Flock Safety. The license-plate network that any cop can search nationwide, and the fifty-plus cities now backing out.
Flock Safety sells automated license-plate reader cameras to thousands of US police departments and wires them into one cross-searchable national database. Officers have used it to stalk exes. A Texas sheriff's office used it to search for a woman connected to an abortion. Local departments gave ICE and Border Patrol access without telling anyone. This is what happens when a private vendor builds shared infrastructure faster than any single agency can be held accountable for it.
Flock Safety was founded in 2017. By 2026 its cameras cover more than 5,000 communities across 40+ states, cross-searchable through a single interface. Since early 2025, reporting from 404 Media, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the University of Washington Center for Human Rights has documented officer misuse, undisclosed federal immigration access, hardware vulnerabilities, and a wrongful gunpoint stop. Congress opened an investigation in August 2025. More than fifty cities have since canceled or suspended their contracts.
Primary sources include 404 Media's cumulative Flock reporting, EFF's Get the Flock Out campaign, the UW Center for Human Rights' county-by-county ICE/CBP breakdown, and named police-department records, court filings, and the ACLU's Get the Flock Out campaign.
What this page is about
Flock Safety runs a cross-searchable automated license-plate reader (ALPR) network across thousands of US police departments. Any participating agency can search plates captured by any other agency's cameras nationwide.
Officers have used that reach to stalk romantic partners and exes. A Texas sheriff's office ran a nationwide search logged as looking for a woman connected to an abortion. Sheriffs and local police departments gave ICE and Border Patrol access to Flock data without telling the public. Since early 2025, more than fifty US cities have canceled or suspended their Flock contracts, though Flock says it signed roughly 800 new city contracts in 2026 over the same period.
A camera misread led Arkansas police to hold a family at gunpoint. Independent researchers found dozens of Flock cameras streaming live and archived footage over the open internet with no login required. A consolidated federal class action in California accuses Flock of letting out-of-state and federal agencies query data California law says should stay in-state.
Every claim on this page is graded independently. The foundational reporting is 404 Media, which broke the abortion- tracking and ICE-access stories and maintains the most complete running index; EFF, whose investigations document the officer-misuse pattern and follow-on records requests; the ACLU's advocacy campaign; and the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, whose October 2025 report is the authoritative source on Washington state's ICE and CBP access. Named police-department records, court filings, and local news coverage of specific firings and arrests fill out the rest. Where a claim rests on a contested count or a single outlet's framing, it is graded PROBABLY TRUE, not FACT.
We are not saying Flock Safety's corporate leadership directed any of the individual officer-misuse cases documented below. Those are cases of named officers fired and, in many cases, criminally charged by their own police departments and sheriff's offices for violating agency policy. The company is not a party to those personnel actions.
We are not saying Flock has a formal contract with ICE or Customs and Border Protection. No such contract is in the public record. What is documented is that local police departments and sheriff's offices, which do hold Flock contracts, gave federal immigration agents access to search Flock data, in most cases without public disclosure.
We are not asserting that the Johnson County, Texas abortion search proves what happened to the woman being searched for. A later independent review complicates that story, and we flag it directly in §5 and §6 rather than repeat the original framing uncritically.
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The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Step through it here, or present it fullscreen.
Flock Safety
The nationwide plate-reader network that lets any cop query any plate, and the fifty-plus municipalities now backing out.
One vendor built a national search engine for license plates. Thousands of independently-run agencies then used it however they wanted.
Flock Safety's business model is saturation. The company does not sell a camera to a police department and stop there. It sells cross-search: once an agency joins the network, its officers can query any other participating agency's camera feed, anywhere in the country, for almost any stated reason.
That design choice is the product, not a side effect. A local police chief buying a handful of cameras to watch one intersection is also buying a seat at a table with thousands of other departments, each setting its own rules for who gets to search and why. No single department wrote those rules. No single department can enforce them on the others.
The result is a pattern that keeps repeating in different forms. Officers search plates for personal reasons unrelated to any investigation. Sheriffs run searches that route around their own state's privacy law. Local departments grant federal immigration agents access that sanctuary-city policy was designed to block. None of this required Flock's corporate leadership to approve anything. The infrastructure did the work once it existed.
