Today, few topics are being discussed with such rare and robust bipartisan consensus and formidable misinformation as Flock Safety surveillance cameras. The hot topics are the surveillance and privacy concerns related to privately owned cameras and the collection and storage of data with no criminal predicate. Almost daily we are hearing stories of police officers misusing the Flock Safety databases and usually it involves stalking love interests or former romantic partners.
The Flock Safety business
The uniform negativity toward Flock Safety cameras is complicated. Flock achieved what many companies in their space aspire: to become synonymous with whatever service you’re selling, in this case with automated license plate readers (ALPR) in public spaces. During the early primitive days, I had the opportunity to work with my agency’s auto theft unit deploying the first ALPRs on some unmarked vehicles. The first thing I learned was that it wasn’t the camera as any camera of a minimum resolution and framerate would do, but the magic happened in the optical camera text recognition software remotely paired with a database of ‘hot’ license plates. These would be tied to a missing person, a wanted person or a stolen vehicle
My point, to the privacy activists and the Sawzall-wielding vandals, is the real problem is the data. One lawsuit sums it up eloquently: Flock creates a mosaic of the patterns of free people without their permission. Without a doubt, that is concerning and it is not merely a feature of data retention. It is an open-ended intrusion of privacy and absent some meaningful legislation, it will continue to have a high likelihood of abuse.
Police misuse of Flock data
Every sworn member of law enforcement who misuses Flock data is without excuse. All law enforcement information systems require both training, often requiring a documented justification for the data query including a case number. Any law enforcement employee that may be exposed to Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) data, including janitors and help-desk staff, are required to train on the requirements every two years. My CJIS certified interns pulled criminal histories on all felony arrests and had to log each ‘transaction’ on an independent freestanding data table for the agency for our audits.
According to The Washington Post: “Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent, a Post analysis of police and court records found.”
In one case, a former romantic interest of the Braselton, Georgia police chief was tracked using Flock system and their far-reaching network. “By the time she understood what was happening, (Chief Michael) Steffman had looked up the tags for her and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times, according to Have I Been Flocked, a website that aggregates police search logs made available through public records.” Steffman ended his life before trial.
While the Post provided ample speculation on this case, and nearly fifty other cases with 90% or greater involving Flock Safety, there actually was nothing else that could or should have been done on the part of the private company. Every law enforcement officer in this country should know that this information, should at the minimum be treated like be treated like CJIS information.
This investigation turned up this key piece of information. City Journal reports:
“… Flock cameras default to retaining data for no more than 30 days, a setting that most jurisdictions leave unchanged.”
I find it extremely disquieting to find out that my data, from an enormous collection network would by default keep my information for 30 days. That is too long by nearly 30 days. I would consider 30 days to be a long-term log for information that is not being held in relation to known crime.
What is the collection pool? The Post reports from Flock that “…more than 120,000 shoebox-size cameras now scan the roads of more than 6,000 communities and record 20 billion plate scans a month.” We need to be reminded that despite their catchy name, they are by no means the only game in town.
Not bad apples
There are more terrible stories from Wisconsin, Florida, and Idaho of criminal activity, apart from the crime of using data as an instrumentality of a crime.
When rules were less rigid, a colleague of mine told me to just look up a person on the state driver license database. Fortunately, I did have a criminal predicate, but he wouldn’t have cared. Years later another colleague looked up a prominent government official for no good reason, and no surprise, that account was flagged, and the state came looking for his badge. Fortunately for him, he kept his career.
I’ve learned that both biometric and access cards are being rolled out for physical Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) security. Five years ago, you had to put in a justification to submit a query. The driver license database had a pull-down menu of very specific reason codes plus entering a case reference number. The list did not have an ‘other’ general choice; you had to choose a very specific reason code.
I’ve seen poor leadership in the past react too rapidly with higher hurdles to clear, but if this is going to be resolved, more and better audits are the best process for accountability. It should be a process that mirrors random drug screening.
The reason I never accept the ‘bad apples’ theory is because it asserts that corruption is contagious. It is never acceptable to apply that to a principled and dedicated profession. There have been cases of widespread corruption within law enforcement, but with nearly 800,000 sworn officers serving in 18,000 agencies, scandals are noteworthy based on their scarcity. We wouldn’t dare allege that the malpractice of one doctor causes corruption of all the doctors in a hospital.
