Flock No
The case against Flock
Ten documented problems with automated license plate readers, and with Flock Safety's network specifically. Each one below is sourced to reporting or a primary document. None of it requires assuming bad faith by any officer or department; several of the examples are cases where a department found the problem itself and acted on it.
1. Cameras record everyone, not just suspects
An ALPR does not wait for probable cause; it reads every plate that passes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has estimated that more than 99.9% of ALPR reads are unconnected to any crime. EFF's own review of Flock's search logs found more than 12 million searches logged by over 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025, a scale that is hard to square with "looking for suspects."
2. People with legitimate access have misused it
Reporting has documented officers using Flock access to look up people they knew personally rather than for a case. In Stow, Massachusetts, the police department terminated its Flock contract in August 2026 after finding an officer had run a Worcester County resident's vehicle information "for no legitimate law enforcement reason." The Institute for Justice maintains a running database of more than 200 incidents nationwide, including romantic stalking, wrongful stops, and use unrelated to law enforcement.
3. Data is not always limited to local access
Flock's network lets a participating agency search cameras it does not own, anywhere in the network that shares with it. Data collected by a camera bought to find stolen cars locally is not necessarily reviewed only by the agency that bought it. Whether that has happened here specifically is one of the open questions on the local page; nationally, it has already led to litigation and to cities ending their contracts.
4. Flock captures more than just plate numbers
Flock markets a "vehicle fingerprint" search: finding a car by make, color, or features like bumper stickers, without a known plate. EFF's review of search logs found agencies using Flock's network in connection with political demonstrations, naming the 50501 protests, the April "Hands Off" protests, and the June and October "No Kings" protests among them, and tracking an activist group by its members' vehicles across dozens of searches.
5. Flock data has already been used in a reproductive-rights case
In 2025, a Johnson County, Texas sheriff's deputy searched more than 83,000 Flock cameras nationwide, including some in Illinois, in a case logged as "had an abortion, search for female." The sheriff's office and Flock described it publicly as a welfare check; records obtained by EFF show investigators discussed criminal charges with prosecutors and kept the case open for over a month. This site's own review of California reporting found the California Highway Patrol ran a search across 845 ALPR systems labeled "ICE case", the kind of cross-jurisdiction reach this concern is about.
6. Civil liberties groups argue Flock cameras bypass the Fourth Amendment rights
The EFF and the ACLU argue that a network capable of reconstructing anyone's movements amounts to a warrantless search conducted on every driver, not just the ones under investigation. This is a contested legal question, not a settled one: Flock points to court rulings that have gone the company's way, and courts elsewhere have reached different conclusions. It has not yet been tested in a way that resolves the question nationally.
7. Misreads have sent officers to the wrong car, guns drawn
A single misread character can turn an ALPR alert into a felony stop. In Roseville, California, a two-year review found the system misread the plate in 71% of alerts flagging a vehicle as stolen or connected to a felony. The Institute for Justice has documented dozens of cases nationwide of drivers pulled over, detained at gunpoint, or jailed after a misread, before anyone checked whether the match was correct.
8. The network is owned by a single private company
Flock Safety is a private, venture-backed company, not a public utility or a government system. It raised $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in March 2025, and reporting later put its valuation at $8.4 billion. Retention defaults, search auditing, and what counts as misuse are set largely by the vendor's own policies and contract terms, not by a public agency's rulemaking process.
9. It is an ongoing cost, not a one-time purchase
Flock sells cameras on an annual subscription, not a one-time purchase, so the bill recurs every year the contract runs. The actual figures for this county, agency by agency, are on the local deployment table, sourced individually to each agency's own contract or council minutes.
10. Some agencies that adopted Flock have since walked away
Beyond Stow, several California cities ended or declined to renew Flock contracts in 2026, including Mountain View, Los Altos Hills, and El Cerrito. Sebastopol, in this county, has never deployed it and requires a public hearing before any department could; see the local page for that ordinance. None of this proves the technology does not work. It is evidence that, once the record on a department's own deployment became visible, some communities decided differently than they had at the start.