This page treats Flock as the current, concrete example of what the Surveillance State(s) hub tracks more broadly: infrastructure built once, shared widely, and governed by whoever happens to have a login.
2017 to July 20, 2026: from Flock’s founding to a third wave of Georgia arrests.
- 2017Flock Safety is founded in Atlanta, Georgia, selling automated license-plate reader cameras to police departments and homeowners' associations, with cross-search as the core product. 404 Media.
- May 9, 2025Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office runs a nationwide Flock search across 83,345 cameras and 6,809 networks, logging the search reason as looking for a woman connected to an abortion. 404 Media.
- May 23, 2025Yakima County, Washington Sheriff's Office runs a Flock search explicitly labeled “ICE” across 89 networks. UW Center for Human Rights.
- May 29, 2025404 Media publishes the story that breaks the Johnson County abortion-search case nationally. 404 Media.
- June 13, 2025The Illinois Secretary of State's office confirms it is investigating Mount Prospect Police Department for sharing ALPR data with the Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office and running 262 immigration-related searches in violation of state law. 6ABC.
- August 6, 2025Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robert Garcia send a formal letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley demanding information on nationwide immigration-related searches. Letter, Krishnamoorthi/Garcia to Langley.
- August 8, 2025Congress formally announces an investigation into Flock, citing 404 Media's reporting on roughly 4,000 immigration-related searches nationwide. 404 Media.
- October 7, 2025EFF publishes records showing the Johnson County search was logged internally as a “death investigation” of a “non-viable fetus,” contradicting Sheriff Adam King's public claim that the search was a welfare check. EFF.
- October 21, 2025The University of Washington Center for Human Rights publishes “Leaving the Door Wide Open,” naming 18 Washington state agencies that gave ICE or Border Patrol access to Flock data between May and August 2025. UW Center for Human Rights.
- December 23, 2025Security researchers Eric Daigle and Ben Jordan publish a video documenting roughly 60 exposed Flock “Condor” cameras streaming live and archived footage over the open internet with no authentication. “This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers”.
- February 11, 2026A Flock camera in Sherwood, Arkansas misreads plate “APX 55X” as the stolen plate “APX 55Y.” Officer Seth Kinkade and a second officer hold a family, including a one-month-old infant, at gunpoint. KATV.
- February 17, 2026NPR reports “at least 30” US cities have canceled Flock contracts since early 2025 over immigration-surveillance concerns. NPR.
- February 26, 2026Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala resigns as a negotiated condition of a misconduct complaint over Flock misuse. The same week, the first California class-action complaint against Flock is filed in San Francisco Superior Court. Wisconsin Law Journal.
- March 2026TechSpot reports 53 US cities across 20 states have canceled Flock contracts. Separately, an independent review by the Tri-City Herald finds the Johnson County case may have involved a violent domestic-assault suspect falsely claiming an aborted fetus, complicating the original abortion-search framing. TechSpot.
- April 3, 2026The California complaint is removed to federal court and amended as Javorsky v. Flock Group, Inc., No. 4:26-cv-02382 (N.D. Cal.). Amended complaint (PDF).
- April 6, 2026The Guardian publishes a feature on Flock cameras, including researcher Ben Jordan's demonstration, with Joshua Michael and Jon Gaines, of firmware extraction from Flock hardware using an Android diagnostic tool. The Guardian.
- June 11, 2026404 Media reports that Flock leaked officers' search reasons and searched plates through DuckDuckGo and Bing indexing, a related but separate vulnerability. 404 Media.
- June 25, 2026Judge Vince Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) appoints Bursor & Fisher's Philip Fraietta and Julia Venditti as interim co-lead class counsel in the consolidated In re: Flock Group Inc. Automated License Plate Reader Litigation, No. 3:26-cv-02375-VC. Bursor & Fisher.
- June 26, 2026Greer, South Carolina Police Corporal Kareem Lynch is terminated for tracking a subordinate he had a prior relationship with, using falsified search justifications. Fox Carolina.
