The misuse of certain new technology by law enforcement should concern us all: Flock Safety’s Electronic License Plate readers and the use of Shock Gloves.
Backed by some of Silicon Valley’s top investors, Flock has become the most prominent player in the burgeoning license-plate-reader business. Flock said last year it had surpassed $300 million in annual revenue, with more than 120,000 shoebox-size cameras now scanning the roads of more than 6,000 communities and recording 20 billion plate scans a month.
Flock has created technology that generates “hot lists” that notify officers whenever a target car is captured on camera, and a “vehicle fingerprint” feature that lets them search for a vehicle by its appearance or characteristics — say, any white minivan with bumper stickers — without knowing its plate number.
Flock’s business model depends on building a nationwide, interconnected surveillance network, which creates risks no software update can eliminate.
During that time, the company had largely left the decision to enable safety measures to its customers. Not surprisingly, many of those organizations did not turn them on.
The use of Flock enables invasive surveillance practices that threaten the privacy, safety, and civil liberties of women, immigrants, and other vulnerable Americans.
An audit disclosed a search accessing 83,345 cameras across nearly the entire country. This underscores a fundamental danger in the Flock system: a single query accesses more than 83,000 cameras spanning almost the entire nation, with minimal oversight and maximum potential for abuse—particularly when weaponized against people seeking reproductive healthcare.
Between June 5, 2024 and June 17, 2025, the San Jose PD and other California law enforcement agencies searched San Jose’s database 3,965,519 times.
The patterns were unmistakable in more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025, the patterns. Agencies logged hundreds of searches related to political demonstrations—the 50501 protests in February, Hands Off protests in April, and No Kings protests in June and October. Nineteen agencies conducted dozens of searches specifically tied to No Kings protests alone. Sometimes searches explicitly referenced protest activity; other times, agencies used vague terminology to obscure surveillance of constitutionally protected speech.
The surveillance extended beyond mass demonstrations. Three agencies used Flock’s system to target activists from Direct Action Everywhere, an animal-rights organization that uses civil disobedience to expose factory-farm conditions.
More than 80 law enforcement agencies used language perpetuating harmful stereotypes against Romani people (Indo-Aryan) when searching the nationwide Flock Safety ALPR network. Between June 2024 and October 2025, police performed hundreds of searches using terms such as “roma” and racial slurs—often without mentioning any suspected crime. Audit logs revealed searches including “roma traveler,” “possible g*psy,” and “g*psy ruse.” Grand Prairie Police Department in Texas searched the slur six times while using Flock’s “Convoy” feature, which identifies vehicles traveling together—essentially targeting an entire traveling community without specifying any crime.
This past October, Texas deputies used the Flock surveillance data purportedly for a missing person investigation, but it was actually an abortion case. Deputies initiated a “death investigation” of a “non-viable fetus,” and logged evidence of a woman’s self-managed abortion. In one Texas county, an official ran two searches with the note “had an abortion, search for female.”
As if the misuse of the Flock license plate reader system weren’t concerning enough, last Fall Flock announced plans to expand its gunshot detection microphone to listen for “human distress.” This expansion will transform audio sensors into powerful surveillance tools monitoring human voices on city streets.
These high-powered microphones above densely populated areas raise serious questions about wiretapping laws, false alerts, and the potential for dangerous police responses to non-emergencies.
To its credit, Flock announced this past Thursday that it will implement changes by January to avoid these problems. All law enforcement customers will have to implement an audit tool that’s intended to flag abnormal search behavior. When the system detects abnormal behavior, the user will be locked out pending an internal review. Secondly, the standard data retention window will be shortened from 30 to 7 days. Many of these safeguards have been available but have been ignored by law enforcement to date. Most of these issues would be avoided if the decision to engage in such surveillance was overseen by a judge. The company’s auditing system had previously been enabled by only about one-third of agencies using the platform. While we can hope this will provide additional safeguards, the documented use by law enforcement suggests that this new audit system is little more than a band-aid.
There is now empirical evidence that officers have used plate-reader systems to track romantic interests. At least 50 officers have been accused, charged, or convicted of misusing Flock or other plate-reader systems, including officers tracking girlfriends, ex-wives, and other romantic interests, and more than a dozen additional cases have been confirmed. Recent allegations have also surfaced in Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/13/flock-unveils-changes-after-post-report-police-misuse-its-network/
- In one Georgia community, the chief of police, Michael Steffman, used Flock to monitor his ex-girlfriend’s movements. Steffman consistently informed the woman, Marci Bakely, that he was aware of all her movements. Bakely couldn’t understand how he always seemed to know where she was. She attempted to determine how he knew where and when she was by installing cameras around her home. Three times, she asked a local mechanic’s shop to scan her cars for trackers, to no avail.
Steffman was able to follow Bakely’s cars using Flock’s sprawling network of artificial-intelligence roadside cameras, giving him the power to monitor Bakely’s life, which he did by looking up the tags for her and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times. Steffman was ultimately charged with stalking, harassment, and license-plate-reader misuse. Before a trial could take place, he was found dead in his home from what officials said was a suicide.
- In Wisconsin, a police officer allegedly used Flock to check whether his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic.
- In Kansas, a police chief who tracked his ex through Flock sneaked up on her while she was intimate with another man (he was fired).
- In California, prosecutors said a former deputy, Alexander Vanny, used Flock as part of a months-long campaign of “stalking” and “humiliating” his former fiancée. Vanny was convicted by a jury on 10 charges, including stalking and unauthorized access of electronic data, and sentenced to six years in prison.
- A Wisconsin police officer searched the plates for his ex-girlfriend and her partner 179 times.
Police agencies log officers’ searches, but obtaining information on whether their cars are being tracked is difficult. While some officers have been fired and prosecuted, in other cases police departments allowed officers to continue using the systems even after receiving warnings that they were being misused.
It has been suggested that Flock could deter bad actors by making simple changes to its product, such as requiring officers to label every search with a criminal case number. However, even in those instances, abuse has been rampant, with officers not identifying their real purpose and simply labeling their use of the system for “investigations.”
One website, Have I Been Flocked, aggregates police search logs made available through public reco