Pattern of Life: Why a City Canceled Flock

On Tuesday, April 21, the Oshkosh Common Council voted 5-2 to renew its Flock surveillance camera contract. On Wednesday, they rescinded it 7-0. What changed in 24 hours? Oshkosh Police Chief Dean Smith told the council Flock had lied to them.

Council member Brad Spanbauer had asked, on the record:

“Just to be clear, does the system create a heat map of a vehicle’s movement using the multiple aggregated images for a specific searched vehicle?”

Flock’s representative answered: “No, that is not available.”

It is available. It has a name. Flock calls it pattern of life.

#What Pattern of Life is

Pattern of life is the Flock feature that turns a string of camera reads into a behavioral profile. You pick a plate. Flock plots every camera that captured it — across a jurisdiction, across a region, across the nationwide network — onto a map, with a heat map overlay that brightens where the vehicle spends its time. You toggle the window: 14 days, 30 days, longer. What comes back is the shape of a driver’s week: home, work, church, doctor, lover, gun range, union hall, rally — each node glowing in proportion to how much of a life is lived there.

It is not a theoretical capability. It is not a roadmap item. It is a marketed, shipped, demonstrated feature of FlockOS, and Flock’s own staff describe it in their own training materials.

#“We do not and cannot track vehicles”

The Oshkosh denial was not one rep having a bad night. It is the company’s house talking point, repeated in its corporate marketing, its blog posts, its press statements, and the materials it feeds to elected officials considering contracts.

On a February 26, 2026 blog post titled Is Flock Mass Surveillance? Here’s What 30 Courts Decided, Flock states, in its own voice:

“Flock ALPRs do not and cannot track vehicles, much less individual people. ALPRs take a point-in-time image of the rear of vehicles on public roadways. They are incapable of tracking the whole of anyone’s movements…”

Not “do not, absent a warrant.” Not “do so only in narrow investigative contexts.” Cannot.

Now set that next to a Flock product staffer walking a customer audience through the search interface: “you can change and see 14 days of pattern of life or 30 days of pattern of life … the heat map that you know and love.”

The marketing department is contradicting the product department. A system that “cannot track vehicles” does not ship with a 30-day pattern-of-life toggle and a heat map its users already know and love. One of those sentences is the product. The other is the pitch.

#Flock Webinars Confirm the Feature

From a Flock product demo of the search interface. A Flock staffer walks through the suspect drawer in the UI:

“you can change and see 14 days of pattern of life or 30 days of pattern of life. So you can, once you’ve zoomed in on your suspect, you can start to see what have they been doing? Where have they been going? And you have the heat map that you know and love, which you can toggle on and off.”

In another webinar, Flock explains why a user would extend a hot list’s retention window:

“you might wanna know long-term where that car has been in a week … you kind of wanna figure out what its pattern of life is.”

Finally, in a Q&A on FlockOS, Flock is asked whether the system can generate “a map-based report reflecting all of the hits for a specific vehicle … a pattern of life scenario,” a Flock trainer defers to another team member, then reads the answer:

“FlockOS allows you to see the historical locations of a specific vehicle, including a map-based view and heat map as part of license plate search.”

Each Flock employee in these three webinars references “the heat map that you know and love” — the same feature Flock told Oshkosh’s council didn’t exist.

#Beyond Oshkosh

Oshkosh is the first council we know of to catch Flock in a lie on the record and actually act on it by reversing a vote because of it. It wasn’t the first council to be told a lie, nor will it be the last. It was the first to so publicly call a spade a spade — a move that makes me feel some Midwestern pride. Three things follow for everyone else.

First, every jurisdiction that approved a Flock contract based on sales representations should re-interrogate those representations. The problem isn’t confined to one rep in one Wisconsin council chamber. Flock’s corporate marketing tells the public the system “cannot” track vehicles. Its trainers tell paying customers how to track vehicles for thirty days at a time. If a council relied on the former to approve a contract, it bought the latter. Pull the minutes. Pull the recordings. Ask the chief what he was shown in the back office that was not shown at the dais.

Second, Flock’s public response — that its statements were “misinterpreted and weaponized by activists” — is not a denial. It’s a complaint that someone noticed. The chief did not misinterpret anything. He said he “visually confirmed” the heat maps the next morning. It’s Flock’s canned repsonse to claims it doesn’t like but can’t refute: “these are just false”.

Finally, “pattern of life” is what makes Flock Flock. A single camera that reads a plate and checks it against a list of stolen vehicles is a tool — a narrow one, with narrow uses. A network of hundreds of thousands of cameras aggregating every read on every plate into a queryable history of where a driver has been, brightened into a heat map, is something categorically different.

The cameras are the sensor — Flock owns these, and its customers don’t care. The pattern-of-life database is the product actually sold to police departments. It’s why the cameras exist, and why the feature is built, taught, and demoed.

An “ALPR camera lease” may be the easier sell for its reps, but it’s not a product Flock offers.

#The Language

Flock did not invent the phrase “pattern of life.” It is a counterterrorism and military-intelligence term of art for building a behavioral template of a target by tracking their movements over time. Flock markets counterinsurgency tooling to local police departments because it sells.

When that product is pointed at every driver on an American road — and the company’s sales staff then tells elected officials it does no such thing — “misinterpreted” is not the word for what happened in Oshkosh.