A cop’s case for Flock

People are right to want less police intrusion in their lives

A car is a difficult thing to steal. It is large, cherished by its owner, difficult to hide and required by law to have identifying metal plates that everyone can see. A good thief changes the plates, and an excellent thief steals a common car in a boring color and hopes to blend in among the crowd. But eventually, no matter what techniques they use, they must drive that car on the road, and roads are public places.

But until recently, finding a stolen car and catching its thief depended on a diligent police officer looking at the right road at the right moment and managing to copy down a license plate number going past at speed, and then remembering he had seen it on the morning briefing’s stolen car hot sheet. America has four million miles of public roads, and almost 50 percent of the country’s police departments employ fewer than ten full-time officers. The odds were in the thief’s favor.

With not much to go on, police officers were forced to operate on vague descriptions and partial plates. While I pulled over a car that happened to be the same color as the suspect’s vehicle, and spent time checking names and licenses; the criminal was usually somewhere else. Imprecision allowed thieves to escape while intruding on the lives of millions of innocent motorists. That is, until the arrival of systems like Flock.

Bare ALPR

Flock Safety, a startup based in Atlanta, Georgia, was founded in 2017 to give police departments better eyes. Its product is a small solar-powered automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera attached to a pole on the roadside. As a car passes, the device takes a photograph of the vehicle, notes identifying features like color and make, and reads its license plate. The license plate is instantly checked against the FBI’s national database of stolen cars or wanted persons. If there’s a match, it sends an alert to police officers in the area, who may be eating their lunch instead of watching the road. As a police officer in the southeastern United States, I have often used Flock to catch wanted criminals.

But ALPR is not new. Originally developed in 1976 by the British Home Office, it was deployed as a prototype on toll roads and tunnels, leading to the first ALPR-enabled arrest in 1981 when a stolen car being driven by its thief was found. The first large-scale trial of the technology was ‘Project Laser’ in 2004, when the project’s cameras read more than five million British plates, resulting in 3,071 arrests. Just a year later, ALPR was used to locate a man who murdered a female police officer. At the time, Chief Superintendent Geoff Dodd of the West Yorkshire Police described it as ‘the best investigative tool we have had since the introduction of DNA analysis’.

Criminals have learned to fear the technology. In London, where I spent five years as a police officer before moving to America, ALPR is so thoroughly embedded in criminal life that rappers discuss it in their lyrics. ‘Bare A[L]PR, bro,’ the artist Central Cee raps, ‘beg you don’t smoke weed in the car’.

For much of the technology’s history, however, it has needed expensive installations or cameras attached to police vehicles, affordable to only the largest departments. Alerts were often neither instant nor accurate. Flock’s idea was to sell a more accurate ALPR camera for an annual subscription of just $3,000, an affordable price given that the typical US police department has an annual budget of $1 million. It worked, and today almost 30 percent of police agencies in the United States subscribe to the service.

It is easiest to imagine the Flock camera, or any ALPR device, as a roadside barcode scanner. I can use a ‘lookup’ tool for either a plate or vehicle description that could be connected to a specific investigation. For instance if a victim of a sexual assault told me the suspect was driving a white Toyota Tacoma with a roof rack, I could while still on scene conduct a lookup in the area filtered for similar vehicles with roof racks and see results from within a particular timeframe. For each search, I am required to record a case number and a reason that is then published in a monthly audit sent to and validated by department administrators.

I have used Flock myself, for instance, to locate a vehicle involved in a hit and run when all there was to go on was a model and color. Using that and an approximate time window, I was able to find an image from when a car entered my jurisdiction, and when it left, with the visible addition of a significant dent from the collision.

What Flock cannot do is search for individuals or show who is driving a particular vehicle that it scans. An ALPR camera does not care about the person driving a car, or its passengers, and even if an officer gets an alert that a vehicle is known to be driven by a wanted felon they must themselves establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it.

Stolen cars provide the clearest evidence such a scanner works. American police solve only 8.2 percent of reported vehicle thefts with an arrest. A recent working paper suggests that agencies that adopted the devices saw a 15.9 percent relative increase in car thefts caught, which would raise the national rate to 9.5 percent. But that is just stolen cars.

Vehicle crime takes many forms. It is often the means by which a robber or a murderer arrives at and departs from their crimes. Criminals’ vehicles carry drugs and guns, and smuggle cash. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, vehicles were involved in 53 percent of shootings during the two years before the city expanded its ALPR network. After the expansion, Atlantic City saw monthly averages of motor vehicle thefts drop by 20 percent, property crimes by 34 percent and fatal shootings by almost 40 percent. Seventy-two alert-caused traffic stops located forty stolen vehicles and nine stolen plates.

Flock itself conducted a study claiming that 10 percent of all reported crime in the United States is solved using evidence obtained from their cameras. Not bad for a few thousand dollars a year.

On several occasions, Flock alerts have allowed me to arrest those suspected of serious violent crimes. Local officers knew who they were and had circulated information about what cars they drove to neighboring agencies. Besides automatically cross-referencing from national databases, officers can create their own ‘hotlists’ of license plates that will create alerts, even if they are not on FBI-maintained lists.

