Full transcript
Drive almost anywhere in America and you're being watched by a small black box mounted to a pole that looks like this.
That box is a Flock safety camera.
Flock says they're operating in over 5,000 communities across 49 states, scanning more than 20 billion vehicles every month.
Privacy researchers have mapped over 90,000 of these cameras across the country.
And in the last year, the empire started cracking.
NPR reported in February that at least 30 cities have canceled or deactivated their Flock contracts since the start of 2025.
Flagstaff, Cambridge, Eugene, Santa Cruz, Denver switched to a competitor.
Residents in San Jose are suing the city.
And Flock has noticed.
CEO Garrett Langley posted a public statement called Setting the Record Straight.
In a December email to law enforcement, he wrote that Flock is under coordinated attack
from, quote, the same activist groups who want to defund the police.
The company's headline pitch is that 1 in 10 reported crimes in America is now solved
using their technology.
But the study isn't peer-reviewed.
It was funded by Flock, and independent peer-reviewed research has actually found that the license plate readers have had little measurable impact on solving or deterring crime.
So which is it? Is Flock actually keeping us safer? And if it is, why are so many people working so hard to get rid of it?
In 2014, Garrett Langley sold his previous startup to Cox Enterprises for $200 million.
A few years later, and a couple more business ventures, he told his wife he was going to take a break.
But a couple of months later, he was sitting down with Matt Fury to figure out what to build next.
We looked at probably a dozen opportunities across music, toilets, which we always laugh about, sports, again, fitness.
And we looked at everything, just whatever we were interested in.
This one came up around fly.
Unlike the rest of them, we had customers before we had anything close to a product, close to a bitch.
And that was a glitch because it felt like there must be a lot of heads up to man.
people are signing a contract without ever meeting us, of course, I've never seen a demo,
not even really understanding what it's going to do. They're like, "So you're going to help
this be safer?" And I was like, "That's generally the bitch." I was like, "Okay,
it's just $5 a month." It's like, "Hmm, we should really go build this product. We know how to
customer." So that'd be awesome. We hear about customer discovery and trying to unlock authentic
demand. And so here's a case where you've actually got somebody to sign a contract,
or at least a letter of intent. Those are contracts. A contract with no product at all.
Yeah, it was a little bit scary.
Yeah, because we had no idea how long it would take to build this hardware.
And so we really rushed from that point on.
By 2018, Flockhead raised seed and Series A money.
By 2020, Series B and C.
In March of 2025, Bedrock and Andreessen Horowitz
led another round at a $7.5 billion valuation.
And as more cameras started popping up, the journalism started to catch up.
404 Media has done most of the heavy lifting.
In 2024, they tore apart Flock's own study,
the one claiming the camera solved 10% of reported crime.
In 2025, they revealed that local cops were running Flock searches for ICE,
more than 4,000 immigration-related lookups,
despite Flock having no formal contract with the federal government.
Then came the story of a Texas deputy who searched 83,000 cameras across 6,800 networks
looking for a woman who had self-administered an abortion,
including in states where abortion is still legal.
That story put Congress on Flock's case in August of 2025.
Then the Illinois Secretary of State ran an audit
and found that Flock had been letting U.S. Customs and Border Protection
access Illinois cameras, even though state law forbids it.
The state ordered Flock to shut down federal access.
The EFF then pulled 12 million Flock searches from nearly 4,000 agencies.
They found more than 50 agencies running searches tied to major protests
like No Kings, Hands Off, and 5051.
Tulsa police alone logged 38 protest-related searches,
including ones tied to anti-deportation rallies
and a protest supporting detained activist Mahmoud Khalil.
And in the audit logs, more than 80 law enforcement agencies use racial slurs against the Romani people as their actual search terms, with no crime mentioned at all.
By the end of 2025, Flock was facing a congressional investigation and an Illinois state audit.
Welcome to Falcon, our flagship LPR product.
Our Falcon can be crucial in pinpointing the location of suspect vehicles and confirming the vehicle details necessary to make an arrest.
This allows our system to alert you of a suspect's presence in your jurisdiction and then gives you the information necessary to find their direction of travel.
Each camera sits on a pole and captures every vehicle that passes underneath.
Flock calls their AI vehicle fingerprint.
The system logs the make, the body type, the color, the state on the plate, whether the plate is temporary or missing,
and a long list of other identifiers like bumper stickers, roof racks, dents, mismatched paint, even toolboxes in the bed of a truck.
This data then goes to a central server.
Officially, Phlox says their cameras do not use facial recognition,
and the company claims they cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals,
and that data is automatically deleted after 30 days.
Officially.
Phlox's own patent describes a surveillance system that can track humans, animals,
and any other object with biometric-like attributes including race, gender, height, weight, and clothing.
So the cameras don't do facial recognition.
The patent just describes how they would.
75% of FLOX law enforcement customers are enrolled in something called the National Lookup Tool.
That means a cop in Florida can search a plate scanned by a camera in Oregon.
Every search requires a written reason and is preserved permanently in the audit log.
404 Media's reporting in the EFF audit showed that those reasons can be and have been
racial slurs, abortion investigations, and protest surveillance.
And the ACLU found that even when a police department thinks it's opted out of nationwide data sharing,
Flock's standard contract gives the company the right to share that data with federal agencies anyway.
