127,000 Flock Cameras Now Track American Drivers. A New Tool Skips the License Plate Entirely.

Flock Safety operates roughly 127,000 automated license plate readers across about 6,000 U.S. communities, according to Wired. That makes it the largest network of its kind in the country, built up since the company launched in 2017.

Wired reported this week that Flock is testing a new AI tool called OS Investigate. The system lets police identify drivers by movement patterns alone, without needing a license plate number or an active crime report, then link that pattern to case files, public records, and commercial data. No court order required.

Flock cameras photograph plates and store the images in a searchable database. Police departments query it during investigations. Jeff Potts, executive director of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, told NPR affiliate WWNO that license plate readers "can be very helpful tools for law enforcement," and a preliminary study cited by WWNO suggests the cameras may deter car theft.

The technology has also been misused. WWNO reported that some police officers have used Flock data to stalk ex-partners. Ground News, aggregating recent reporting, put a number on it: at least 50 officers have been accused or charged with misusing Flock systems for exactly that. A 2024 California audit found 71 percent of alerts generated by the system contained incorrect plate data, according to the same Ground News summary. A sheriff's office in Texas used Flock to track a woman who may have had an abortion, WWNO reported. Officers in some jurisdictions have accessed the data for immigration enforcement without local government approval.

Clare Garvie, deputy director of technology law and policy at NYU's Policing Project, told WWNO the scope is broader than most people realize. "They monitor, quite simply, when we go to and from work, where we go to the doctor, where we drop our kid off at daycare," Garvie said. "What we've enabled in practical reality is law enforcement to go back and look at where any of us was at any given point in time."

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, told WWNO the risk grows as AI and cloud storage centralize the data. "The potential for police fishing expeditions is unlimited," Stanley said.

Flock CEO Garrett Langley announced new safeguards on August 13, according to Ground News, shortening default data retention to seven days and adding mandatory lockouts for suspicious searches. The company says that's a direct response to the backlash.

More than 100 cities have deactivated Flock cameras, according to Ground News. The Los Angeles Police Department paused its Flock contract, saying in a statement quoted by Reason and the Orange County Register that it wanted "to address some of the civil liberty and civil right concerns and ensure that there is clarity over the terms regarding privacy, data ownership and security."

Some residents aren't waiting on city councils. WWNO reported that Brady O'Rourke, a resident of Crystal, Minnesota, walks to a busy intersection near his house several times a week with a roof rake taped with a sign and blocks a Flock camera with it. "I don't want to pay to be surveilled," O'Rourke told WWNO. "My tax dollars are funding cameras at the end of my block. I don't want to live like that. I don't think anybody should have to live like that." He said he got the idea from a man in Florida who did the same thing with a pool skimmer. Vandalism of cameras has also been reported elsewhere, according to the Daily Caller.

The Daily Caller raised a separate concern: Flock is a private company, not a government agency, and one of its investors has been linked to Toka, an Israeli security firm the outlet described as specializing in technology capable of altering camera footage. That claim comes from the Daily Caller alone among these sources and has not been independently verified here; it's an allegation about a business relationship, not a proven instance of tampering with Flock's own systems.

None of this has produced federal legislation yet. Ground News reported that Congress has held hearings on Flock surveillance abuses but has "yet to introduce a bill" that would restrict or ban the cameras.

The core disagreement isn't about facts. Potts and other police leaders don't dispute that Flock cameras can be misused; they argue the tool's crime-solving value outweighs the risk. Garvie, Stanley, and privacy advocates don't dispute that stolen cars get recovered; they argue a system with no warrant requirement and a 71 percent error rate in at least one state audit is the wrong tradeoff regardless of the benefit.

What happens next likely depends on whether more cities follow LAPD's lead in pausing contracts, and whether the safeguards Langley announced on August 13 actually reduce the misuse cases prosecutors and auditors have already documented. So far, no federal court ruling or statute requires a warrant before police query a Flock database, and no bill restricting the technology has been introduced in Congress.