- Late June 2026Richmond County, Georgia Sheriff's Office Deputy Jaquarius Yarbrough is fired and charged after running 1,639 Flock searches over roughly 28 days to track a woman for personal reasons. CBS Atlanta.
- June 29, 2026Greer, South Carolina Officer Sebastian Echeverry is decertified for tracking “several citizens” using false search entries. Separately, Tech Times reports 53 cancellations alongside nearly 800 new Flock city contracts signed in 2026. Tech Times.
- July 2, 2026The Washington Times reports “more than 70” US cities have canceled or suspended Flock contracts, citing DeFlock's grassroots tracker, with 55 of those in the past year. Washington Times.
- July 6-7, 2026The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announces the firing and arrest of five Albany Police Department officers, Tytianna Davis, Jade Jackson, Nicholas Richardson, Brittney Smith, and Issac Whitus, for misusing Flock license-plate data. CBS Atlanta.
- July 8, 2026GridWatch the USA's independent count of canceled or suspended Flock contracts reaches 68. GridWatch the USA.
- July 9, 2026A second Milwaukee Police Department detective is charged in a follow-on case of Flock misuse. Straight Arrow News.
- July 11, 2026LAPD's three-year Flock contract, covering roughly 138 cameras, expires without renewal. CIO Dean Gialamas cites civil liberties and data-sharing concerns. LA Times.
- July 14, 2026Fox Carolina and FITSNews report publicly on both Greer, South Carolina officers, Lynch and Echeverry, and note South Carolina's state law enforcement division (SLED) is reviewing further allegations. FITSNews.
- July 17-18, 2026DeKalb County, Georgia Sheriff's Office Sergeant Kabiru Salawu, a 17-year veteran, is fired and arrested. An affidavit alleges he searched fellow deputies' plates hundreds of times under a false “welfare check” pretext. Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
- July 20, 2026Three more Richmond County, Georgia officers, Lieutenant John McKenzie, Investigator Curtis Hoskins, and Deputy Joshua Johnson, are fired and charged for more than 100 unauthorized Flock searches each. CBS Atlanta.
The company, the lawmakers, the researchers, and more than twenty officers now fired or charged.
Received the August 6, 2025 congressional letter from Reps. Krishnamoorthi and Garcia demanding an accounting of nationwide immigration-related searches. Flock has disputed some framing of the camera-vulnerability reporting while confirming at least one instance of hardware misconfiguration.
His office ran the May 9, 2025 nationwide search logged as looking for a woman connected to an abortion. Publicly described the search as a welfare check; EFF later obtained records showing it was logged internally as a death investigation. King has since been indicted on unrelated felony perjury and sexual-harassment-retaliation charges.
Co-signed the August 6, 2025 letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley and announced the congressional investigation on August 8, 2025, citing 404 Media's reporting on roughly 4,000 immigration-related searches nationwide.
Co-signed the same August 6, 2025 letter. The investigation he and Krishnamoorthi opened remains active as of this writing.
First identified roughly 70 unsecured Flock camera admin interfaces via a commercial search engine in late 2025, then partnered with 404 Media and Ben Jordan to document the exposure publicly on December 23, 2025.
Co-published the December 23, 2025 video documenting roughly 60 exposed Flock “Condor” cameras. Later demonstrated firmware extraction from Flock hardware with Joshua Michael and Jon Gaines, reported by The Guardian on April 6, 2026.
Worked with Ben Jordan on the hardware-level firmware extraction demonstrated using an Android diagnostic tool, documented in The Guardian's April 6, 2026 feature.
Resigned in February 2026 as a negotiated condition of a misconduct complaint over Flock database misuse. A second Milwaukee detective was charged in a follow-on case reported July 9, 2026.
Terminated June 26, 2026 for tracking a subordinate he had a prior relationship with, using falsified Flock search justifications.
Decertified June 29, 2026 for tracking several citizens using false Flock search entries.
Fired and charged in late June 2026 for 1,639 Flock searches over roughly 28 days, tracking a woman for personal reasons.
Fired and charged July 20, 2026, each for more than 100 unauthorized Flock searches.
