The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, directed police departments last week to stop spending state money on Flock Safety cameras, the license-plate readers that have drawn bipartisan backlash around the country.
Days later in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration ordered the systems removed from state roads. Mr. DeSantis has described the surveillance technology as “out of control.”
Both governors are tough-on-crime Republicans with deep backing from law enforcement agencies. Yet their moves underscore how the political winds are shifting against Flock and other plate-reading systems that have been embraced by police departments.
The cameras, which began rapidly appearing by the tens of thousands on American roads in recent years, track vehicles and feed surveillance databases. The networks of cameras can be used to assist officers by quickly locating vehicles connected with crimes. But concerns about a sweeping system of government surveillance and about abuses by individual officers have brought mounting opposition.
Flock cameras and others like them have become a campaign issue in several states, in some cases uniting Republicans and Democrats.
The result of the actions in Texas and Florida: Police departments are falling in line behind their governors and dismantling their license-plate readers. They have begun doing so even as they extol the cameras’ crime-fighting capabilities. In Jacksonville, Fla., the sheriff, a Republican, announced on Monday he was pausing his agency’s program of 150 cameras — one week after the office released a documentary-style video lauding their role in solving a kidnapping, among other crimes.
The moves in Texas and Florida are unfolding as Republican elected officials elsewhere are mulling their own restrictions.
In Indiana, Republicans have signaled they will draft legislation to set minimum law enforcement standards for the technology. In Kansas, some Republican lawmakers now say they want to tighten restrictions and oversight after earlier legislation had made it easier for the police to deploy license-plate readers.
In Tennessee, the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, which has backed some of the state’s top Republicans, celebrated a unanimous Knox County Commission vote this week to remove Flock cameras. The ordinance was signed by the outgoing mayor, Glenn Jacobs, a Republican better known as the wrestler Kane.
Barry Friedman, a professor at the New York University School of Law and the director of its Policing Project, said he is not surprised conservatives are realizing the perils of the rapidly deployed technology.
“I can’t imagine what would be a greater affront to conservatives than the government spying on multitudes of blameless people,” Mr. Friedman said.
Democratic leaders have also taken steps to address concerns. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, Mayor Andrew Ginther paused the city’s Flock program this week to investigate potential misuse by an officer. Los Angeles has also paused its use of the cameras.
Although several companies have contracts with police departments for license-plate readers, Flock has attracted the most vitriol, in part because of the size of its network. Its contracts with 7,000 law enforcement agencies cover nearly every state. The company has more than 100,000 cameras feeding into its vast database.
Some officers have abused their access to the information collected by the cameras. In East Texas, an officer was accused of using Flock more than 10,000 times to track his ex-girlfriend and others. Mr. Abbott’s office cited the case to support halting state spending on Flock cameras.
A Flock spokesman said its technology was an important public safety tool and that it supported bipartisan legislation “that puts strong privacy, transparency, and accountability guardrails in place.”
The Dallas Police Department said 321 of its Flock cameras would be deactivated, though at least 300 others will remain in use because they were not purchased with state funds. Several smaller Texas cities said they were stopping their Flock programs.
Mitch Little, a Republican state representative in a North Texas district, said he would consider a ban on Flock cameras despite their popularity with the police. “That’s really not the job of the Legislature to make law enforcement’s job easier,” Mr. Little said.
Mr. DeSantis, who frequently hails his state as a conservative bastion, said his concern was over the extent of the surveillance.
“What we don’t want in the state of Florida is to have a digital A.I. surveillance state where everything we’re doing is being tracked at all times,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters.
While Florida police officials have mostly avoided directly criticizing Mr. DeSantis, Sheriff Bill Prummell of Charlotte County, in southwest Florida, said “criminals are jumping up and down for joy” at the state’s order.
Sheriff Prummell criticized the “knee-jerk reactions to something that really isn’t a problem,” and said the response ignored the benefits of the technology.
Although the order applies only to state roads, departments in communities like Jacksonville and Miami-Dade County suspended their entire programs.
Not all Florida departments were pausing their programs. Sheriffs in Polk and Orange Counties, in Greater Orlando, said they will operate cameras on nonstate roads.
“Technology already knows everything about all of us,” Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County said. “What we have to do in government is to make sure that it’s used appropriately.”
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.
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