And the Flock ecosystem has not stopped growing.
Flock's audio sensor, a microphone called Raven, listens for gunshots, glass breaking, and tires screeching.
A newer feature even listens for human screams.
After acquiring a drone company called Aerodrome, Flock's next generation of cameras will be mounted on flying drones.
Earlier this year, a Monroe County, Florida sheriff's deputy named Lamar Roman drove over 70 miles an hour down U.S. Highway 1,
passed cars in a no-passing zone, and forced an oncoming truck off the road. He was chasing down
a woman he'd met two weeks earlier while doing security on the set of an Apple TV show. Roman
had added her license plate to get alerted when she was nearby. When she drove past, he was notified.
He chased her until he could pull her over, and according to court records, he leaned into the car
and said, I told you I'd find you and pull you over. He was arrested, charged with unauthorized
computer access, and fired the same day. He's one of at least 14 documented cases. Last month,
The Institute for Justice published a review of media reports identifying at least 14 cases nationwide of police officers using license plate reader networks to stalk romantic interests.
Take Sedgwick, Kansas. Police Chief Lee Nagard ran his ex-girlfriend's license plate 164 times in five months.
He ran her new boyfriend's plate another 64 times.
He logged false reasons in the system, things like missing child, drug use, and suspicious activity.
He followed the couple out of town in his police vehicle.
Nagard resigned, lost his police certification, and got 18 months of probation, although no criminal charges.
Or take Pennsylvania.
A former Fraser Township officer named Michael McSherry tracked his estranged wife's license plate over 250 times.
He pleaded guilty to stalking and official oppression and was sentenced to up to 23 months in prison.
The Institute for Justice notes that most of these cases were discovered only because victims came forward,
not because internal investigations caught the officers.
One case only surfaced because the woman searched her own plate on a public website called Have I Been Flocked?
It's also worth highlighting the IJ piece is careful to say.
These are just the cases that have made it into news reports.
Flock has a lot of company.
There are five other big players in this market, and most of them have been at it longer than Flock has.
The biggest one is Motorola Solutions.
In 2018, they bought a video surveillance company called Avagalon for a billion dollars.
The next year, in 2019, they bought a license plate reader company called Vigilant Solutions for $445 million.
Together, those acquisitions gave Motorola what they now advertise as the largest commercial license plate database in the country.
The platform contains billions of historical records and grows by tens of millions of new scans every week.
Cameras in the network scan at least one and a quarter million vehicles every single day.
Motorola also has a formal federal contract for ICE database access.
Avagalon, Motorola's surveillance camera arm, also serves as a subcontractor for U.S. prisons and immigration jails.
Then there's Genetic, a Canadian company whose AutoVoo product line lets cities federate their license plate readers together, meaning the way Phlox National Lookup Tool works, but for cities running Genetic instead.
There's Recore Systems, a publicly traded company that signed a $16.8 million contract with Oklahoma to run a statewide uninsured vehicle enforcement program.
And then there's Vercata, the cloud surveillance company best known for getting hacked in 2021.
A group of hackers found admin credentials sitting on an unencrypted Verkata subdomain and used them to access live feeds from 150,000 cameras inside hospitals, Tesla factories, Sandy Hook Elementary School, psychiatric facilities, and women's health clinics.
The hack lasted 36 hours.
In 2024, the FTC fined Verkata nearly $3 million over its data security failures.
All five of these companies sell slightly different products, but they're built on the same model.
They have dense networks of cameras, long-term storage of where every vehicle has been,
and a central dashboard where law enforcement can run unlimited searches against your plate.
Flock just happens to be the one in the headlines.
So where does this leave us?
The cameras keep going up, and the response has been getting louder.
At least 64 cities have rejected or canceled Flock contracts.
Just this month, Shoreline, Washington rejected the possibility of a contract with Flock Safety
due to public opposition.
And in El Cerrito, California, the city council voted not to renew its contract with Flock.
Most cities cited the same reason, concerns that local data was being used by federal immigration agents.
The pushback is also getting more organized.
A volunteer-run site called dflock.org has mapped over 90,000 of these cameras across the country.
There are local anti-flock groups popping up around the U.S.
Another site, Have I Been Flocked, lets anyone in the country check whether the license plate has been searched.
States are starting to act too.
In March of this year, Washington Governor Bob Ferguson signed Senate Bill 6002, which is a law that limits these cameras to felony investigations, missing persons, and stolen vehicles.
It cuts retention from 30 days to 21, bans immigration enforcement use, and bans cameras near health care facilities, schools, courts, food banks, and places of worship.
Illinois has blocked ICE from accessing the state's plate reader data.
California has classified automatic license plate recognition data as personal information under state privacy law.
And the violations are still being discovered.
Last week, the city of Dayton, Ohio,
indefinitely suspended its flock cameras
after a city audit found 7,100 immigration-related search requests
had been run against city policy.
The mayor called it not an isolated failure.
Meanwhile, flock just hit an $8.4 billion valuation.
They generate over $300 million a year in revenue,
have raised close to a billion dollars,
and reportedly are preparing for an IPO.
If you want to check whether your plate has been searched,
The link to Have I Been Flocked is in the description.
The full list of articles is cited there too.
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