Fired and arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on July 6-7, 2026, charged with misuse of license-plate data and violation of oath of office.
A 17-year veteran, fired and arrested July 17-18, 2026 on a felony violation-of-oath charge and a misdemeanor misuse-of-license-plate-data charge. An affidavit alleges he searched fellow deputies' plates hundreds of times under a false welfare-check pretext.
Involved in the February 11, 2026 gunpoint stop of a family after a Flock camera misread a stolen-vehicle plate by one character.
Publicly stated LAPD's Flock contract was not renewed on July 11, 2026 “because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras.”
Presides over the consolidated In re: Flock Group Inc. Automated License Plate Reader Litigation, No. 3:26-cv-02375-VC.
Appointed June 25, 2026 to lead the consolidated California class action against Flock.
Sixteen claims, from a May 2025 abortion search through the 2026 data-broker build-out, Flock's OS Investigate AI tool, and a Supreme Court location ruling.
Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office ran a nationwide Flock search logged as looking for a woman connected to an abortion.
PROBABLY TRUE404 Media broke the story: on May 9, 2025, the office searched 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks nationwide, logging the reason as looking for a woman who had an abortion. EFF's October 2025 follow-up found the search was internally logged as a death investigation of a non-viable fetus, contradicting the sheriff's public welfare-check framing. A later Tri-City Herald review complicates the story further: the underlying case may have involved a violent domestic-assault suspect who falsely claimed an aborted fetus to cover up an assault on his girlfriend. That means the search log's abortion framing may not reflect what actually happened to the woman being searched for. We grade this PROBABLY TRUE rather than FACT because the underlying narrative is genuinely contested, even though the search itself and the sheriff's contradictory public statements are documented.
Yakima County, Washington Sheriff's Office ran a search explicitly labeled 'ICE' across 89 Flock networks on May 23, 2025.
FACTDocumented directly in the University of Washington Center for Human Rights' primary-source records review. The search reason field itself read 'ICE,' making this one of the more explicit examples in the national dataset.
Illinois's Secretary of State found Mount Prospect Police Department ran 262 immigration-related Flock searches in violation of state law and shared data with the Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office.
FACTConfirmed by Illinois state officials themselves, reported June 13, 2025. Illinois law restricts ALPR data sharing with out-of-state agencies for immigration enforcement; the state's own investigation found Mount Prospect PD violated that restriction 262 times and shared data directly with the Texas office that ran the abortion-related search.
404 Media documented roughly 4,000 immigration-related Flock searches nationally, and Congress opened a formal investigation on August 8, 2025.
FACT404 Media's original data-driven reporting is the primary source for the national search count. The congressional investigation is confirmed by the letter itself, sent by Reps. Krishnamoorthi and Garcia directly to Flock CEO Garrett Langley.
18 Washington state agencies gave ICE or Border Patrol access to Flock data between May and August 2025, mostly undisclosed.
FACTThe University of Washington Center for Human Rights' October 21, 2025 report is the authoritative primary source. It names 8 agencies with direct one-to-one Border Patrol network sharing: Benton County Sheriff's Office, and the Arlington, Auburn, Lakewood, Richland, Sunnyside, Wenatchee, and Yakima police departments. It separately names 10 more agencies with undisclosed 'back door' CBP access: Black Diamond, Centralia, Chehalis, East Wenatchee, Eatonville, Ellensburg, Grandview, Mukilteo, Prosser, and Renton.
Roughly 60 Flock 'Condor' cameras exposed live and archived footage over the open internet with no authentication required.
FACTCorrect attribution matters here: the researchers are Eric Daigle, Ben Jordan, Joshua Michael, and Jon Gaines, not the name in Tim's original source note. Daigle first found roughly 70 unsecured admin interfaces via a commercial search engine, then partnered with 404 Media and Jordan to document about 60 exposed cameras publicly on December 23, 2025. Jordan, Michael, and Gaines later demonstrated hardware-level firmware extraction, reported by The Guardian in April 2026. Flock's response: the company says the affected devices were not cloud-connected or not customer-installed at the time of discovery, while confirming at least one instance of misconfiguration.
