Read the coverage of Flock Safety’s current troubles and the safeguards sound brand new: seven-day retention, required case codes for searches, automatic lockouts for odd query patterns, offense filters on what neighbouring agencies can see. All of it was committed on August 13, in a blog post by chief executive Garrett Langley, with deadlines stretching to the end of the year.
What has changed since is temperature, not policy. More than 50 cities and counties have cancelled or deactivated plate cameras this year, and Politico counted them. Cameras have been vandalised in at least 36 states. Senator Josh Hawley opened an inquiry and asked the company for internal documents. Texas paused state funding, Florida’s transport department pulled local agencies off state highways, and Pennsylvania’s governor said he would welcome a ban.
Abuse cases keep supplying the fuel. An Albany, New York investigator was charged after allegedly running an ex-girlfriend’s plate nearly 3,000 times, with case-number fields filled in falsely. Franklin County, Ohio suspended a deputy after an audit. Fresno put an officer on leave.
The mechanism Flock is selling is detection. Audit Assistance flags abnormal activity, and the company now requires it for law enforcement customers by year’s end, along with case codes and proactive lockout. Nothing in that stack stops an agency that never reviews the alerts, and the civil-liberties argument has moved on to warrants.
Flock says its cameras helped locate more than 10,000 missing people last year and supported roughly a million investigations in 2025.
