Surveillance Company Flock Now Using AI to Report Us to Police if it Thinks Our Movement Patterns Are “Suspicious”
Flock license plate readers are motion-activated cameras paired with cloud-based software built for public safety and security.
Unlike traditional security cameras that record continuous video, Flock cameras focus on capturing specific vehicle information as vehicles pass through a defined location. This includes: check icon, License plate number, check icon,
Vehicle make, model, color, and body type, check icon, Date, time, and general location of detection
The police surveillance company Flock has built an enormous nationwide license plate tracking system, which streams records of Americans’ comings and goings into a private national database that it makes available to police officers around the country. The system allows police to search the nationwide movement records of any vehicle that comes to their attention. That’s bad enough on its own, but the company is also now apparently analyzing our driving patterns to determine if we’re “suspicious.” That means if your police start using Flock, they could target you just because some algorithm has decided your movement patterns suggest criminality.
There has been a lot of reporting lately about Flock but I haven’t seen anyone focus on this feature. It’s a significant expansion in the use of the company’s surveillance infrastructure — from allowing police to find out more about specific vehicles of interest, to using the system to generate suspicion in the first place. The company’s cameras are no longer just recording our comings and goings — now, using AI in ways we have long warned against, the system is actively evaluating each of us to make a decision about whether we should be reported to law enforcement as potential participants in organized crime.
In a February 13 press release touting an “Expansive AI and Data Analysis Toolset for Law Enforcement,” the company announced several new capabilities, including something called “Multi-State Insights”:
Many large-scale criminal activities—such as human and narcotics trafficking and Organized Retail Crime (ORC)—involve movement across state lines. With our new Multi-State Insights feature, law enforcement is alerted when suspect vehicles have been detected in multiple states, helping investigators uncover networks and trends linked to major crime organizations.
Flock appears to offer this capability through a larger “Investigations Manager,” which urges police departments to “Maximize your LPR data to detect patterns of suspicious activity across cities and states.” The company also offers a “Linked Vehicles” or “Convoy Search” allowing police to “uncover vehicles frequently seen together,” putting it squarely in the business of tracking people’s associations, and a “Multiple locations search,” which promises to “Uncover vehicles seen in multiple locations.” All these are variants on the same theme: using the camera network not just to investigate based on suspicion, but to generate suspicion itself.
In a democracy, the government shouldn’t be watching its citizens all the time just in case we do something wrong. It’s one thing if a police officer out on a street sees something suspicious in public and reacts. But this is an entirely different matter.
First, the police should not be collecting and storing data on people’s movements and travel across space and time in the first place, or contracting to use a private company’s technology to accomplish the same thing. Second, they shouldn’t be taking that data and running it through AI algorithms to potentially swing the government’s eye of suspicion toward random, innocent civilians whose travel patterns just happen to fit what that algorithm thinks is worth bringing to the attention of the police.
And of course because Flock is a private company not subject to checks and balances such as open records laws and oversight by elected officials, we know nothing about the nature of the algorithm or algorithms that it uses— what logic it may be based upon, the data upon which it was trained, or the frequency and nature of its error rates. Does anyone actually know whether there are movement patterns characteristic of criminal behavior that won’t sweep in vastly larger numbers of innocent people?
We also don’t know what kind of biases the company’s algorithms might exhibit; it’s very easy to imagine an algorithm trained on past criminal histories in which low-income neighborhoods and communities of color are highly over-represented because of the well-established, top-to-bottom biases in our criminal justice system. That could mean that just living in such a neighborhood could make you inherently suspicious in the eyes of this system in a way that someone living in a wealthier place would never be. Among other problems, that’s just plain unfair.
The bottom line is that Flock, having built its giant surveillance infrastructure, is now expanding its uses — validating all our warnings about how such systems inevitably undergo mission creep, and providing all the more reason why communities should refuse to allow the police departments that serve them to participate in this mass surveillance system.
Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car's location, date, and time. They also capture your car's make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points.
These cameras collect data on millions of vehicles regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime. These systems are marketed as indispensable tools to fight crime, but they ignore the powerful tools police already have to track criminals, such as cell phone location data, creating a loophole that doesn't require a warrant.