A Flock camera misread a license plate by one character, leading Sherwood, Arkansas police to hold a family at gunpoint on February 11, 2026.
FACTA Flock camera near a hot-list vehicle misread the plate 'APX 55X' as the actual stolen plate 'APX 55Y.' Officer Seth Kinkade and a second officer detained the family, including a one-month-old infant, at gunpoint. Body-camera-sourced reporting confirms the stop. The family's names were not made public in any source reviewed; we do not fabricate them. The Institute for Justice has documented 26 similar Flock misread cases nationally since 2018.
A consolidated federal class action accuses Flock of letting out-of-state and federal agencies query California license-plate data in violation of state law.
FACTIn re: Flock Group Inc. Automated License Plate Reader Litigation, No. 3:26-cv-02375-VC (N.D. Cal.), before Judge Vince Chhabria, consolidates three earlier suits including Javorsky v. Flock. The core allegation is that Flock violated California's ALPR Privacy Act (SB 34) by letting out-of-state and federal agencies query California data. One filing alleges 1.6 million out-of-state searches of the San Francisco Police Department's Flock database over seven months. Bursor & Fisher's Philip Fraietta and Julia Venditti were appointed interim co-lead class counsel on June 25, 2026. The case is active and pre-class-certification.
LAPD did not renew its Flock contract on July 11, 2026, citing civil liberties and data-sharing concerns, after an audit found 161 vehicles falsely flagged as stolen.
FACTLAPD's three-year Flock agreement, signed in July 2023 and covering roughly 138 cameras, expired without renewal on July 11, 2026. CIO Dean Gialamas attributed the non-renewal to civil liberties and civil rights concerns around data collection. An LAPD Inspector General audit (IG Matthew Barragan) reportedly found a 32.3 percent false-hit rate on hot-list alerts — roughly one in three — with 161 vehicles falsely flagged as stolen over an August–September 2025 window, and recommended the department sign no new ALPR contracts; Flock called the halt a 'surprise.' One mechanism caveat matters: reporting indicates the cameras often read plates correctly while the backend hot-list and databases were wrong, so this is a false-alert and data-quality problem, not purely a camera misread. As of mid-July 2026, LAPD is renegotiating rather than walking away permanently; this is an open renegotiation, not a clean break.
More than 20 Georgia officers across Albany, DeKalb, and Richmond County have been fired and, in most cases, arrested since June 2026 for personal misuse of Flock searches, with parallel cases in Milwaukee and Greer.
FACTRichmond County Sheriff's Office Deputy Jaquarius Yarbrough was fired and charged in late June 2026 for 1,639 searches over 28 days tracking a woman for personal reasons; three more Richmond County officers, Lt. John McKenzie, Investigator Curtis Hoskins, and Deputy Joshua Johnson, were fired and charged July 20, 2026 for over 100 unauthorized searches each. Five Albany Police Department officers, Tytianna Davis, Jade Jackson, Nicholas Richardson, Brittney Smith, and Issac Whitus, were fired and arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation July 6-7, 2026. DeKalb County Sheriff's Office Sergeant Kabiru Salawu was fired and arrested July 17-18, 2026 for searching fellow deputies' plates hundreds of times under a false welfare-check pretext. Additional documented Georgia cases span Fayetteville, Cherokee County, Greene County, Henry County, and other jurisdictions, pushing the statewide total past 20. Parallel misuse cases have surfaced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Officer Josue Ayala, February 2026, plus a second detective charged in July 2026) and Greer, South Carolina (Cpl. Kareem Lynch, terminated June 26, 2026, and Officer Sebastian Echeverry, decertified June 29, 2026).
- CBS Atlanta, July 6-7, 2026 (Albany)
- WALB (Albany)
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 17-18, 2026 (DeKalb)
- CBS Atlanta, July 20, 2026 (Richmond County)
- Wisconsin Law Journal, February 26, 2026 (Milwaukee)
- Straight Arrow News, July 9, 2026 (Milwaukee follow-on)
- FITSNews, July 14, 2026 (Greer)
- Fox Carolina, July 14, 2026 (Greer)
More than fifty US cities have canceled or suspended their Flock contracts since 2025.
