count.