Police Are Using Flock's AI Camera Tool to Watch Anyone, Not Just Cars
A detailed look at how Flock Safety's AI search tools work, what its own code reveals about the guardrails, and why dozens of officers have already used the system to stalk people.
Key points
- Flock Safety's AI search tool lets officers type a plain-English description of a person and have cameras across a defined area scan for that person automatically.
- At least 46 of the roughly 50 US officers recently accused of misusing licence-plate readers were using Flock's system, with most alleged targets being romantic partners or ex-partners.
- A Texas deputy used Flock to search more than 83,000 cameras for a woman who had an abortion, prompting two members of Congress to write to the company's CEO.
- Flock's own code, analysed by Wired, shows its guardrails record misuse but cannot stop it from happening.
- Political and cultural expression is the one sensitive category where Flock applies only a warning rather than blocking the search outright.
Flock Safety sells camera networks to police departments across the United States. The company built its name on licence-plate readers, but its newest tools go much further. Officers can now type a plain-English sentence, something like "person wearing scrubs," and have every camera inside a chosen area of a city run a continuous, automated search for anyone matching that description.
Wired collected the software code Flock sends to a police officer's browser, built a reconstruction of what officers see, and examined what the code actually does. That analysis is the basis for what follows.
How does the search tool actually work?
The tool, which Flock calls FreeForm, works by turning words and images into numbers. Every frame a camera captures gets stored as a set of numbers describing what is in the shot. A description typed by an officer, "blue jacket, red bag," gets converted into numbers the same way. The system then compares the two sets and ranks the footage that matches most closely at the top.
A second feature, Smart Sort, lets the officer vote on results: approve an image and similar ones rise; reject it and they fall. A few clicks can significantly narrow a large batch of footage. What remains invisible are any additional filters or instructions sitting on Flock's own servers, which no outside researcher can examine.
Vehicle searches use menus of colours, body types, makes and models. Person searches, by contrast, offer no such filtering. Officers type a free description and the AI does the rest.
What are the guardrails, and do they work?
Flock announced changes in August: shorter default data-retention periods, mandatory case codes, and automated auditing to flag suspicious searches. The company says these will be mandatory across all departments by the end of this year.
The code tells a different story about enforcement. When an officer types a description, Flock's AI scores it against several sensitive categories, including race and religion. For most of those categories, a high score stops the search. Political and cultural expression is the only category where the system issues a warning and then lets the search proceed. Tom Bowman, policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Wired that political expression is "one of the most protective areas" under the First Amendment, making it a curious place to apply the weakest check.
Critically, the code shows the guardrails record what officers do but cannot block a determined officer from continuing. Flock's own system warns users that results "may be inaccurate or incomplete" while placing the "risk of any inaccuracies" on the officer running the search.
Should ordinary people be worried?
Yes, based on what has already happened. At least 46 officers accused of misusing Flock's system allegedly used it to track romantic partners, ex-partners, or women they wanted to contact. A Milwaukee officer searched one woman 124 times, logging each search as an "investigation." A Georgia police chief searched his ex-girlfriend and her daughter 600 times before being charged. A North Carolina officer filed 29 of 31 searches for her boyfriend's ex-wife as traffic infractions.
Experts who study automated surveillance say no AI screening system operating at this scale is consistently accurate, and nobody outside Flock can measure how often it makes mistakes or in which direction.
Watch for these signs that camera surveillance may be affecting you: unexplained police contact following routine travel, or an officer who seems to know your movements without an obvious reason to. If you believe you have been tracked without cause, organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union have resources for people dealing with police surveillance.
