Cameras don't track people, Flock does

Last Thursday night, KCCI Des Moines reported that in suburban Pleasant Hill, the pole holding up a Flock camera was “apparently cut in half,” and the camera system itself had been “destroyed.” Police Captain Amy Kramer “said similar Flock cameras have been vandalized elsewhere in Iowa, pointing to incidents highlighted on the website De-Flock.”^[1] She spoke about the recent backlash against Flock in Iowa, saying, “part of it, I think, is a little misinformation. These cameras don’t track people or follow people around.”

#“The cameras don’t track vehicles”

In the video, someone clicks a button labeled “START REAL-TIME ROUTING,” which shows the route a car traveled. The narrator explains that Condor cameras “help identify where vehicles are traveling in between our various Falcon cameras placed throughout the community.”

The distinction Flock makes is that these are Condor (pan-tilt-zoom) cameras, not Falcon (license plate reader, or LPR) cameras. The LPR detects the plate. The Condor spots the same car by some other characteristic. The video does not say whether it works with third-party (“Wing”) cameras, while the marketing material says “various data sources.”^[2]

After all of the data is collected, FlockOS — software running in Flock’s cloud, not on the camera — puts all of it together to track the car from point A to point B, and through the rest of the alphabet.

To call it misinformation, Flock leans on a non-existent distinction between “FlockOS analyzes various data sources to determine where a suspect vehicle has been and its direction of travel” and its shorthand, “the camera tracks people.”

#“It takes a picture of a car”

That same day, Flock CEO Garrett Langley had a similar message when responding to the LAPD suspending its use of Flock’s cameras, following a critical inspector general’s report:

If people would understand what the technology actually does — not what it might do in fifty years, not what someone thinks it could do, but what it actually does, day in and day out — it takes a picture of a car. Most people go, “this makes a lot of sense. I want my kids to be safe.”

#“External radar”

The (apparent) current model of Flock’s LPR camera has a small module attached to the bottom:

The module is labeled “external radar,” but its purpose is unclear. Flock has never said.

The FCC keeps public records on any device that emits radio signals (such as radar). Such devices are required to be labeled, but there is no FCC identifier visible on the module. Flock registered an FCC grantee code (2BKG8) in August 2024. As of July 26, 2026, no applications are listed under it, for the radar module or any other device.

The apparent FCC violation itself is problematic, but more relevant here is that the public can’t get any information. The entry for an Apple AirTag, by comparison, shows the device was tested by a third party to ensure its radio signal doesn’t cause harmful interference, e.g., on public safety communications frequencies. For Flock’s module: zero results. The company placed an unknown number of them, likely in the tens of thousands, at unknown locations, and we have no idea what they do, let alone if they do it without interfering with anything else.

Assuming the label is telling the truth about this being a radar module, it seems unlikely (but entirely possible) that it’s being used to determine vehicle speeds. mmWave radar is often used for real-time 3D object mapping; it’s used in self-driving cars and on “smart highways.”^[3]

Two things are clear: radar is not required to “take a picture of a car,” and we have no way of knowing what this module does.

#“Dossier of that person’s entire life”

The similarity between the Flock CEO’s message and the Pleasant Hill, Iowa, police department’s message is not a coincidence. Flock helps its customers stay on-message through webinars, glossy ebooks, and, of course, sales reps and blog posts.

In the video, a Flock rep tells the audience he’s “even heard some reporters refer to it in a way that on the left side of the screen, there’s a picture of a license plate, and the right side of the screen has a dossier of that person’s entire life. As we all know, who use the technology, that’s just not true.”

Cut to an excerpt from another webinar, this one about Flock Nova; on the main screen: “Step 1: Build a digital trail with LPR and enriched case data” alongside the heatmap Flock says doesn’t exist.

The strenuous distinction here is that the LPR itself does not show the dossier; the Flock Nova software does. Nova can combine Flock LPR with all sorts of other data sources. According to the “Step 1” slide, it can “surface accomplice vehicles and movement patterns … with AI-enabled LPR” and it can “use AI to connect case data across CAD/RMS” (dispatch and records systems).

In his hypothetical human trafficking investigation, the presenter says Nova will pull in bodycam footage from previous police encounters to see if someone might be associated with “females who are underdressed for the weather.”

Flock also built “AI analysts” into the product to identify patterns and conduct investigations:

Langley told the ABC7 crew people shouldn’t worry about what the system might do one day, but Night Shift, Flock promised on stage in 2025, will get even better in the future: “soon, you will be able to build your own agent … you can share those agents within your own agencies, or even across agencies, in the same way you share camera access today, or a custom hotlist.”

