Flock Safety Is Changing Who Can Search Its 120,000 Police Cameras, and Why
After reports of officers using licence-plate readers to stalk ex-partners, the surveillance firm is adding new rules. Critics say the fixes have a big hole in them.
Key points
- Flock Safety operates a network of 120,000 automated licence-plate reader cameras used by around 5,000 law-enforcement agencies across the United States.
- A Washington Post investigation found 46 cases in which officers were accused of using Flock's cameras for unauthorised purposes, including stalking current or former romantic partners.
- Flock now requires officers to enter a criminal case number before running a search, a rule that was optional since last year but is now mandatory.
- At least 30 cities dropped Flock contracts in the year to February 2025, according to NPR, with the activist group DeFlock putting the number higher.
- The ACLU says the new rules are a start, but real accountability requires independent researchers to audit Flock's systems directly.
Imagine a speed camera that never forgets. Flock Safety's network of 120,000 cameras sits on roads and car parks across the United States, quietly reading licence plates and logging where each vehicle was, when. Police officers at thousands of departments can type a plate into Flock's system and pull up a map of everywhere that car has been spotted.
That is enormously useful for finding stolen vehicles or tracking a suspect. It is also, critics say, a tool that makes it trivially easy to follow someone's daily movements without a warrant, which is a court order that normally forces police to justify surveillance to a judge.
Why is Flock under fire right now?
Officer abuse made the headlines. A Washington Post investigation, reported by MIT Technology Review, uncovered 46 cases in which officers allegedly used Flock's cameras for personal reasons: tracking an ex-partner's car, checking up on a neighbour, or confirming a spouse's location. The scale of the camera network made those searches devastatingly easy.
The backlash spread well beyond individual abuses. Civil-liberties groups argue that a database recording the movements of millions of ordinary drivers is a surveillance tool so large it undermines a basic American legal principle: you can only investigate someone if you have reason to believe they have broken the law. Flock lets officers search that database without any such threshold.
At least 30 cities cancelled Flock contracts in a single year, and some states are moving to ban automated licence-plate readers altogether.
What is Flock actually changing?
Three things, effective now.
First, officers must enter a valid criminal case number before running a search. The idea is to tie every query to a real investigation. The catch: Flock will not verify that the case number is genuine, so an officer could type any number and proceed.
Second, an automatic auditing tool will scan officer search behaviour and flag suspicious patterns to department supervisors. That was optional before; it is mandatory now.
Third, departments can restrict what other departments are allowed to search from their cameras. A city might permit searches linked to kidnapping investigations but block searches for immigration enforcement purposes.
| Change | Previous status | New status |
|---|---|---|
| Case number required before search | Optional | Mandatory |
| Automatic search-behaviour auditing | Optional | Mandatory |
| Data retention recommendation | 30 days | 7 days (agencies can override) |
| Reason-based search restrictions between agencies | Not available | Now available |
Should ordinary drivers be worried?
The new rules help at the margins. But the ACLU points to a telling precedent: when Flock previously asked officers to type a reason for a search, some entered the word "investigation" as a catch-all, and one Oregon department used the phrase "hehehe" twenty times in a row. A case-number field is a stronger prompt, yet the same gaming is possible.
Chad Marlow, a senior policy lawyer at the ACLU who has spent years scrutinising automated licence-plate reader companies, welcomes the changes but says they fall short. His test is simple: let independent researchers examine the auditing system to see how well it actually catches abuse. Flock has not agreed to that.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley told MIT Technology Review the backlash is partly driven by misinformation, specifically the false belief that Flock does facial recognition or sells data to advertisers. He says it does neither. Critics counter that Flock has its own record of overstating or understating its capabilities to local councils.
For now, drivers in cities with Flock cameras should know their plate is likely being logged every time they pass a camera. The new rules make misuse slightly harder. Whether they make it rare enough is a question only an independent audit could answer.
Common questions
Does Flock do facial recognition?
Flock Safety says no: its cameras read licence plates, not faces. The company also says it does not sell the data it collects to commercial buyers.
Can I find out if my local police department uses Flock?
Many departments publicly list their technology vendors in budget documents or through public-records requests. The activist group DeFlock publishes a running list of known Flock contracts and cancellations.
Do police need a warrant to search Flock's database?
No. Searching a licence-plate database does not currently require a warrant in the United States. That is the core concern civil-liberties groups raise: the legal threshold that normally protects people from surveillance does not apply here.