ALPRs are a serious risk to your privacy and civil liberties. These systems continuously record your movements without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. Your driving history is rarely confined to the town or city where the cameras are installed. It's typically shared with thousands of other agencies nationwide (secretly). Once the data is out of your community, you have no control over how it's used or what rules apply, leading to instances of misuse.
What is Flock?
Flock Safety is one of the largest ALPR vendors in the United States. Their cameras are installed for police departments, businesses, and HOAs. Captured vehicle data is uploaded to Flock's cloud system, where participating agencies can search and share information across jurisdictions.
Flock is not the only ALPR vendor, and other vendors still participate in similar practices.
Flock cameras—solar-powered, automated license plate readers, weighing less than 3 pounds and designed to be unobtrusive—can be found on 80,000 street corners throughout the country. The company behind the cameras built an $8.3 billion business empowering officers to track people’s movements. Nationwide, Flock cameras log billions of license plates each month. And now dozens of reports are emerging of police using the cameras not to solve crimes, but to stalk their partners and exes.
Over a two-month period in 2025, Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala searched the license plate number of someone he was dating over 200 times, according to court documents. He also searched for his partner’s ex.
Another Milwaukee officer, Tehrangi Chapman, was assigned to investigate Ayala’s case. Ayala was charged with misconduct, resigned, and was sentenced to one year’s probation. Then, this week, Chapman too was charged with “misuse of GPS information.” While investigating Ayala, he allegedly engaged in the exact same misconduct, using the technology to track people in his own life.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, identified at least 24 similar cases nationwide of officers using automated license-plate reader (ALPR) cameras like Flock to stalk romantic interests over the past two years. Nearly all of those officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs.
A license plate reader camera
A Flock Safety automated license plate recognition camera is mounted along a roadway in Altadena, California.
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Flock cameras—solar-powered, automated license plate readers, weighing less than 3 pounds and designed to be unobtrusive—can be found on 80,000 street corners throughout the country. The company behind the cameras built an $8.3 billion business empowering officers to track people’s movements. Nationwide, Flock cameras log billions of license plates each month. And now dozens of reports are emerging of police using the cameras not to solve crimes, but to stalk their partners and exes.
Over a two-month period in 2025, Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala searched the license plate number of someone he was dating over 200 times, according to court documents. He also searched for his partner’s ex.
Another Milwaukee officer, Tehrangi Chapman, was assigned to investigate Ayala’s case. Ayala was charged with misconduct, resigned, and was sentenced to one year’s probation. Then, this week, Chapman too was charged with “misuse of GPS information.” While investigating Ayala, he allegedly engaged in the exact same misconduct, using the technology to track people in his own life.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, identified at least 24 similar cases nationwide of officers using automated license-plate reader (ALPR) cameras like Flock to stalk romantic interests over the past two years. Nearly all of those officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs.
This month alone, at least six new cases were reported in local media outlets. Beyond Chapman’s case in Wisconsin, officers in Illinois, South Carolina, Texas, California, and Georgia all lost their jobs due to alleged misuse of Flock cameras.
Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, has been following technology and privacy issues for over a decade. “The tracking of an individual vehicle, as it moves throughout an area, can reveal very deeply personal and private information, not only about the vehicle but the person operating it,” Marlow said. “That is Flock at its most dangerous.” (When reached for comment, a Flock Safety representative sent press releases about its audit assistance tool.)
Six years ago, Mother Jones’ Daniel Moattar detailed how some of California’s most populous counties were collecting information using ALPRs—mostly tracking people who weren’t even under suspicion of any crime. And in 2013, the ACLU said that just 47 of every million plates scanned by Maryland ALPRs that year “were even tentatively associated with actual serious crimes.”
But in the years since then, police use of ALPRs has increased across the country. The cameras have been used to go after immigrants without warrants, and to track people seeking abortions as they travel across state lines for the procedure. Though there are several companies that make ALPRs, Flock is by far the largest, with more than 80,000 cameras spread throughout the United States. Flock Safety’s CEO, Garrett Langley, has said he wants his cameras “on every corner.”
