# What Flock cameras capture as you drive
# News 8 Now — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2AMqEZLVaQ

They're easy to miss, but they're
watching you. Small cameras are popping
up on the side of public roads
throughout our communities. Ken
Kasarowski has this story.
What most of us have driven past are
automated license plate readers made by
the private company Flock Safety. Police
departments on average pay $3,000 per
camera per year. Now, officers call them
a public safety game changer, but
privacy advocates say they're a quiet
expansion of government surveillance.
Tonight, what these Flock cameras
capture, how the data is used, and
whether enough protections are in place.
Flock Safety says more than 220
Wisconsin law enforcement agencies are
using their license plate readers. That
includes Holmen Police. Captain Cody
Spears says the department has eight of
them since the Village Board approved
them in 2024. The purpose of the camera
is to capture a picture of your license
plate. So, it's not intended to cap
capture a picture of somebody driving in
the car or an occupant in the car.
Spears says officers use the tech on a
variety of cases, like hit-and-runs and
attempts to locate.
We had a case here recently where an
Alzheimer's patient was confused and
lost, and we were able to put their
plate into Flock and find that they were
traveling through Holmen, and we located
them. Flock spokesperson Paris Lubell
says that doesn't mean the cameras are
tracking your every move.
Flock LPRs do not and cannot track
vehicles, much less individual people.
The LPRs themselves take a point-in-time
image of the rear vehicle on public
roadways. Each picture includes details
like make, model, and color. Details
that an officer can type into a Flock
search tool to investigate claims.
Police departments own that camera data,
which is permanently deleted after 30
days, but a wealth of footage just a
click away. And attorneys say police
don't need a warrant to use it.
Both the US Supreme Court and the
Wisconsin Supreme Court have been pretty
consistent that if
you know, it's a camera in a public
location that you don't have a
reasonable expectation of privacy. Even
so, Holmen has its own policy outlining
who can use the technology and when.
Every officer in our agency needs to put
in a reason why they're doing a search.
We can look back at those searches as
well. So, if anybody's misusing it,
they'll be held accountable. It may be
true for Holmen, but civil liberties
advocates are still concerned.
I truly believe that 99.9%
of officers are doing the right thing.
The problem is when you have tens of
thousands of license plate searches
happening across the state of Wisconsin,
you only need 0.11%
of officers to be misusing that
technology to have massive issues. In
just the last year, five Wisconsin
officers have been arrested on
Flock-related stalking charges. A
Milwaukee officer this spring resigned
after being accused of running the
plates of his romantic partner and her
ex almost 200 times in a 3-month span,
but it wasn't the police who discovered
him. It was one of the women themselves
researching
through the website haveibeenflocked.
That site uses publicly available data
from police departments to allow someone
to search their plate. One of the
alleged victims found Ayala had typed
investigation under the reason for the
search. The Wisconsin Examiner found
that for Wisconsin agencies in 2025,
investigation was the most commonly used
reason for Flock searches. The ACLU says
more transparency is needed.
We've asked for annual reports done
showing that these technologies actually
have a direct impact on crime impact on
crime, and that they're worth the
millions of dollars that taxpayers are
paying into these systems.
of it is that this is keeping people
safe, solving crimes, it's finding
missing individuals, it's finding
Alzheimer's patients. So, yeah, at the
end of the day, it's it's a major win
for public safety. But the question
communities are starting to ask, at what
cost?
Of course, law enforcement's right that
sometimes, you know, this is helpful for
public safety, but also we live in a
free society. Do we want the government
being able to track where we are every
second of every day? We searched
publicly available data and found over
100 Flock cameras in our region. In
general, any purchase of Flock cameras
should be going through local law
enforcement committees and councils for
approval. If you're not sure if your
community is using this technology, call
your local officials.