#A license for music and videos

In Costa Mesa, CA, the city council went back and forth for a while on a specific contractual clause. The clause defines content a customer might “post” or “upload” through Flock’s products, language you would expect in a social network’s terms of service, not a police camera contract. The clause discussed involved a definition similar to this one, from Dunwoody, GA’s contract^[4]:

Flock may provide Customer with the opportunity to post, upload, display, publish, distribute, transmit, broadcast, or otherwise make available, messages, text, illustrations, files, images, graphics, photos, comments, sounds, music, videos, information, content, ratings, reviews, data, questions, suggestions, or other information or materials produced by Customer

After a few rounds, the city council, the city attorney, and the three of the department’s nine Flock administrators who were present all seemed confused. Flock did not send a representative. Costa Mesa decided it wanted the language removed from the contract.

The people in the room, including the three administrators who “use the technology” and were specifically selected to come in and defend the contract against five hours of public comment in opposition, did not seem to know that Flock’s hotlist tool has a comment section and a “Media” button:

Keep in mind that Costa Mesa had already signed this contract. The meeting was about whether it should be renegotiated. The Costa Mesa police department has used the system, “day in and day out,” for four years.

The contractual language was treated as misinformation regardless.

#“A tough balance”

On X, Flock’s Chief Strategy Officer, Rahul Sidhu, defends Flock’s decision to redact critical audit log information in response to a question from a reporter:

Honest answer: transparency is split between what we share and what the agency shares. We can’t force the latter. We make it as easy as we possibly can for the agency to be transparent.

Ex: We share the employee IDs for the officers, but it’s up to the agency to share who those IDs belong to. This is a tough balance because we also don’t want to doxx the undercover officers, etc.

He attaches a screenshot saying, “the change followed complaints from roughly 200 law enforcement leaders that activists were using published audit data to identify undercover officers.”

This concern over “doxxing” is rooted in a belief that a secret police force is appropriate, not in a belief that all government officials, police included, are by definition accountable to the public. Identification for accountability purposes is the reason we have license plates to begin with, but it’s a bridge too far for police.^[5]

Meanwhile, access on the inside is wide open. Flock’s blog recently put the number of “monthly active users” above 140,000. There are no background checks. Multi-factor authentication is not required, users have been found sharing accounts, and stolen credentials have circulated on dark-web marketplaces; lawmakers have asked the FTC to investigate. Flock has defended all of that as local decisions.

It is a statistical certainty that some of those accounts are in hostile hands. Whoever holds them can see searches, camera footage, and people’s location histories (including cops’) in real time, no public records request required. All of it will look like it’s coming from yet another small town in northwestern Arkansas nobody has ever heard of, under reasons like “test” or “inv.”

#Fighting misinformation

Flock’s claim is that asserting the company does anything beyond “taking pictures of a car” is “misinformation.” The company asks people to ignore the mysterious radar modules; the dossiers with 911 transcripts, LPR histories, CAD/RMS data, bodycam footage, and OSINT data; the AI combing through it all for patterns; the APIs; the account sharing; and the complete lack of security standards.

It’s true that many of those are technically different Flock products, not “LPR.” That is the problem. The backlash focuses on the cameras because the cameras are the only part of the system the public can see. The hardware inside them, and bolted onto them, is undocumented. The software behind them runs in Flock’s cloud, out of sight.

The onus is on the government to select vendors that can earn public trust. Part of that is providing complete and accurate information: not corporate talking points, and not a CEO going on TV to tell the public not to worry about the future because it’s only “pictures of cars” today.

Captain Kramer was probably right that misinformation contributed to the destruction of the camera. Misinformation grows where information is withheld. When a reporter requested information about Pleasant Hill’s Flock deployment last year, the response was that some of that information, like the locations and types of cameras, is “confidential.”^[6]

Whoever destroyed the camera couldn’t know whether it was the type that “takes a picture of a car” or some other type that might have a radar module. They couldn’t know who was watching from the other side. Neither can anyone else in Pleasant Hill.

That’s the arrangement offered: the public must take it on faith that every camera is benign, while the system logs every plate on the assumption that any of them may turn out to be involved in a crime. Trust is demanded in one direction and withheld in the other.

It’s a familiar play: in June 1775, with Boston under siege, British General Thomas Gage issued a proclamation explaining the unrest. The people were not aggrieved, it said. They were misled: “infatuated multitudes, who have long suffered themselves to be conducted by certain well known Incendiaries and Traitors.”^[7]

Gage claimed the press had printed “the grossest forgeries, calumnies and absurdities that ever insulted human understanding,” but offered nothing in refutation. Americans were not persuaded.