Flock tightens police surveillance guardrails after abuse reports, city dropouts

Flock Safety, the police-tech giant behind a nationwide network of 120,000 license plate readers, announced new guardrails on officer access to the system in response to mounting backlash over mass surveillance and documented abuse. The company's core change is now requiring officers to enter a criminal case number before conducting a search; this was introduced as an optional feature last year but is now mandatory. Flock is simultaneously expanding an automatic auditing system, also previously optional, that analyzes officer search activity and flags administrators to suspicious searches. Both changes are meant to prevent unauthorized use.

The impetus is clear from recent reporting. A Washington Post investigation uncovered 46 cases in which officers were accused of abusing Flock's access to conduct unauthorized stalking and harassment of current or former romantic partners. The scale of risk is substantial: Flock's 120,000 cameras give officers access to an enormous searchable pool of location data. Yet the new safeguards contain loopholes that critics have seen before. When Flock previously required officers to enter a reason for a search, the ACLU found that some officers submitted generic terms like "investigation," while at one Oregon police department, officers entered "hehehe" 20 times. Because Flock does not verify the case numbers in the new system, officers could circumvent it just as easily. The company has also not shared specifics on how accurate the auditing tool is, nor has it opened it to independent evaluators.

Flock is addressing broader surveillance concerns with two additional changes. The company now recommends that agencies retain data for seven days rather than the previous 30-day default (though departments can override this), and it allows individual police departments to restrict other departments' access to their camera data by limiting searches to certain stated purposes—for example, allowing "kidnapping" investigations but not "immigration enforcement" queries. Both safeguards hinge on officers accurately reporting why they search, a standard the ACLU has found unreliable in practice.

The backlash Flock faces is unprecedented in scope. At least 30 cities dropped their Flock contracts in the last year according to NPR, though the activist group DeFlock estimates the number is higher. Tucker Carlson has called Flock's technology part of a "slave state," and some states and municipalities are passing laws to ban license plate readers entirely or switching to competitors Axon and Motorola. Flock claims these cancellations represent a small portion of its 5,000 contracted agencies. Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU, frames the core issue differently than either abuse or misinformation: as license plate readers become more ubiquitous, officers gain latitude to investigate people without first establishing suspicion of a crime, since searching location data does not require a warrant. "Is it worth it to catch a certain number of criminals, return a certain number of stolen cars, to eviscerate Americans' privacy?" Marlow asks. Flock CEO Garrett Langley, by contrast, attributes the backlash to "misinformation"—people mistakenly believing the company does facial recognition or sells data commercially. (The ACLU and other critics have documented Flock repeatedly misrepresenting its capabilities to city councils and decision-makers.) Langley says the company's shift is "from building things that are optional" to "building more confidence that as a technology company we have a responsibility to enforce guardrails, not provide optionality." Marlow remains skeptical, characterizing the changes as the company's "best" offer in response to an "unprecedented nationwide uprising" while still being "absolutely unwilling to make the actual changes they need to make."