Flock Safety sells an easy promise to share: helping police recover a stolen car, locate a missing person, solve a crime. To keep that promise, its cameras also record your car passing by while you go out to buy bread. The system does not wait for you to become relevant to an investigator. When that happens, part of the work will already have been done.
The US company provides surveillance systems to law enforcement agencies, businesses and residential communities. Its automatic licence plate readers associate each detection with vehicle characteristics, location and time. This information is retained and can be searched later. The archive therefore also contains the movements of people who are not involved in any investigation.
With a feature called National Lookup, officers can search a full licence plate across cameras operated by other departments that have joined the network. Sharing depends on permissions and applicable rules, but it allows searches to extend beyond the boundaries of their own city. The camera you see at an intersection can be an entry point into a much larger system.
A licence plate does not automatically identify the driver, but linked detections can reconstruct routes and habits: where you go, at what times, and places you visit often. Put together, this information says far more than a car journey and can make aspects of private life legible without anyone having given consent.
This reduces the cost and difficulty of reconstructing the past and increases the power of those able to access it.
Whose safety?
In 2022, Victor Heiar, an officer in Kechi, Kansas, used Flock to search for the licence plate of the car driven by his estranged wife.
The state commission order revoking his certification states that Heiar admitted using the system to monitor the woman’s movements. He was convicted of stalking and unlawful use of computer systems.
On 13 August 2026, Flock announced new controls: by the end of the year, officers will have to link every search to an investigation, except for emergencies to be reviewed later. For new law enforcement customers, the default data-retention period will fall from 30 to seven days, while existing customers will be able to keep their previously approved periods. These measures may limit abuse, but they leave intact the collection of movements of people not involved in an investigation.
