THEBLACKBOOK AUDIT
Investigation · Surveillance State(s) Hub

Flock Safety. The license-plate network that any cop can search nationwide, and the fifty-plus cities now backing out.

Flock Safety sells automated license-plate reader cameras to thousands of US police departments and wires them into one cross-searchable national database. Officers have used it to stalk exes. A Texas sheriff's office used it to search for a woman connected to an abortion. Local departments gave ICE and Border Patrol access without telling anyone. This is what happens when a private vendor builds shared infrastructure faster than any single agency can be held accountable for it.

Flock Safety was founded in 2017. By 2026 its cameras cover more than 5,000 communities across 40+ states, cross-searchable through a single interface. Since early 2025, reporting from 404 Media, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the University of Washington Center for Human Rights has documented officer misuse, undisclosed federal immigration access, hardware vulnerabilities, and a wrongful gunpoint stop. Congress opened an investigation in August 2025. More than fifty cities have since canceled or suspended their contracts.

Primary sources include 404 Media's cumulative Flock reporting, EFF's Get the Flock Out campaign, the UW Center for Human Rights' county-by-county ICE/CBP breakdown, and named police-department records, court filings, and the ACLU's Get the Flock Out campaign.

§1 · Summary Brief

What this page is about

Flock Safety runs a cross-searchable automated license-plate reader (ALPR) network across thousands of US police departments. Any participating agency can search plates captured by any other agency's cameras nationwide.

Officers have used that reach to stalk romantic partners and exes. A Texas sheriff's office ran a nationwide search logged as looking for a woman connected to an abortion. Sheriffs and local police departments gave ICE and Border Patrol access to Flock data without telling the public. Since early 2025, more than fifty US cities have canceled or suspended their Flock contracts, though Flock says it signed roughly 800 new city contracts in 2026 over the same period.

A camera misread led Arkansas police to hold a family at gunpoint. Independent researchers found dozens of Flock cameras streaming live and archived footage over the open internet with no login required. A consolidated federal class action in California accuses Flock of letting out-of-state and federal agencies query data California law says should stay in-state.

Every claim on this page is graded independently. The foundational reporting is 404 Media, which broke the abortion- tracking and ICE-access stories and maintains the most complete running index; EFF, whose investigations document the officer-misuse pattern and follow-on records requests; the ACLU's advocacy campaign; and the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, whose October 2025 report is the authoritative source on Washington state's ICE and CBP access. Named police-department records, court filings, and local news coverage of specific firings and arrests fill out the rest. Where a claim rests on a contested count or a single outlet's framing, it is graded PROBABLY TRUE, not FACT.

What we are NOT saying

We are not saying Flock Safety's corporate leadership directed any of the individual officer-misuse cases documented below. Those are cases of named officers fired and, in many cases, criminally charged by their own police departments and sheriff's offices for violating agency policy. The company is not a party to those personnel actions.

We are not saying Flock has a formal contract with ICE or Customs and Border Protection. No such contract is in the public record. What is documented is that local police departments and sheriff's offices, which do hold Flock contracts, gave federal immigration agents access to search Flock data, in most cases without public disclosure.

We are not asserting that the Johnson County, Texas abortion search proves what happened to the woman being searched for. A later independent review complicates that story, and we flag it directly in §5 and §6 rather than repeat the original framing uncritically.

§2 · Thesis

One vendor built a national search engine for license plates. Thousands of independently-run agencies then used it however they wanted.

Flock Safety's business model is saturation. The company does not sell a camera to a police department and stop there. It sells cross-search: once an agency joins the network, its officers can query any other participating agency's camera feed, anywhere in the country, for almost any stated reason.

That design choice is the product, not a side effect. A local police chief buying a handful of cameras to watch one intersection is also buying a seat at a table with thousands of other departments, each setting its own rules for who gets to search and why. No single department wrote those rules. No single department can enforce them on the others.

The result is a pattern that keeps repeating in different forms. Officers search plates for personal reasons unrelated to any investigation. Sheriffs run searches that route around their own state's privacy law. Local departments grant federal immigration agents access that sanctuary-city policy was designed to block. None of this required Flock's corporate leadership to approve anything. The infrastructure did the work once it existed.