But the backlash against Flock and other ALPRs is growing. The technology, activists say, holds potential for misuse. And even when it’s used as intended, some researchers say the company’s data sharing practices lead to privacy rights violations. Throughout 2025, at least 30 municipalities canceled their Flock contracts. Grassroots groups such as DeFlock have built maps showing the public where these license-plate readers are located. (Langley called DeFlock and other activists “terroristic” last year, and apologized this week.)
And Marlow of the ACLU expects the pushback to keep getting louder. “In these incredibly divisive political times, we’re actually seeing the rare issue that unites Americans: opposition to government surveillance,” Marlow said. “And I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I think this movement is only going to grow.”
Cops have used Flock's FreeForm search feature to look for people with tattoos and wearing specific sport shirts, and searches sometimes include the target's race, according to data reviewed by 404 Media.
Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Sometimes searches reference a target’s race or signs of their political affiliation.
The searches highlight that while most people associate Flock cameras with scanning license plates and tracking vehicles, some of the cameras are also capable of following the movements of particular people or groups of people. Flock’s nationwide network of cameras lets police officers in one state search for a vehicle across many other states at once; the people searches do a similar thing, typically on a smaller scale, sometimes querying many hundreds of cameras at once. These are called “FreeForm” searches, and allow cops to use Flock’s system as though they would use a search engine, with Flock’s AI and image recognition interpreting what footage and which people are relevant to a police officer’s search.
“Much of the world hasn’t quite caught up yet to how much more powerful a surveillance camera is today compared to a few years ago. AI video analytics means that giant oceans of video data can now be searched the same way big text files can be, including for sensitive content such as t-shirts, tattoos, and bumper stickers. Even without face recognition, that’s a significant increase in surveillance capability,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media in an email.
“This is a classic bait-and-switch. Your town was pitched a tool to catch stolen cars and find missing kids,” Tom Bowman, policy counsel, security … surveillance, at the Center for Democracy … Technology, told 404 Media in a statement. Instead, cops now have the capability to search for a specific person or description of a person across a wealth of camera networks at once. “It's like being sold a smoke detector and only later finding out it's been recording every conversation in your house.”
The searches sometimes stretch across dozens or even nearly a hundred networks of Flock cameras at once. Sometimes the searches are so vague that they can pull up images of innocent or unrelated people. Other examples in the data reviewed by 404 Media include:
Dunwoody GA PD looking for someone wearing a “backpack,” and later “person walking” and “black sweatshirt.” The latter two searches were across nine networks of cameras each
Pocatello ID PD searching for “a male on foot” across 38 cameras. Another search was “atlanta falcons,” referencing the NFL team
Corona CA PD searching for “american flag shirt” and “dodger shirt.”
Milford CT PD looking for “male with tattoos,” “male with brown hair,” and “woman blue shirt,” across more than a hundred cameras
The California Highway Patrol looking for someone wearing a “gray shirt” across 274 cameras
The Texas Department of Public Safety searching 96 networks of cameras for “man weasring [sic] a black t-shirt and shorts.”
Florence SC PD looking for “person with gun” across 61 cameras
Chamblee GA PD searching 85 camera networks for “white woman wearing grey shirt, blonde hair, black shorts with blue and white shoes.” The agency also searched for “female with ugg boots.”
Brookhaven GA PD looking for “tall man.”
Some searches referenced the race of the person authorities were looking for. The California Highway Patrol was “Looking for a white male about 6ft 1in tall, longer brown hair almost to his shoulders, slender build, will have been wearing blue jeans, boots with white paint stains on the toes and possibly carrying a black helmet.” Atlanta GA PD searched for “non caucasion [sic] male wearing blue shirt blue pants white hat.”
Some searches are part of an “investigation,” according to the “reason” field in the data. Others are part of a missing persons case. In some it is not clear what the reason for the search was because it is redacted.
“Unfortunately, this ability to search cameras as though doing a search engine inquiry is increasingly common for surveillance cameras,” Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media. “AI-enabled video analysis across reams of footage exacerbates the risk that law-abiding people minding their own business end up with police observing them without their knowledge and opens them to possibly being implicated in a crime or being treated as a criminal. Imagine how many people at any given moment may be walking on foot, wearing a backpack, or existing with brown hair. It wasn’t that long ago that Trayvon Martin was murdered by someone who could argue that wearing a hoodie justified suspicion and a claim of self-defense.”
