North Richland Hills seeks $2.3 million for Flock records request

The price tag would make it hard to obtain records on how the city police use the camera system.

A North Richland Hills, Texas, city hall has told a requester to pay $2.3 million before it will release records about the police department’s use of Flock camera systems, a move that highlights how expensive access to surveillance-technology records can become. The Texas Tribune says the city justified the price by estimating that reviewing about a terabyte of communications on errors, misuse, and effectiveness would require roughly 14 years of work at $15 an hour. The request was filed by Phil Mynona under a pseudonym for the Texas Privacy Coalition, and he said the quote was meant to block public-records scrutiny. The episode comes amid growing bipartisan backlash to Flock and other AI-assisted camera deployments.