Flock’s announcement last Thursday sounded like accountability. The police-tech company, which operates roughly 120,000 license plate readers nationwide, rolled out changes meant to curb officer misuse—new software to flag abnormal searches, mandatory case numbers before running a query. Coming off a Washington Post investigation that identified 50 cases of officers stalking and harassing women with these systems, the timing made sense. One Wisconsin woman alleged her officer ex-boyfriend searched for her car 179 times.
But the safeguards have holes you could drive a cruiser through. Flock confirmed to MIT Technology Review that it doesn’t actually verify those case numbers. An officer can type in any string of digits and the system accepts it. That’s not oversight—it’s theater. Flock’s defenders point to legitimate uses: catching kidnappers, finding missing people. Fair enough. Those are real outcomes. But the question isn’t whether the technology can help. It’s what kind of system Flock chose to build, and whether those choices reflect a genuine bargain with the public or just a sales pitch to police departments.
The design decisions matter more than the policy announcements. Flock operates as a national network—police in one state can search data collected in another, and agencies can hold onto that data for months or years. Yet the company’s own numbers show 90% of searches happen within a week of an incident. That gap between what’s useful and what’s collected is where civil liberties groups like the ACLU focus their criticism. Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, told MIT Technology Review that the most acceptable Flock contract by his standards is “one that is never signed.” Flock CEO Garrett Langley responded that he’ll “probably always have a different view than the ACLU.”
Flock could design a narrower system. Searches tied to active Amber Alerts could access broader data. Case numbers could be verified against department records. Retention could default to seven days—which Flock now recommends, though agencies can ignore that. The company hasn’t built any of these stronger safeguards, and that’s a choice. License plate readers have existed since the 1990s for tolls and ticketing. Flock’s innovation wasn’t the camera—it was turning a scattered municipal tool into a searchable national dragnet. Whether that trade-off is acceptable shouldn’t be decided by Flock’s default settings.