404 Media reviewed data collected by HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a website that collates Flock search-related data obtained through public records requests. Since 404 Media revealed local police were performing Flock searches on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), journalists, activists, and residents across the country have requested “Network Audits” from their local police departments. These spreadsheets show in granular detail when an officer searched Flock cameras, how many cameras they queried, and the stated reason why.
A sometimes overlooked part of those audits is a field called “text_prompt.” This relates to a feature in Flock called FreeForm search, which lets officers search cameras not by typing in a license plate but with a natural language phrase. Sometimes these FreeForm searches are descriptions of vehicles, but they often include descriptions of people.
Flock primarily advertises its FreeForm as a feature for its Condor video cameras, which are separate from its automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. These video cameras have “people detection alerts,” and “Guardian Mode” automatically zooms in on people and vehicles. “Deploy AI-powered video where it matters most—no blind spots, no hassle, and fully integrated into Flock,” the company’s website reads. But the AI-analyzed feeds are not entirely divorced from ALPR; Flock has designed the systems to work in tandem. Kevin Cox, a Flock consultant who previously worked for the Grand Prairie Police Department in Texas, previously said, “video combined with the LPR evidence of placing a vehicle at the scene or nearby is an incredibly game changing experience into the prosecutorial chain of events.”
Flock launched FreeForm in February 2025, although the company’s announcement at the time focused on searches related to vehicles. Some FreeForm searches 404 Media reviewed indicate a target’s potential political affiliation, such as the Anne Arundel County MD PD searching 198 networks for “white jeep with trump flag.”
One example search Flock gives on its website is for “camo hat orange vest.”
Flock told 404 Media in a statement “FreeForm is designed to help investigators quickly search through large amounts of footage when they are working with limited information, such as a witness description of a person or vehicle.”
“FreeForm is not facial recognition. Flock’s products do not have facial recognition, and we have no facial recognition technology in development. FreeForm cannot identify a person by name, verify someone’s identity, or search for a specific face,” the company added. Flock said authorities used FreeForm searches in a September 2025 AMBER alert case and in Emporia, Kansas, when an elderly man left an assisted living facility.
Flock said FreeForm searches have “guardrails,” including users not able to search attributes such as “race, ethnicity, religion, nationality.” When they do, an alert is generated and sent to the agency’s administrators, Flock said. Some of the searches 404 Media found did discuss someone’s race.
Stanley from the ACLU added, “Imagine that your police department stationed officers on corners around your community writing down notes on where you are at what time, but also what you’re wearing every day, what objects you might be carrying — and writing down those details on everybody, 24/7. You would ask, why are they keeping notes on everybody? That’s pretty intrusive. But that’s basically what these systems do.”
“All this goes to show that Flock is eager not just to expand its surveillance of drivers across America through license plate readers, but to expand into every new kind of surveillance that technology makes possible. And then to link these data streams together to capture even more information about how everybody is living their lives. I don’t think most Americans want to live under that kind of constant automated surveillance,” he wrote.
In May 2025, 404 Media revealed Flock planned to use hacked data as part of a massive people lookup tool. The idea was to use information from data brokers and data breaches to “jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person,” according to internal Flock meeting audio 404 Media previously obtained. Flock scrapped the plan to use hacked data after 404 Media’s coverage and internal pressure.
In December 2025, 404 Media reported Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking cameras exposed to the wider internet, letting anyone watch their feeds in real time. Those were Flock Condor cameras, and not its more widespread license plate reading cameras.
Those black, oval shaped devices you see popping up on poles in Miami-Dade and Broward counties aren’t regular traffic cameras, they’re AI-powered Flock cameras. And residents aren’t too keen on their arrival. The cameras, also known as ALPR cameras, are powered by Flock Safety and use artificial intelligence to scan license plates. Other Flock technology uses audio-detecting technology to identify sounds like gunfire or car crashes.