PROBABLY TRUEThe figure is real, but it moves depending on the tracker and the date. NPR reported 'at least 30' cancellations in February 2026. TechSpot and Tech Times both reported 53 across 20 states in March and June 2026. GridWatch the USA counted 68 as of July 8, 2026. The Washington Times reported 'more than 70' on July 2, 2026, citing the grassroots tracker DeFlock, with 55 of those in the past year. Tech Times also noted nearly 800 new Flock city contracts signed in 2026, a countervailing figure that cuts against a simple 'backlash' narrative. We use 'more than fifty' as the number every tracker supports, and flag that higher counts and the new-signings figure are both contested and dated.
A public-records aggregation of Flock audit logs surfaced tens of millions of searches — including cross-state immigration queries and searches run with no case number — though its headline totals are activist estimates, not Flock's own figures.
PROBABLY TRUEIn 2026, 404 Media reported that a Flock redaction error exposed audit-log data covering more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of searches, and separately documented more than 4,000 searches run for federal officials or immigration purposes — a floor drawn from one review. The activist project haveibeenflocked aggregates those public-records logs into a searchable dashboard, and its own tallies run far higher: it reports figures such as 18.6 million out-of-state California queries, tens of thousands of immigration-tagged records, and thousands of 'account-sharing' name/login mismatches. We grade this PROBABLY TRUE rather than FACT: the underlying dataset and the categories of abuse — cross-state queries, immigration searches, searches with no articulated reason — are real and 404-corroborated, but the most eye-catching top-line totals (a widely-cited 233 million searches, 84 percent with no case number) trace to haveibeenflocked's own dashboard, are a public-records sample rather than every Flock search, and should be read as activist aggregation, not Flock's audited numbers.
Leaked code shows Flock built a people-search tool, 'Nova,' with fields for Social Security numbers and a 'DarkData' search type designed to ingest breached data — a capability Flock says it decided not to switch on.
PROBABLY TRUE404 Media, working with Nexanet researcher 'Matt,' documented that Flock's Nova product was built to correlate a license plate to a named person by pulling in data-broker and breach data, and that its code included a 'DarkData' search type with selectors for Social Security numbers, credit-card numbers, and crypto, plus a UI exposing those tabs — with the 2021 ParkMobile breach named among ingestible sources. Flock's response, which we carry in the same breath: the company says it made a policy decision not to supply dark-web or breach data, that 404 published before Nova was finalized, and disputes that Nova would use breached data. We grade this PROBABLY TRUE rather than FACT — the code-analysis findings and the named researcher are documented, but whether the breach-data pipe ever went live is disputed by the company and not independently confirmed.
Flock's own code, served publicly from its login pages, describes an AI tool — OS Investigate — that hunts for suspects by movement pattern alone and reaches Social Security numbers and relatives through commercial databases; Flock did not dispute the capabilities.
PROBABLY TRUEIn August 2026, WIRED reported it had recovered more than 450 files that Flock served from its own login portals to anyone who loaded them, exposing the code behind an AI product called OS Investigate (originally 'Nightshift'). Independent security researcher Buchodi reviewed the code separately and reproduced key parts. The code describes 45 tools reaching plate scans and camera metadata, arrest and case records, 911 dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases holding Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, emails, and relatives — and ships 69 prewritten prompts an officer can run or edit. Many invert Flock's longstanding 'we read plates, not drivers' pledge: 14 of the prompts require no plate, name, or crime, and instead return the people who fit a place, a time, and a behavior — vehicles seen repeatedly in a neighborhood offered up as 'witnesses'; a single plate's 'top three associates' ranked by how often they pass the same cameras; everyone in an area arrested more than twice, with an automated 'workup' (a one-command background check that pulls relatives, phones, and online accounts) run on the top three. Flock did not dispute the capabilities: spokesperson Paris Lewbel called OS Investigate a product separate from its license-plate readers, 'designed to help investigators work across information their agencies already have access to,' still in development and subject to change before a broader release. We grade this PROBABLY TRUE rather than FACT for two reasons: WIRED reviewed the served code, which shows what the tool is built to do but not how Flock's servers behave in production, and the product is in limited testing rather than general release. The documented fact is the capability the code describes — not that Flock is running these dossiers on innocent people today. Legal experts who reviewed the prompts for WIRED read them as opening space for warrantless fishing expeditions — the ACLU's Jay Stanley called it a scale with no precedent — but whether any specific query violates the Fourth Amendment or consumer-data law is an open legal question, not an adjudicated finding.
