Flock Safety announced major changes to its automated license-plate-reader network according to the Washington Post, implementing mandatory safeguards designed to curb police officer abuse of the system. The company, which is based in Atlanta, operates a vast roadside camera network consisting of more than 120,000 artificial-intelligence-enabled cameras installed across the United States since 2017. These cameras record approximately 20 billion plate scans every month, which the company states assist officers in investigating roughly 1 million crimes annually.
Flock Safety Mandates New Safeguards After Police Misuse Reports
Under the newly mandated policies, law enforcement officers across the company’s 7,000 agency customers will be required for the first time to tie every vehicle search to a specific criminal case number and offense type. In addition, Flock will deploy its automated auditing system across all of its law-enforcement customer accounts to flag unusual searches for abnormal activity. Prior to the announcement, this auditing tool was voluntary and used by only about one-third of the agencies on the network.
Data Retention Period Cut and Cross-Agency Sharing Controls Added
In addition to search verification and auditing, Flock is reducing the default setting for how long vehicle-location data is stored as reported by The Morning Sun. The default data retention period will drop from 30 days down to seven days. Agencies will be able to increase their data retention policies up to a year if they obtain prior approval from an elected official or governing body. Furthermore, the company will launch a feature named “Evidence Mode” to allow officers to preserve license-plate data beyond the standard retention window for active cases needing additional time.
Police departments will also receive enhanced control over how their data is shared with external agencies. Departments can specify which categories of investigations outside agencies may search—allowing searches for serious offenses like homicide or kidnapping while actively blocking queries related to immigration enforcement.
Background on Police Misuse and Industry Response
The company’s decision follows extensive reporting regarding law enforcement misconduct. As noted by WSET, investigations revealed that at least 50 officers had been accused, charged, or convicted of misusing Flock and other license-plate-reader systems for personal surveillance, such as tracking girlfriends, ex-wives, and other romantic interests. Following initial coverage, more than a dozen additional cases were confirmed, with allegations surfacing in states including Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona.
Flock Chief Executive Garrett Langley explained in an interview that executives previously held off on making these anti-abuse features mandatory because they anticipated that state and local lawmakers would move quickly to mandate them as optional controls. I had this hope that local lawmakers at the state and local level would move very quickly and they’d look at the things that we’re recommending as optional and say, ‘Great, we’re going to force it.’ And they haven’t,
Langley said.
Civil liberties advocates, policing experts, and critics have welcomed the new safeguards as addressing obvious vulnerabilities, but they argue that such protections should be established by law rather than left to a private vendor. The announcement arrives amid wider public and political backlash, with more than 50 agencies or jurisdictions reported to have canceled, suspended, rejected, or deactivated Flock deployments over Fourth Amendment, immigration-enforcement, and mass-surveillance concerns.
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