This page treats Flock as the current, concrete example of what the Surveillance State(s) hub tracks more broadly: infrastructure built once, shared widely, and governed by whoever happens to have a login.

§3 · Timeline

2017 to July 20, 2026: from Flock’s founding to a third wave of Georgia arrests.

  1. 2017
    Flock Safety is founded in Atlanta, Georgia, selling automated license-plate reader cameras to police departments and homeowners' associations, with cross-search as the core product. 404 Media.
  2. May 9, 2025
    Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office runs a nationwide Flock search across 83,345 cameras and 6,809 networks, logging the search reason as looking for a woman connected to an abortion. 404 Media.
  3. May 23, 2025
    Yakima County, Washington Sheriff's Office runs a Flock search explicitly labeled “ICE” across 89 networks. UW Center for Human Rights.
  4. May 29, 2025
    404 Media publishes the story that breaks the Johnson County abortion-search case nationally. 404 Media.
  5. June 13, 2025
    The Illinois Secretary of State's office confirms it is investigating Mount Prospect Police Department for sharing ALPR data with the Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office and running 262 immigration-related searches in violation of state law. 6ABC.
  6. August 6, 2025
    Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robert Garcia send a formal letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley demanding information on nationwide immigration-related searches. Letter, Krishnamoorthi/Garcia to Langley.
  7. August 8, 2025
    Congress formally announces an investigation into Flock, citing 404 Media's reporting on roughly 4,000 immigration-related searches nationwide. 404 Media.
  8. October 7, 2025
    EFF publishes records showing the Johnson County search was logged internally as a “death investigation” of a “non-viable fetus,” contradicting Sheriff Adam King's public claim that the search was a welfare check. EFF.
  9. October 21, 2025
    The University of Washington Center for Human Rights publishes “Leaving the Door Wide Open,” naming 18 Washington state agencies that gave ICE or Border Patrol access to Flock data between May and August 2025. UW Center for Human Rights.
  10. December 23, 2025
    Security researchers Eric Daigle and Ben Jordan publish a video documenting roughly 60 exposed Flock “Condor” cameras streaming live and archived footage over the open internet with no authentication. “This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers”.
  11. February 11, 2026
    A Flock camera in Sherwood, Arkansas misreads plate “APX 55X” as the stolen plate “APX 55Y.” Officer Seth Kinkade and a second officer hold a family, including a one-month-old infant, at gunpoint. KATV.
  12. February 17, 2026
    NPR reports “at least 30” US cities have canceled Flock contracts since early 2025 over immigration-surveillance concerns. NPR.
  13. February 26, 2026
    Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala resigns as a negotiated condition of a misconduct complaint over Flock misuse. The same week, the first California class-action complaint against Flock is filed in San Francisco Superior Court. Wisconsin Law Journal.
  14. March 2026
    TechSpot reports 53 US cities across 20 states have canceled Flock contracts. Separately, an independent review by the Tri-City Herald finds the Johnson County case may have involved a violent domestic-assault suspect falsely claiming an aborted fetus, complicating the original abortion-search framing. TechSpot.
  15. April 3, 2026
    The California complaint is removed to federal court and amended as Javorsky v. Flock Group, Inc., No. 4:26-cv-02382 (N.D. Cal.). Amended complaint (PDF).
  16. April 6, 2026
    The Guardian publishes a feature on Flock cameras, including researcher Ben Jordan's demonstration, with Joshua Michael and Jon Gaines, of firmware extraction from Flock hardware using an Android diagnostic tool. The Guardian.
  17. June 11, 2026
    404 Media reports that Flock leaked officers' search reasons and searched plates through DuckDuckGo and Bing indexing, a related but separate vulnerability. 404 Media.
  18. June 25, 2026
    Judge Vince Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) appoints Bursor & Fisher's Philip Fraietta and Julia Venditti as interim co-lead class counsel in the consolidated In re: Flock Group Inc. Automated License Plate Reader Litigation, No. 3:26-cv-02375-VC. Bursor & Fisher.
  19. June 26, 2026
    Greer, South Carolina Police Corporal Kareem Lynch is terminated for tracking a subordinate he had a prior relationship with, using falsified search justifications. Fox Carolina.
  20. Late June 2026
    Richmond County, Georgia Sheriff's Office Deputy Jaquarius Yarbrough is fired and charged after running 1,639 Flock searches over roughly 28 days to track a woman for personal reasons. CBS Atlanta.
  21. June 29, 2026
    Greer, South Carolina Officer Sebastian Echeverry is decertified for tracking “several citizens” using false search entries. Separately, Tech Times reports 53 cancellations alongside nearly 800 new Flock city contracts signed in 2026. Tech Times.
  22. July 2, 2026
    The Washington Times reports “more than 70” US cities have canceled or suspended Flock contracts, citing DeFlock's grassroots tracker, with 55 of those in the past year. Washington Times.
  23. July 6-7, 2026
    The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announces the firing and arrest of five Albany Police Department officers, Tytianna Davis, Jade Jackson, Nicholas Richardson, Brittney Smith, and Issac Whitus, for misusing Flock license-plate data. CBS Atlanta.
  24. July 8, 2026
    GridWatch the USA's independent count of canceled or suspended Flock contracts reaches 68. GridWatch the USA.
  25. July 9, 2026
    A second Milwaukee Police Department detective is charged in a follow-on case of Flock misuse. Straight Arrow News.
  26. July 11, 2026
    LAPD's three-year Flock contract, covering roughly 138 cameras, expires without renewal. CIO Dean Gialamas cites civil liberties and data-sharing concerns. LA Times.
  27. July 14, 2026
    Fox Carolina and FITSNews report publicly on both Greer, South Carolina officers, Lynch and Echeverry, and note South Carolina's state law enforcement division (SLED) is reviewing further allegations. FITSNews.
  28. July 17-18, 2026
    DeKalb County, Georgia Sheriff's Office Sergeant Kabiru Salawu, a 17-year veteran, is fired and arrested. An affidavit alleges he searched fellow deputies' plates hundreds of times under a false “welfare check” pretext. Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
  29. July 20, 2026
    Three more Richmond County, Georgia officers, Lieutenant John McKenzie, Investigator Curtis Hoskins, and Deputy Joshua Johnson, are fired and charged for more than 100 unauthorized Flock searches each. CBS Atlanta.
§4 · Key Personnel

