Flock mandates case numbers after 46 officers accused of stalking via LPRs

Flock is making its audit tools mandatory after a Washington Post investigation documented 46 cases of officers accused of misusing the company’s license plate readers for stalking and harassment. Starting today, any officer searching the network of 120,000 cameras must enter a criminal case number first. The company is also flipping on an automatic auditing system that flags suspicious search patterns to department administrators. Both features existed as opt-in options last year. Now they’re required.

The problem is that neither safeguard is hard to verify. Flock won’t actually check whether those case numbers correspond to real investigations, so an officer could type in anything. The ACLU already demonstrated how easily these prompts get mocked: when Flock asked officers to enter a reason for a search, one Oregon department logged “hehehe” twenty times. Others used generic terms like “investigation” that told administrators nothing. The automatic auditing tool is meant to catch that kind of behavior, but Flock hasn’t published accuracy metrics or let independent researchers evaluate it.

The company is also pushing agencies toward shorter data retention—seven days instead of thirty—and letting departments restrict which other agencies can search their camera data based on stated purpose. A department could allow searches tagged “kidnapping” while blocking “immigration enforcement.” That sounds reasonable until you remember the Oregon officers typing “hehehe.” Every new guardrail still depends on officers reporting their own intentions honestly.

Flock’s lost at least 30 city contracts in the past year, according to NPR, though the activist group DeFlock puts the number higher. CEO Garrett Langley blames “misinformation”—he says people wrongly believe Flock does facial recognition or sells data commercially. The ACLU’s Chad Marlow frames it differently: the backlash stems from the scale itself. “In America, you only get to investigate someone if you think they’ve done something wrong,” Marlow says. That principle gets harder to maintain when 120,000 cameras have already logged where everyone drove.