A separate firm, Leonardo, is marketing a bolt-on that adds phone, AirPod, and smartwatch tracking to license-plate cameras — built and for sale, with no confirmed police deployment yet.
SOME SMOKE404 Media reported in June 2026 that Leonardo — not Flock — is selling an ALPR add-on that captures Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and RFID signals from passing vehicles and turns them into device 'fingerprints' linked to a plate. We grade this SOME SMOKE and carry it as direction-of-travel, not a receipt: the product is real and marketed, but there is no confirmed live agency deployment, and it is Leonardo's product, not Flock's. It matters here because it is the commercial next step past the plate — the same device-to-person ambition Flock's abandoned Nova breach-data pipe pointed at, now offered as an off-the-shelf sensor.
In June 2026 the Supreme Court held that police need a warrant to obtain historical phone-location data — a geofence ruling that points toward, but does not itself decide, the legality of warrantless plate-tracking.
FACTIn Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112, decided June 29, 2026, 6-3, Justice Kagan writing), the Court held that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in cell-phone location information and that geofence or historical-location requests to tech companies require a warrant and probable cause. The scope correction matters: this is a cell-site and geofence holding about location data held by companies like Google — it is not a direct ruling on ALPR or Flock. But it undercuts the 'no expectation of privacy in public movement' argument that warrantless plate-dragnet programs lean on, which is why we carry it as an analogical, direction-of-travel signal rather than 'the Supreme Court struck down Flock.'
Flock says safer streets and transparent audits. The record shows a repeating misuse pattern.
Flock's public pitch is consistent: safer streets, a transparent audit trail on every search, and opt-in participation by each department. The company points to solved crimes, recovered stolen vehicles, and an internal audit system that flagged the Albany, Georgia officers in the first place. That audit-catches-misuse framing is real. It is also the same system that let the misuse happen for months or years before anyone reviewed the logs.
The record shows the audit trail working after the fact, not preventing the underlying access. Deputy Yarbrough in Richmond County ran 1,639 searches over 28 days before he was caught. Sergeant Salawu in DeKalb County searched fellow deputies' plates hundreds of times under a false pretext before anyone flagged it. The pattern across Georgia, Wisconsin, and South Carolina is the same: an officer with a legitimate login uses it for a personal reason, and the system catches it only when someone happens to look.
On the camera-stream exposure, Flock's specific denial deserves a fair hearing rather than a one-sided writeup. The company says the affected devices were not cloud-connected, or were not installed by Flock's own customers, at the time researchers found them exposed. That is a real distinction between a Flock-shipped default vulnerability and a customer-side misconfiguration. What the company has not disputed is that researchers found roughly 60 cameras streaming footage with no login required, and it has confirmed at least one instance of misconfiguration on its own hardware.
The cancellation-count dispute is genuinely unresolved, not a case of one side lying. Different trackers use different start dates and different definitions of “canceled” versus “suspended” versus “not renewed.” Flock's own counter-figure, nearly 800 new city contracts signed in 2026, is not disputed by any source we reviewed, and it complicates any narrative that treats the backlash as an existential threat to the company's growth. Both numbers can be true at once: a real and growing cancellation wave, and a company still expanding faster than it is losing customers.
Congress, a federal judge, and LAPD are all actively deciding Flock's future right now.
Nothing about this record is finished. The congressional investigation Krishnamoorthi and Garcia opened in August 2025 is still open. The California class action is at the interim-lead-counsel stage, not close to trial, with a consolidated docket that will likely set the first real legal test of whether a vendor, not just the agencies using its product, can be held liable for how a national ALPR network gets used. LAPD is not walking away from Flock; it is renegotiating, which means the terms of that renegotiation will shape what other major cities demand next.