The company, the lawmakers, the researchers, and more than twenty officers now fired or charged.

Garrett Langley
CEO and cofounder, Flock Safety

Received the August 6, 2025 congressional letter from Reps. Krishnamoorthi and Garcia demanding an accounting of nationwide immigration-related searches. Flock has disputed some framing of the camera-vulnerability reporting while confirming at least one instance of hardware misconfiguration.

Adam King
Sheriff, Johnson County, Texas

His office ran the May 9, 2025 nationwide search logged as looking for a woman connected to an abortion. Publicly described the search as a welfare check; EFF later obtained records showing it was logged internally as a death investigation. King has since been indicted on unrelated felony perjury and sexual-harassment-retaliation charges.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi
US House, co-lead of the Flock congressional investigation

Co-signed the August 6, 2025 letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley and announced the congressional investigation on August 8, 2025, citing 404 Media's reporting on roughly 4,000 immigration-related searches nationwide.

Rep. Robert Garcia
US House, co-lead of the Flock congressional investigation

Co-signed the same August 6, 2025 letter. The investigation he and Krishnamoorthi opened remains active as of this writing.

Eric Daigle
Security researcher

First identified roughly 70 unsecured Flock camera admin interfaces via a commercial search engine in late 2025, then partnered with 404 Media and Ben Jordan to document the exposure publicly on December 23, 2025.

Ben Jordan
Security researcher and YouTuber

Co-published the December 23, 2025 video documenting roughly 60 exposed Flock “Condor” cameras. Later demonstrated firmware extraction from Flock hardware with Joshua Michael and Jon Gaines, reported by The Guardian on April 6, 2026.

