Flock Safety pledges January safeguards for license plate cameras after stalking, ICE-access reports

Today’s Focus

Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based maker of automated license plate readers used by roughly 5,000 U.S. police departments, said on Wednesday it will introduce a package of new safeguards in January 2027 after months of reports about officer misuse and federal access to its data.

Chief executive Garrett Langley told the BBC the company had “taken too long” to act on documented cases in which officers searched the network for personal reasons, including tracking ex-partners. He said Flock will add mandatory reason codes for every search, tighter audit logs, and clearer limits on how long footage and plate reads are retained, according to WRAL and Al Jazeera.

The announcement follows reporting by 404 Media and others that some local agencies had run Flock searches on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies, even in states and cities that formally restrict such cooperation. Al Jazeera reported that a wave of stalking-related misuse cases across multiple states pushed the company to accelerate changes it had previously described as optional.

Flock’s cameras capture license plates, vehicle make, color, and distinguishing features, then store the reads in a searchable database that participating agencies can query nationwide. KCRA reported the January package will include new default retention windows, restrictions on interstate sharing, and a public transparency portal listing which agencies use the network.

Langley did not commit to blocking federal immigration queries outright. He told the BBC the company would give local agencies stronger tools to set their own rules, and would publish quarterly reports on search volume and flagged misuse.

The Debate

Supporters argue

Flock and allied law enforcement groups say the readers have become a core investigative tool and that reforms, not restrictions, are the right response. Langley told the BBC the network has helped recover stolen cars and locate missing children, arguing that “the answer is better guardrails, not fewer cameras.”

The Major Cities Chiefs Association and individual departments cited by KCRA credit Flock with clearing cases faster, particularly hit-and-runs and Amber Alerts. Cobb County, Georgia police told WRAL the system had contributed to hundreds of arrests in the past year.

Backers of the January changes, including some city council members quoted by Al Jazeera, say mandatory reason codes and audit logs directly target the abuses that surfaced. They contend that unlike facial recognition, plate readers capture information already visible in public, and that a national audit trail is stronger accountability than most departments impose on their own records systems.

Flock also argues its transparency portal will let residents see, for the first time, how often their local department queries the network and for what stated purpose, something the company says few surveillance vendors offer.

Critics argue

Civil liberties groups say the announced safeguards do not address the core problem: a private company has built a de facto national surveillance grid with little legal oversight. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has tracked Flock deployments, told the BBC that voluntary corporate policies can be reversed at any time and do not carry the force of law.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has argued that reason codes are easy to falsify and that audit logs only matter if someone independent reviews them. EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia told 404 Media that Flock’s core business model, pooling reads across thousands of jurisdictions, is what enables misuse in the first place.

Some Democratic state lawmakers cited by KCRA said they will still push legislation to ban or sharply limit plate reader networks, arguing that recent stalking cases and ICE queries show self-regulation has failed. Immigrant-rights groups told Al Jazeera that without a hard block on federal queries, sanctuary policies in cities like San Francisco and Seattle can be quietly bypassed by neighboring departments.

What the experts say

Independent researchers have documented rapid growth and thin oversight of automated plate reader (ALPR) networks. A 2022 study by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology found that most departments deploying ALPRs had no written retention policy and no routine audits of officer searches.

Brookings Institution fellow Cameron Kerry has written that private surveillance vendors now hold data whose scope and searchability would require a warrant if the government collected it directly, a gap Congress has not addressed. A 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on federal use of commercial data reached a similar conclusion about oversight gaps.

Historical comparison points to Carpenter v. United States (2018), in which the Supreme Court ruled that police generally need a warrant to obtain historical cell-site location data. Legal scholars including Orin Kerr of Berkeley Law have argued that aggregated plate reads may eventually face similar constitutional scrutiny, though no federal appeals court has yet applied Carpenter to ALPRs.

By the Numbers

5,000: approximate number of U.S. law enforcement agencies using Flock Safety cameras, according to WRAL.
January 2027: target rollout date for the new safeguards, per Flock’s announcement reported by KCRA.
40+: number of states where Flock cameras are deployed, according to Al Jazeera.
$7.5 billion: Flock Safety’s most recent private valuation, reported by Bloomberg in 2025.
$26 billion: unrelated but same-week figure, the White House’s estimate of tariffs lost to transshipment, for scale context on federal enforcement priorities, per The Hill.
2018: year the Supreme Court decided Carpenter v. United States, the leading precedent on digital location data and the Fourth Amendment.
2022: year of the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology study finding most ALPR-using departments lacked written retention policies.