The concrete example this page tracks, ICE and Border Patrol reaching Flock data through local police departments that never told the public, is the current-tense version of what the Surveillance State(s) hub calls surveillance infrastructure that, once built, gets shared. Nobody voted to give federal immigration agents a side door into a local police department's camera network. The side door existed anyway, because the infrastructure made it available and no single agency's oversight process was built to catch a request from outside its own jurisdiction.
State attorneys general are watching the same California case that will decide whether SB 34-style privacy statutes can actually bind a nationwide vendor. Whatever Judge Chhabria's court decides will not stay confined to California. Every other state weighing its own ALPR privacy law is watching this docket right now.
Questions worth taking seriously
Is Flock breaking the law, or are the individual officers and agencies?
Why do different sources say 30, 53, 68, or 70+ cities have canceled Flock contracts?
What is the actual relationship between Flock and ICE?
Did the security researchers who exposed the camera streams work for Flock or against it?
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
404 Media's cumulative reporting, EFF and UW Center for Human Rights records, and named police-department filings.
Every claim on this page grades to one of FACT · PROBABLY TRUE · SOME SMOKE · PURE SPECULATION · FALSE / MISLEADING. The grade badge hedges. The prose does not. Nothing false is asserted here as accepted claim.
Abortion-tracking and immigration-access sources
- 404 Media, May 29, 2025, on the Johnson County abortion search
- EFF, October 7, 2025, on the sheriff's contradictory statements
- 6ABC, June 13, 2025, on the Illinois Secretary of State investigation
- UW Center for Human Rights, “Leaving the Door Wide Open,” October 21, 2025
- Krishnamoorthi/Garcia letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley, August 6, 2025 (PDF)
- 404 Media, August 8, 2025, on the congressional investigation
- 404 Media, cumulative Flock reporting index (31+ posts)
Officer-misuse sources: Georgia, Wisconsin, South Carolina
- CBS Atlanta, July 6-7, 2026, on the Albany firings and arrests
- WALB, on the Albany Police Department audit finding
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on the DeKalb County firing and arrest
- Ground News, affidavit detail on the DeKalb County case
- CBS Atlanta, on the Richmond County firings and charges
- Atlanta News First, on the broader statewide Georgia count
- Wisconsin Law Journal, February 26, 2026, on Officer Josue Ayala
- Straight Arrow News, July 9, 2026, on the second Milwaukee detective
- FITSNews, July 14, 2026, on the Greer, South Carolina terminations
- Fox Carolina, July 14, 2026, on the same
Hardware, gunpoint incident, LAPD, and litigation sources
- “This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers,” YouTube, December 23, 2025
- The Guardian, April 6, 2026, on firmware extraction
- 404 Media, June 11, 2026, on the DuckDuckGo/Bing indexing leak
- KATV, on the Sherwood, Arkansas gunpoint stop
- Carscoops, on the same
- Institute for Justice, case review of 26 similar national incidents
- LA Times, July 11, 2026, on LAPD's non-renewal
- Fortune, July 15, 2026, on the same
- Amended complaint, Javorsky v. Flock Group, Inc. (PDF)
- Bursor & Fisher, June 25, 2026, interim co-lead counsel announcement
Cancellation-count and advocacy sources
- NPR, February 17, 2026
- TechSpot, March 2026
- Tech Times, June 29, 2026
- GridWatch the USA, cancellation tracker
- Washington Times, July 2, 2026
- ACLU, “Get the Flock Out” campaign hub
- ACLU, “Get the Flock Out” advocacy toolkit
- EFF, 2025 year-in-review on Flock investigations
- EFF, “Get the Flock Out Here,” live campaign update
The full research brief, with all sourcing and notes on editorial judgment, is in docs/research/flock-safety/flock-safety-brief.md.
Full method: Methodology. Related hub: Surveillance State(s). Cross-cut investigations: Toka and SDS, MI5, and BOSS.
Last updated July 21, 2026. If a link 404s or a date is wrong, tell us and we will fix it publicly.