Joshua Michael and Jon Gaines
Security researchers

Worked with Ben Jordan on the hardware-level firmware extraction demonstrated using an Android diagnostic tool, documented in The Guardian's April 6, 2026 feature.

Josue Ayala
Former officer, Milwaukee Police Department

Resigned in February 2026 as a negotiated condition of a misconduct complaint over Flock database misuse. A second Milwaukee detective was charged in a follow-on case reported July 9, 2026.

Cpl. Kareem Lynch
Former officer, Greer Police Department, South Carolina

Terminated June 26, 2026 for tracking a subordinate he had a prior relationship with, using falsified Flock search justifications.

Officer Sebastian Echeverry
Decertified officer, Greer Police Department, South Carolina

Decertified June 29, 2026 for tracking several citizens using false Flock search entries.

Deputy Jaquarius Yarbrough
Former deputy, Richmond County Sheriff's Office, Georgia

Fired and charged in late June 2026 for 1,639 Flock searches over roughly 28 days, tracking a woman for personal reasons.

Lt. John McKenzie, Investigator Curtis Hoskins, Deputy Joshua Johnson
Fired and charged, Richmond County Sheriff's Office, Georgia

Fired and charged July 20, 2026, each for more than 100 unauthorized Flock searches.

Tytianna Davis, Jade Jackson, Nicholas Richardson, Brittney Smith, Issac Whitus
Fired and arrested, Albany Police Department, Georgia

Fired and arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on July 6-7, 2026, charged with misuse of license-plate data and violation of oath of office.

Sgt. Kabiru Salawu
Former sergeant, DeKalb County Sheriff's Office, Georgia

A 17-year veteran, fired and arrested July 17-18, 2026 on a felony violation-of-oath charge and a misdemeanor misuse-of-license-plate-data charge. An affidavit alleges he searched fellow deputies' plates hundreds of times under a false welfare-check pretext.

Officer Seth Kinkade
Officer, Sherwood Police Department, Arkansas

Involved in the February 11, 2026 gunpoint stop of a family after a Flock camera misread a stolen-vehicle plate by one character.

Dean Gialamas
Chief Information Officer, LAPD

Publicly stated LAPD's Flock contract was not renewed on July 11, 2026 “because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras.”

Judge Vince Chhabria
US District Judge, N.D. Cal.

Presides over the consolidated In re: Flock Group Inc. Automated License Plate Reader Litigation, No. 3:26-cv-02375-VC.

Philip Fraietta and Julia Venditti
Interim co-lead class counsel, Bursor & Fisher

Appointed June 25, 2026 to lead the consolidated California class action against Flock.

§5 · Graded Claims

Eleven claims, from a May 2025 abortion search to July 2026’s third wave of Georgia arrests.

Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office ran a nationwide Flock search logged as looking for a woman connected to an abortion.

PROBABLY TRUE

404 Media broke the story: on May 9, 2025, the office searched 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks nationwide, logging the reason as looking for a woman who had an abortion. EFF's October 2025 follow-up found the search was internally logged as a death investigation of a non-viable fetus, contradicting the sheriff's public welfare-check framing. A later Tri-City Herald review complicates the story further: the underlying case may have involved a violent domestic-assault suspect who falsely claimed an aborted fetus to cover up an assault on his girlfriend. That means the search log's abortion framing may not reflect what actually happened to the woman being searched for. We grade this PROBABLY TRUE rather than FACT because the underlying narrative is genuinely contested, even though the search itself and the sheriff's contradictory public statements are documented.

Yakima County, Washington Sheriff's Office ran a search explicitly labeled 'ICE' across 89 Flock networks on May 23, 2025.

FACT

Documented directly in the University of Washington Center for Human Rights' primary-source records review. The search reason field itself read 'ICE,' making this one of the more explicit examples in the national dataset.

Illinois's Secretary of State found Mount Prospect Police Department ran 262 immigration-related Flock searches in violation of state law and shared data with the Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office.

