In 2023, Texas lawmakers added a dollar to every car insurance policy in the state. The reason was specific and it was written into the law: catalytic converter theft. A Harris County deputy named Darren Almendarez had been shot to death in a grocery store parking lot after interrupting catalytic converter thieves, and the bill was named for him. It passed the House and the Senate without a single vote against it, and Greg Abbott signed it on May 29, 2023.
The law says what the dollar is for. The extra money can be used "only for coordinated regulatory and law enforcement activities intended to detect and prevent catalytic converter theft."
Three years later, The Texas Tribune found that a state board whose members Abbott appoints has spent at least $30 million of that money building an artificial-intelligence surveillance network that tracks where Texans drive — at least 3,200 cameras, from El Paso to the Louisiana border.
On Thursday night, Abbott ordered every state agency to stop paying for them. The Tribune published its investigation on Friday.
What the dollar actually bought
The fee has raised an estimated $81 million. The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority — a small agency run by a Department of Public Safety official and six board members the governor appoints — has pushed $50.8 million of it out the door in 234 grants.
At least 95 of those grants went to helping police departments buy and maintain roughly 2,000 Flock cameras. Another $15.9 million went to a three-year contract putting almost 1,200 more of them in the hands of DPS. In early August, with the money still flowing, the board approved $3 million more for 583 additional cameras along Texas tollways.
The grants ranged from $7,000 for two cameras in Bellmead, near Waco, to nearly $1.7 million for 201 cameras in Dallas. Some cities got their entire network for free: 165 cameras in Laredo, 150 in El Paso. In Temple, 84% of the city's Flock cameras were paid for by the state. In Cibolo, a town of 36,000 north of San Antonio, a grant took the camera count from 11 to 52.
A Flock camera is not a speed trap. It uses artificial intelligence to build what the company calls a "vehicle fingerprint" — your plate, your make, model and color, your bumper stickers, your dents — and stores it in a database that police departments across the country can search without a warrant. DeFlock, a watchdog group that maps the cameras, counts about 13,000 in Texas. By that count, the insurance fee paid for one in four of them.
The agency does not publish how much of its grant money went to cameras. The Tribune had to reconstruct it from board minutes and the agendas of 101 city councils and county commissions. Another 124 grants have no clear public record of what they bought at all, which means the real number is probably higher than $30 million.
The lawmakers who voted for it say they were never told
The senator who wrote the fee into law found out what it was paying for from a reporter.
State Sen. Carol Alvarado, who wrote the bill, and Rep. Jeff Leach, who sponsored it in the House, both told the Tribune that surveillance cameras were never discussed while the bill was being considered. "I did not have that in mind when we passed the bill," Alvarado said. "When I think of combating crime, I'm thinking … more boots on the ground, hiring more officers to tackle the crime or some type of undercover work."
Rep. Brian Harrison, a Midlothian Republican who voted for the bill, was blunter:
"In a million years, I never could have even contemplated that this would be used to fund what is effectively warrantless surveillance. Otherwise, I can't imagine it would have gotten unanimous support. I sure as hell wouldn't have voted for it if I knew some bureaucrat was going to redirect the money to Flock cameras."
Harrison also said he was "shocked and dismayed" that so few Republicans had spoken up, and said the governor should act. Rep. Mitch Little, a Lewisville Republican, told the Tribune the volume of data collected is "not something that is entertained, in my view, by the Fourth Amendment."
This is not a partisan complaint. The Democrat who wrote the bill, the Republican who carried it in the House, and a Republican who voted for it all say the same thing: the cameras were never part of the deal.
"There's nothing that they can tell us"
The board's chairman, Laredo Police Chief Miguel Rodriguez, told his own board in August 2023 that he hoped to use the fee money to "cover the entire state" with cameras.
By this year, a growing list of Texas cities and counties — Austin, Bandera, Hood County — had canceled their Flock contracts after residents objected. Rodriguez had an answer for that too. In April, discussing the DPS contract, he suggested putting state cameras on state roads inside the towns that had said no:
"I think that if for whatever reason you are within those jurisdictions that do not want Flock, let's get together with DPS, [so] that, you know, we can put those in state right-of-way. And there's nothing that they can tell us."