DeFlock, an open-source project that maps where the cameras are in the U.S., shows almost 400 Flock cameras installed in Miami-Dade County. The site shows Broward County has twice that many at over 800 cameras, with a big concentration in the Fort Lauderdale area, including Pembroke Pines and Hollywood. While the Flock Safety website states it partners with businesses and local communities to implement the technology, the company is most known for its partnerships with law-enforcement agencies, which are said to use the technology to solve crimes like missing persons or stolen vehicles. It is unclear if any Miami-Dade or Broward agencies have partnerships with the company. Neither county’s sheriff’s office immediately responded to a Miami Herald inquiry about a contract or partnership with Flock, nor did police departments from Miami, Miami Gardens, Miami Beach, Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale. A YouTube video might depict a relationship with Flock Safety and MDSO, though. In the video, posted by Flock Safety in March, Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office Major George Perera speaks with a Flock representative concerning a tip that the agency received about the security of the technology. Perera said MDSO’s Electronic Crimes Task Force analyzed the technology and found it to be secure. “We feel confident in the product to be able to continue to have a relationship,” Perera said in the video.
Controversy about the cameras Flock cameras have become so widespread, residents are taking to social media to air their grievances. Tiffany Hudson, 38, of Plantation, created a Facebook group called “Get the Flock Out of Florida” after learning her city would implement close to 100 cameras. She said in a city of about 100,000 residents, that’s a lot of cameras. “People are like, ‘So what? Big deal, it snaps a picture of your car,’” she told a Miami Herald reporter. “But what happens is they put a camera on this street, then the next street, then the next street. … They have them all over the place, so you’re under surveillance all the time.” The Flock Safety website says the license plate-reading cameras don’t detect faces, people, gender or race and its audio-detecting equipment doesn’t record conversations, but Floridians like Hudson are concerned about their data being tracked. Unless stated otherwise by an individual contract — whether that be with a law-enforcement agency or business — the Flock website says all data gathered from the cameras are only stored for 30 days. But that’s not to say data isn’t being sold, Hudson said. “We don’t know what’s happening to our data,” she said. “Our data is being taken and given to [people or agencies] we don’t even know.” On its website, Flock repeatedly states it does not sell data to third parties nor can any outside agencies access it without permission. ICE and immigration worries While Flock’s website says it doesn’t work directly with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or share data with the agency, it says individual agencies like police departments that partner with Flock can share the data if they choose. Budget data from Florida’s State Board of Immigration Enforcement states several law-enforcement agencies have requested funds for Flock cameras and similar ALPR technology. “Flock Safety ALPR scans plates in real-time, cross-referencing against immigration databases for warrants, deportees, or smuggling vehicles. Under 287(g) and ICE partnerships, it flags suspicious patterns on routes like US-19, aiding arrests and data sharing,” one of the budget requests said. Law-enforcement agencies outside of Florida have reevaluated their partnerships with the company based on similar concerns. In Dayton, Ohio, the police department suspended its partnership with Flock and placed trash bags over its cameras after finding more than 7,000 cases of immigration enforcement-related searches. The Los Angeles Police Department ended its partnership with the company last week and is in the process of renegotiating it over concerns of how Flock Safety stored the data. In Miami Beach Along the Venetian Causeway — one of the main links between Miami Beach and the mainland — DeFlock shows nine Flock cameras installed. In Miami Beach alone, the website shows four ALPR cameras — two of which are Flock Safety cameras — near the intersection of Alton Road and 14th Street. Despite the low number of Flock cameras installed in the city, Miami Beach resident Alex Giassa, 56, said he thinks the company is a data-sharing scheme. “It’s not just an invasion of privacy, it’s really a violation of everything that we stand for as Americans,” he said. “Yes, we have the Fourth Amendment, but isn’t it our choice also when we want somebody to know something?” With Flock cameras, he said privacy takes on a new meaning — with people needing to recognize their actions are constantly monitored. “It just infuriates me. … Regardless of where you go and who you meet with, you’re being tracked,” he said.
Also:
What are ALPRs
Also:
Police Keep Losing Their Jobs For Using Flock Cameras To Stalk People
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How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars
Also:
What are Flock cameras and where are they in Miami-Dade and Broward?
Flock Map 90,000+
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