FACT

Confirmed by Illinois state officials themselves, reported June 13, 2025. Illinois law restricts ALPR data sharing with out-of-state agencies for immigration enforcement; the state's own investigation found Mount Prospect PD violated that restriction 262 times and shared data directly with the Texas office that ran the abortion-related search.

404 Media documented roughly 4,000 immigration-related Flock searches nationally, and Congress opened a formal investigation on August 8, 2025.

FACT

404 Media's original data-driven reporting is the primary source for the national search count. The congressional investigation is confirmed by the letter itself, sent by Reps. Krishnamoorthi and Garcia directly to Flock CEO Garrett Langley.

18 Washington state agencies gave ICE or Border Patrol access to Flock data between May and August 2025, mostly undisclosed.

FACT

The University of Washington Center for Human Rights' October 21, 2025 report is the authoritative primary source. It names 8 agencies with direct one-to-one Border Patrol network sharing: Benton County Sheriff's Office, and the Arlington, Auburn, Lakewood, Richland, Sunnyside, Wenatchee, and Yakima police departments. It separately names 10 more agencies with undisclosed 'back door' CBP access: Black Diamond, Centralia, Chehalis, East Wenatchee, Eatonville, Ellensburg, Grandview, Mukilteo, Prosser, and Renton.

Roughly 60 Flock 'Condor' cameras exposed live and archived footage over the open internet with no authentication required.

FACT

Correct attribution matters here: the researchers are Eric Daigle, Ben Jordan, Joshua Michael, and Jon Gaines, not the name in Tim's original source note. Daigle first found roughly 70 unsecured admin interfaces via a commercial search engine, then partnered with 404 Media and Jordan to document about 60 exposed cameras publicly on December 23, 2025. Jordan, Michael, and Gaines later demonstrated hardware-level firmware extraction, reported by The Guardian in April 2026. Flock's response: the company says the affected devices were not cloud-connected or not customer-installed at the time of discovery, while confirming at least one instance of misconfiguration.

A Flock camera misread a license plate by one character, leading Sherwood, Arkansas police to hold a family at gunpoint on February 11, 2026.

FACT

A Flock camera near a hot-list vehicle misread the plate 'APX 55X' as the actual stolen plate 'APX 55Y.' Officer Seth Kinkade and a second officer detained the family, including a one-month-old infant, at gunpoint. Body-camera-sourced reporting confirms the stop. The family's names were not made public in any source reviewed; we do not fabricate them. The Institute for Justice has documented 26 similar Flock misread cases nationally since 2018.

A consolidated federal class action accuses Flock of letting out-of-state and federal agencies query California license-plate data in violation of state law.

FACT

In re: Flock Group Inc. Automated License Plate Reader Litigation, No. 3:26-cv-02375-VC (N.D. Cal.), before Judge Vince Chhabria, consolidates three earlier suits including Javorsky v. Flock. The core allegation is that Flock violated California's ALPR Privacy Act (SB 34) by letting out-of-state and federal agencies query California data. One filing alleges 1.6 million out-of-state searches of the San Francisco Police Department's Flock database over seven months. Bursor & Fisher's Philip Fraietta and Julia Venditti were appointed interim co-lead class counsel on June 25, 2026. The case is active and pre-class-certification.

LAPD did not renew its Flock contract on July 11, 2026, citing civil liberties and data-sharing concerns, after an audit found 161 vehicles falsely flagged as stolen.

FACT

LAPD's three-year Flock agreement, signed in July 2023 and covering roughly 138 cameras, expired without renewal on July 11, 2026. CIO Dean Gialamas attributed the non-renewal to civil liberties and civil rights concerns around data collection. An LAPD Inspector General audit reportedly found 161 vehicles falsely flagged as stolen over a two-month window. As of mid-July 2026, LAPD is actively renegotiating rather than walking away permanently; this is an open renegotiation, not a clean break.

More than 20 Georgia officers across Albany, DeKalb, and Richmond County have been fired and, in most cases, arrested since June 2026 for personal misuse of Flock searches, with parallel cases in Milwaukee and Greer.