That is the chairman of a board whose members the governor appoints, explaining how to route around a city council that voted the other way. Rodriguez told the Tribune the state network provides a needed crime-fighting tool in areas hostile to the cameras.
The board's DPS member, Major Sharon Jones, who described herself as "pro Flock" and left the post on August 1, told a July grant meeting that the agency "must put a stamp on those who are spreading false information on license plate readers."
The misuse is not hypothetical
On August 21, an Angelina County grand jury indicted a Lufkin police officer on 100 counts of misusing official information, accusing him of using the area's Flock cameras to track 11 people for more than a year. Lufkin suspended its Flock program. In the past month alone, officers in at least six Texas departments and sheriff's offices have been put on leave, investigated, or charged over how they used the system.
Meanwhile, the crime the dollar was collected to fight is only part of what the cameras do. The authority's own report says the license plate readers were searched 62,000 times in 2025, and credits them with clearing about 1,660 catalytic converter theft cases. Police officials told the board the grant-funded cameras have stretched well past converter cases: a tire theft ring in Dallas, a hit and run, a "pattern of life assessment" built with Homeland Security to find a fugitive.
The pause arrived on deadline
Abbott's order came Thursday night. The Tribune had already sent his office questions about its findings. The story ran Friday.
Earlier that week, his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, had released an ad running in Texas college towns: "There's only 10,000 Flock cameras reading your plate, logging where you sleep and pray. No warrant needed in Greg Abbott's Texas."
And when Abbott's office finally responded, it did not say the state had made a mistake. The first thing it did was point somewhere else. "To the extent that cities get any funding for those cameras, most of it comes from the federal government. To the extent any funding comes from Texas agencies, those agencies are clarifying that those funds cannot be used for Flock cameras," spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris said. The Tribune's reporting is about the state's share: at least $30 million in grants from an agency the governor's appointees control, plus a separate $28.5 million Flock contract held by DPS.
On Glenn Beck's radio show Friday morning, Abbott described a "crackdown" already underway and said the cameras "are being reduced dramatically." The crackdown he was describing was city councils canceling contracts and a county grand jury handing up an indictment — other people's decisions, in the same weeks his own board was approving $3 million for 583 more cameras.
Texans have seen this exact sequence from Abbott before. He spent eleven years courting data centers and letting their tax break balloon, then announced a pause in August of an election year that rural Republicans in his own state called "smoke and mirrors." When he ordered a study to answer Texans' questions about those data centers, the state's grid operator told regulators it was aiming for December 10 — 37 days after Election Day. The pattern is the same each time: preside over the thing for years, stop it the month the voters are looking, and take credit for the stopping.
He knows what his agencies are doing
The most telling word in this story is Harrison's: "bureaucrat."
Abbott is not a governor who loses track of his agencies. In June 2018, he ordered state agencies to run proposed rules past his office before they are published for public comment — a level of control nothing in the Texas Government Code requires him to have. He appoints six of the seven people on the vehicle authority's board. That board voted on the Flock grants in public meetings, year after year, since 2023. Its chairman announced the plan to blanket the state in 2023.
And Abbott's interest in what Texans do and where they go is not new either. His own reelection campaign is running an app that reads your phone's address book and tells you which of your contacts are Democrats, how often they've voted since 2016, and whether they've voted yet this year.
What the record shows
Texas lawmakers unanimously added $1 to every car insurance policy in the state to fight catalytic converter theft, and the law they passed says the money can be used only for that. A board that Greg Abbott appoints six of the seven members to has spent at least $30 million of it on 3,200 AI cameras that log where Texans drive and let police nationwide search that record without a warrant — including a $15.9 million state contract meant in part to put cameras within reach of towns that had refused them. The Democrat who wrote the law, the Republican who sponsored it, and a Republican who voted for it all say nobody ever mentioned surveillance. Abbott stopped the spending on a Thursday night, after a reporter called for comment and days after his opponent put the cameras in a campaign ad.
Source
Ayden Runnels and Alex Ford, "Abbott blocks state agencies from spending money on Flock cameras" and "How a $1 Texas insurance fee funded thousands of Flock cameras", The Texas Tribune, August 28, 2026. Photo: A Flock camera records drivers on Allen Parkway near downtown Houston, Aug. 24, 2026, by Jon Shapley for The Texas Tribune.
