According to an investigation by The Washington Post, more than 50 police officers abused the Flock Safety system, which records billions of numbers, to stalk women without a warrant.
The cases show that the technology, used in 6,000 communities, is being turned into a digital weapon, with many violations remaining hidden due to weak internal controls. Despite calls for regulation, the company is relying on voluntary audits for abuse.
What are Flock cameras?
Flock cameras are not ordinary video recording devices, but a high-tech mass surveillance network based on artificial intelligence:
- Digital fingerprint of the vehicle: The system uses automatic license plate recognition (ALPR). It captures not just the license plate, but the make, model, color of the car, unique defects (scratches) and even bumper stickers.
- Network Scale: As of August 2026, the company operates over 120,000 solar-powered cameras in over 6,000 communities and private neighborhoods across the U.S., processing approximately 20 billion scans per month.
- Real-time search: Law enforcement officers can enter intentionally vague criteria (e.g. “blue SUV with sport line“) and receive an immediate alert on their mobile devices when such a vehicle passes a camera.
- Lack of court orders: The database allows police officers to retrospectively track the movements of any citizen without the need for a judge's permission.
What are the penalties for officers who violate the law?
Since there is no uniform federal regulation of ALPR systems in the United States, penalties vary dramatically depending on local laws of the specific state and the internal rules of police departments [washingtonpost.com]:
- Disciplinary dismissals: In most US states, personal use of police databases is considered a serious offense. According to The Washington Post and the non-governmental organization Institute for Justice, more than 50 police officers have already been fired or forced to resign. Recently, five officers were fired in Albany, Georgia, following an internal audit.
- Probation and fines: Under lighter legal qualifications (for example, in Milwaukee), police officers caught illegally stalking ex-partners over 100 times receive light sentences such as 1 year probation and minimum fines of around $500.
- Criminal Prosecution (General Crimes):
- Only 13 states (including California, Connecticut, and Washington) require mandatory audits of searches in the Flock system.
- Only 8 states have explicitly criminalized the misuse of license plate readers. In states like Georgia, this is considered a "high and aggravated misdemeanor."
- The charges are most often filed for "attempted misconduct in a government institution" or directly for "unlawful harassment and harassment" (stalking) [themarshallproject.org, facebook.com].
The main problem, according to the ACLU, remains the fact that Flock's built-in protections require justification for the search, but police officers massively write fictitious monosyllabic words like “investigation“ or “suspicious vehicle“, making it almost impossible to detect abuse without an internal signal from the victim herself.