Flock Would Rather Jail Cops Than Turn Off the Cameras

In the last month or two, reports of police abusing Flock appear to have skyrocketed. In Georgia — Flock’s home state — Atlanta News First counts at least 20 cases in the past year of officers disciplined or charged over Flock abuse, and lately the arrests seem to come every other day. Despite reports often indicating that the stalking was first reported by the victims, Flock has been busy taking credit: when Albany, GA fired and arrested five officers in July, Flock announced it in its own press release, starring its new “Audit Assistance” tool. Increased surveillance — through roadside cameras or automated log parsing — remains a band-aid on a bullet wound.

“Audit Assistance” went into general availability on April 14, 2026. Flock says little about how it works: it “continuously monitors system activity and surfaces search patterns that fall outside an agency’s typical usage,” and it is “proactive” (while simultaneously being a dashboard that must be opened). Flock’s press materials never say what’s under the hood. A police commander quoted in the announcement credits “an algorithm,” but a company spokesperson told Atlanta News First that it “uses artificial intelligence to flag searches that may be outside a department’s policy.”

#The Abuse Is Not Hypothetical

The Institute for Justice’s list of “police officers using ALPR camera networks to keep tabs on their romantic interests” is up to 24, as of today. The cases date back to 2021, but most were discovered in the past year. The ALPR abuse library is only current until May 2026, but it has documented 66 cases across 28 states. Only 8 of those are dated before 2025.

People who were stalked before 2025, or after 2026,^[1] may never find out. People who had their personal information pulled from systems other than Flock also may never know. Flock and police even made it part of their fatalistic sales pitch to communities: you are under surveillance 24/7, by more invasive tools than Flock — what are you even worried about?

#“It’s Just Not That Interesting”

If [people are] worried about privacy, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do surveillance. You have a cell phone. A cell phone knows your exact location at all times.

And because Flock itself only retains the data for 30 days (never mind that it can be copied and stored indefinitely during that period), Langley argues, abuse is at worst limited and boring:

There’s still going to be abuse, but it limits that, hey, if it’s seven days, 14 days, 30 days of data, it’s just not that interesting. Relative to what you see with data brokers online, where they have your entire internet history stored forever.

Flock’s blog makes the same move: “reported misuse represents a small fraction of overall activity”, and only “19 agencies out of approximately 3,900 Flock customers conducted searches that explicitly referenced protest activity. That represents roughly 0.48% of agencies, less than half of one percent.” Which, of course, doesn’t count the other kinds of abuse — like stalking romantic partners.

It’s an interesting position for a company that, by its own count, photographs and indexes more than 240 billion plates, in case any might be related to one of 6.3 million crimes.^[2] Even if every single crime in the US were captured on a Flock camera ten times over, only 0.026% of captures would contain any information related to a crime. If 0.48% of agencies stalking protestors doesn’t prove the system is being abused, then 0.026% of photos being relevant certainly doesn’t prove it solves crime.^[3]

#All You Need to Do Is Look

No matter the scale, transparency tools help uncover abuse. haveibeenflocked.com has helped some people find out they were being stalked, and, in a few of those cases, their discoveries led to consequences for the stalkers. Maybe “Audit Assistance” is helping too — Flock certainly says so.

But finding abuse is not the same as stopping it, and this was never a technical problem to begin with. Sure, nobody can manually read the millions of searches that hit the system every month, and even a mid-sized agency produces (tens of) thousands.

But checking if every search has a case number takes seconds. Checking if reasons go beyond “sus” or “inv” is trivial. Automating keyword scans (which is what the reports on this website do) is a twenty-minute task for the IT department, or just someone who is good with spreadsheets. You don’t need AI for any of that: all you need to do is look.

Very few people were looking at Flock logs before they started being published as responses to public records requests in 2025. A year later, Flock and police have only made it more difficult to watch them. And what about everything else? Langley wasn’t wrong about the data brokers with “your entire internet history stored forever.”^[4] None of those systems publish logs, and nobody is getting fired for abusing them. At the end of the day, a few cops have been fired over how they used Flock, but nothing has actually been solved.

#“It Captures Vehicles. Not People”

The underlying problem is the constant minimization. With one hand Flock builds an “Audit Assistance” tool and issues press releases about the criminal cops it catches; with the other it insists there is no privacy interest in any of the data.^[5] Both can’t be true.

If the system “captures vehicles, not people,” nobody could be stalked with it; every stalking charge Flock takes credit for uncovering is evidence against its own product description. What are cops supposed to conclude about a system that they are told “captures vehicles, not people,” where “30 courts” have supposedly agreed the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply, that they can access from their personal phones, and where the defaults serve up 30-day nationwide location histories on DUI stops? That it contains highly sensitive information?

#“Five Officers Arrested”

The Albany announcement was titled “Five Officers Arrested.” It went out as a corporate press release, distributed on a newswire between product launches and C-suite hires. Five of its customers’ employees used the company’s product to commit crimes, and Flock’s marketing department sent out a press release claiming a victory.

Flock’s co-founder supplied the moral: “Technology doesn’t create misconduct. People do. The question is whether the technology is designed to expose that misuse.” Expose. Not prevent. Flock isn’t fixing its product so that it prevents abuse, or even deters it: its press release wanted you to know it has built a surveillance tool to detect beat cops messing up, and to get them fired and jailed. The system that invites the abuse rolls on, and Flock continues minimizing to make the sale.

#The Difference

Of course, I post this on a website that also audits Flock searches — meta-surveillance, by my own definition. There are differences: the reports here run on public logs, and are public themselves. They don’t hide in a private dashboard that shows only what an admin, or a marketing department, decides to share. And Flock needs its audit tool — audit is what keeps the surveillance sellable.

This website exists to make the opposite case. I’ve said from day one that I want to be able to shut it down. We can end the abuse by ending the surveillance. And by ending the abuse, we can end the meta-surveillance. Shouldn’t that be the goal?