FACT

Richmond County Sheriff's Office Deputy Jaquarius Yarbrough was fired and charged in late June 2026 for 1,639 searches over 28 days tracking a woman for personal reasons; three more Richmond County officers, Lt. John McKenzie, Investigator Curtis Hoskins, and Deputy Joshua Johnson, were fired and charged July 20, 2026 for over 100 unauthorized searches each. Five Albany Police Department officers, Tytianna Davis, Jade Jackson, Nicholas Richardson, Brittney Smith, and Issac Whitus, were fired and arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation July 6-7, 2026. DeKalb County Sheriff's Office Sergeant Kabiru Salawu was fired and arrested July 17-18, 2026 for searching fellow deputies' plates hundreds of times under a false welfare-check pretext. Additional documented Georgia cases span Fayetteville, Cherokee County, Greene County, Henry County, and other jurisdictions, pushing the statewide total past 20. Parallel misuse cases have surfaced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Officer Josue Ayala, February 2026, plus a second detective charged in July 2026) and Greer, South Carolina (Cpl. Kareem Lynch, terminated June 26, 2026, and Officer Sebastian Echeverry, decertified June 29, 2026).

More than fifty US cities have canceled or suspended their Flock contracts since 2025.

PROBABLY TRUE

The figure is real, but it moves depending on the tracker and the date. NPR reported 'at least 30' cancellations in February 2026. TechSpot and Tech Times both reported 53 across 20 states in March and June 2026. GridWatch the USA counted 68 as of July 8, 2026. The Washington Times reported 'more than 70' on July 2, 2026, citing the grassroots tracker DeFlock, with 55 of those in the past year. Tech Times also noted nearly 800 new Flock city contracts signed in 2026, a countervailing figure that cuts against a simple 'backlash' narrative. We use 'more than fifty' as the number every tracker supports, and flag that higher counts and the new-signings figure are both contested and dated.

§6 · Record vs Narrative

Flock says safer streets and transparent audits. The record shows a repeating misuse pattern.

Flock's public pitch is consistent: safer streets, a transparent audit trail on every search, and opt-in participation by each department. The company points to solved crimes, recovered stolen vehicles, and an internal audit system that flagged the Albany, Georgia officers in the first place. That audit-catches-misuse framing is real. It is also the same system that let the misuse happen for months or years before anyone reviewed the logs.

The record shows the audit trail working after the fact, not preventing the underlying access. Deputy Yarbrough in Richmond County ran 1,639 searches over 28 days before he was caught. Sergeant Salawu in DeKalb County searched fellow deputies' plates hundreds of times under a false pretext before anyone flagged it. The pattern across Georgia, Wisconsin, and South Carolina is the same: an officer with a legitimate login uses it for a personal reason, and the system catches it only when someone happens to look.

On the camera-stream exposure, Flock's specific denial deserves a fair hearing rather than a one-sided writeup. The company says the affected devices were not cloud-connected, or were not installed by Flock's own customers, at the time researchers found them exposed. That is a real distinction between a Flock-shipped default vulnerability and a customer-side misconfiguration. What the company has not disputed is that researchers found roughly 60 cameras streaming footage with no login required, and it has confirmed at least one instance of misconfiguration on its own hardware.

The cancellation-count dispute is genuinely unresolved, not a case of one side lying. Different trackers use different start dates and different definitions of “canceled” versus “suspended” versus “not renewed.” Flock's own counter-figure, nearly 800 new city contracts signed in 2026, is not disputed by any source we reviewed, and it complicates any narrative that treats the backlash as an existential threat to the company's growth. Both numbers can be true at once: a real and growing cancellation wave, and a company still expanding faster than it is losing customers.

§7 · Why It Matters Now

Congress, a federal judge, and LAPD are all actively deciding Flock's future right now.

Nothing about this record is finished. The congressional investigation Krishnamoorthi and Garcia opened in August 2025 is still open. The California class action is at the interim-lead-counsel stage, not close to trial, with a consolidated docket that will likely set the first real legal test of whether a vendor, not just the agencies using its product, can be held liable for how a national ALPR network gets used. LAPD is not walking away from Flock; it is renegotiating, which means the terms of that renegotiation will shape what other major cities demand next.