These could be hotlists to build intelligence on drug supply or gangs, or plates belonging to drivers in the city with suspended licenses. These officer-created hotlists can be shared locally or nationally, but still require an officer to verify the information and establish lawful reasons to investigate the cars involved. Without those alerts, some of the criminals I arrested would have remained free for longer.

Good Flock, Bad Flock

And yet, the past month has seen this simple piece of crime-fighting technology become the most reviled piece of street furniture in America. Flock cameras have been sawn from their poles, hammered into shards by teenagers, and rammed by vehicles. Cities have canceled contracts even where their own audits found no evidence that their officers had misused the system. Opposition stretches from Bernie Sanders all the way to the former WWE wrestler Kane, who now serves as the Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, and who describes Flock as ‘unconstitutional’.

More than 150 cities and towns have now deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled contracts with the company. Over the space of a few weeks a startup previously known to just police officers and neighborhood associations has joined data centers, Covid vaccines, 5G towers, pasteurized milk and fracking in the pantheon of American moral panics.

Opponents of Flock tend to believe that it is abused by policemen with impunity, that it can track individuals as well as cars, and that it violates American constitutional protections. None of those things are true.

Obviously a camera capable of finding a stolen car is also capable of finding a car driven by somebody’s ex-wife and so like any software, Flock has been abused. There are stories of police officers who have used it to stalk girlfriends, and there are also innocent motorists who have been stopped by police after Flock cameras misread plates or received old information from national databases. A common issue from my experience is stolen front license plates being entered into a database and the innocent owners of the rear license plate being held on suspicion of car theft.

But Flock comes with protections. As mentioned earlier, each search in Flock must be accompanied by a recorded reason. Similarly entering a plate into a hotlist must have a case number assigned. Results were originally retained for thirty days, but recent changes by Flock mean that recorded plates are now kept for only seven days. Suspicious searches are picked up by algorithms or found in department audits, with the service blocking users until senior officers evaluate and resolve flags. The Institute for Justice, a think tank that is critical of ALPR, studied misuse of Flock in April of this year and found 51 incidents across the United States since 2024, noting that ‘Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired’. Another incorrect belief is that Flock does more than scan vehicles, with some suggesting it scans and tracks passing phones or devices – but it does no such thing.

While Flock is a tool that can be audited, there is nothing to stop a corrupt officer simply following a car when they don’t like the look of its driver, or writing down plates of vehicles spotted outside an ex-girlfriend’s house – they would just be harder to catch. And Flock does not proactively alert officers to cars that do not trigger flags on national or local hotlists. There is no reason state legislatures or Congress could not create harsh punishment or penalties for abuse of ALPR, without getting rid of it entirely.

Another argument against Flock, as espoused by Kane, is that it violates liberties granted by the Fourth Amendment, protecting citizens from unreasonable privacy breaches from law enforcement. But it has been repeatedly established over the last century by courts across the country that cops observing license plates, either with the naked eye or by machine, is not an unreasonable search. After all, your license plate belongs to the government and a highway is a public place.

In 1983, the Supreme Court held unanimously that ‘a person travelling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another’. And in January of 2026, a federal judge in Virginia ruled in a challenge by two civil rights activists against Flock specifically that: ‘An individual scan of a license plate, a vehicle identifier that generally must be displayed under state law, does not invade any privacy interests’.

The problem for Flock is that, if it works, it provides no visible benefits outside the crime statistics: a crime prevented because an offender was afraid of being caught by ALPR produces no victim and no police report. But every misuse has a victim who can describe what happened and a mugshot of a corrupt cop, and every false alert can produce a photograph of an innocent motorist in handcuffs.

Flock did not invent its capabilities and certainly does not have a monopoly on them. There are at least five other companies that offer almost identical products and services to public and private enterprise, some arguably even more invasive. Even some of the cities that have canceled contracts with Flock Safety in recent weeks have signed up to buy similar products from the company’s rivals.

It seems unlikely that America will ever ban ALPR at a state level, let alone a national one. Instead, a patchwork already familiar to American policing will result, where policies and practices diverge across local and political boundaries.

Nor would the cameras actually disappear, even in towns where governments restrict their use and cancel contracts. The already-mentioned Fourth Amendment only applies to the government, not to private enterprise. Police departments may dismantle their networks but homeowners associations concerned about vehicle theft can buy their own network of Flock cameras, as many already do. The people harmed the most will be the residents of the average small town whose police departments cannot afford helicopters, drones or enough police officers to watch every road themselves.

I can remember policing without ALPR. A circulation would go out over the radio to look for a silver Volkswagen Golf, no license plate seen, and so for the rest of the night every single silver Golf we saw got stopped. There was no audit trail of our mistakes because there was no software.

Even when ALPR was introduced, we relied on a complex system that would send alerts through multiple layers of human filtering before finally being sent out to officers – often five to ten minutes after the car had been detected – and so was usually long gone by the time we turned up. With Flock, I can get a notification on my phone and can set my patrol car up to intercept it as it approaches.

Flock’s critics have the important point right: we should want the police to invade law-abiding citizens’ lives as little as possible. But they are mistaken about what Flock actually does. Flock allows us to be more surgical and precise, avoiding pulling over innocent people with all of the risks that involves. More than anything, Flock allows me to leave you alone.

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Ned Donovan is a policeman