The concrete example this page tracks, ICE and Border Patrol reaching Flock data through local police departments that never told the public, is the current-tense version of what the Surveillance State(s) hub calls surveillance infrastructure that, once built, gets shared. Nobody voted to give federal immigration agents a side door into a local police department's camera network. The side door existed anyway, because the infrastructure made it available and no single agency's oversight process was built to catch a request from outside its own jurisdiction.

State attorneys general are watching the same California case that will decide whether SB 34-style privacy statutes can actually bind a nationwide vendor. Whatever Judge Chhabria's court decides will not stay confined to California. Every other state weighing its own ALPR privacy law is watching this docket right now.

§8 · FAQ

Questions worth taking seriously

Is Flock breaking the law, or are the individual officers and agencies?

Both are live legal questions, and they are being tested separately. The officer-misuse cases in Georgia, Wisconsin, and South Carolina are personnel and criminal matters against individual employees, prosecuted by their own agencies. The California class action, In re: Flock Group Inc. Automated License Plate Reader Litigation, is the first serious test of whether Flock itself, as the vendor, can be held liable for building a system that let out-of-state and federal agencies query data a state privacy law says should stay in-state.

Why do different sources say 30, 53, 68, or 70+ cities have canceled Flock contracts?

Different trackers use different start dates and different definitions. NPR's “at least 30” figure, from February 2026, predates several months of later cancellations. TechSpot and Tech Times both later reported 53. GridWatch the USA, an independent tracker, counted 68 by July 2026. The Washington Times reported “more than 70,” citing the grassroots tracker DeFlock, which also counts contract suspensions and non-renewals, not just formal cancellations. We use “more than fifty” because every tracker supports at least that floor.

What is the actual relationship between Flock and ICE?

There is no formal Flock-ICE contract in the public record. What is documented is that local police departments and sheriff's offices, which do contract with Flock, granted ICE and Border Patrol guest access to search Flock data, mostly without telling the public. The University of Washington Center for Human Rights named 18 Washington state agencies that did this between May and August 2025 alone.

Did the security researchers who exposed the camera streams work for Flock or against it?

Independent researchers, not Flock employees. Eric Daigle first found the exposed admin interfaces using a commercial search engine, then worked with 404 Media and Ben Jordan to publish the finding on December 23, 2025. Jordan later worked with Joshua Michael and Jon Gaines on the hardware firmware-extraction demonstration reported by The Guardian in April 2026. Flock disputes some framing of the reporting while confirming at least one instance of misconfiguration.
§9 · Standing Invitation

If you are named on this page

If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.

This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.

§10 · Sources

404 Media's cumulative reporting, EFF and UW Center for Human Rights records, and named police-department filings.

Every claim on this page grades to one of FACT · PROBABLY TRUE · SOME SMOKE · PURE SPECULATION · FALSE / MISLEADING. The grade badge hedges. The prose does not. Nothing false is asserted here as accepted claim.

Abortion-tracking and immigration-access sources

Officer-misuse sources: Georgia, Wisconsin, South Carolina

Hardware, gunpoint incident, LAPD, and litigation sources

Cancellation-count and advocacy sources

The full research brief, with all sourcing and notes on editorial judgment, is in docs/research/flock-safety/flock-safety-brief.md.

Full method: Methodology. Related hub: Surveillance State(s). Cross-cut investigations: Toka and SDS, MI5, and BOSS.

Last updated July 21, 2026. If a link 404s or a date is wrong, tell us and we will fix it publicly.

▦ Ledger gaps

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This entry is graded on what’s on the public record. These are the blanks we know about. If you can source one, you’re rebuilding the ledger with us.

  • OpenHow many US cities have actually canceled, suspended, or non-renewed their Flock Safety contracts, using one consistent definition applied across all trackers?Help fill this →
  • OpenDid the underlying Johnson County, Texas Flock search genuinely target a woman connected to an abortion, or did it involve a domestic-assault suspect who falsely claimed an aborted fetus to cover up an assault, as a later review suggested?Help fill this →

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