Perhaps the most important point being missed as these stories dominate our news feeds, is that in most cases, the officer was also misusing federal CJIS data, state crime information center information, and state license and registration data, all of which are prosecutable crimes, in addition to Flock databases. In Florida, a Sumter County detective was arrested and fired. Orlando’s Fox 35 reported: “According to investigators, (Deputy) Almany improperly accessed the Comprehensive Case Information System (CCIS), the Flock automated license plate recognition system and the Florida Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID).”
In the Florida Keys, “…Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, 28-year-old Deputy Lamar Eliseo Roman was working security detail on the set of the television show “Bad Monkey” when a group of women arrived on a bus for extras. Roman reportedly ‘began whistling’ at one of the women who got off the bus and cat called her.
Roman allegedly later used police databases to learn more information about the woman and to put her license plate into a “hotlist” which would alert him if her license plate was detected by license plate readers.”
Using the information provided by the woman he targeted, he was able to find her license plate number by using the DAVID system and then add her to a Flock Safety ‘hotlist.’ After receiving an alert, a hit on her tag, he then conducted an illegal traffic stop on her. Just reading the brief article, Roman’s conduct at the security detail was full of red flags.
A Niceville, FL city press release regarding the arrest and termination of Officer Coty Hall states: “…An internal audit conducted between January 2025 and October 2025 identified numerous unauthorized personal information inquiries Officer Hall made through various Law Enforcement databases. The information from these inquiries were used to harass a fellow law enforcement officer and their spouse.” Another Flock Safety case, but his stalking and harassment were also facilitated by illegal use of federal and state restricted databases.
Disproportionate media coverage
To illustrate how concentrated the focus is on police misconduct using Flock Systems, where The Washinton Post has identified ‘at least 50’ criminal cases, let’s contrast that to the most recent data on drunk driving fatalities according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 2024, 11,904 people lost their lives to impaired drivers, or an average of one fatality every 44 minutes. This is not to diminish stalking, a documented dangerous precursor to intimate partner violence and fatalities. It is to illustrate how selective media is in delivering relevant news.
Due to the outsized attention by the media, there really should be no good reason for any officer to become tomorrow’s Flock Safety misuse headline, but unfortunately it is likely. One would think that the frequency of news stories, seemingly every day, would shock some sense into those who haven’t been caught yet, but that clearly hasn’t happened yet.
We must also notice that stalking of potential and past love interests appears to dominate the motives rather than idle curiosity. Without conducting a meta-analysis on every Flock Safety police misuse case, of the cases presented recently by the media, every case that I researched has elements of creepy stalking behavior.
But this does not completely vindicate Flock Safety and their hands off approach or absolve them of responsibility. The private sector currently can legally record and warehouse your data without your consent. Laws can be passed to determine how much access law enforcement agencies should have to balance our privacy and safety needs. Access to thirty days of free citizens movements without any type of criminal predicate needs to change legislatively now.
A 1755 quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the governor regarding the French and Indian War: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.
Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com. His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.
References
https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving
https://www.city-journal.org/article/automated-license-plate-readers-flock?utm
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/us/flock-camera-vandalism-protests-cec
Good governance is the keystone to any intrusive technology.
Trust is the central theme to any controversial police incident or technology. If you can nibble away at the trust, you can delegitimize the institution. There is a segment at both ends of the political spectrum that seems to take pleasure in finding new things and people to demonize. Flock is like the perfect stick to flog the police “trust” and one that both have found common ground. Strange bedfellows we could say. Maybe we will see them all holding hands and signs together at the next deflock protest.
You make an excellent point in that Police and Community leaders must understand the forces they are up against. This does not mean caving and getting defensive, it means having the courage to bring people to the table to find a way to make it work. If Flock leadership would have done this from the start instead of getting defensive and trying to hide behind case successes, they would have worked more publicly to acknowledge the valid concerns of how the data is used and stored. But they didn’t, and then threw gas on the fire.
We need this technology. The data is clear that it is one of the most effective crime fighting tools we have ever used in law enforcement. But it does have high potential for abuse.
Last week in our sleepy, quiet, Shangri-La, university town, a baby was abducted by a woman posing as babysitter. She came from several states away. Thankfully, the baby was located safely within hours in a neighboring state. The deflockers who have been vocal and public in their outrage went eerily silent. We don’t yet know what role the Flock ALPR cameras may or may not have played in this case, but I, for one, was glad we had them when the police were notified and began the intense investigation.
And there is the answer.
Well done, Roland, and I also agree with Coptimizer. While we should indeed have discussions about abuses, I also don't think effective life-saving technology should be discounted. There has to be middle ground somewhere here.
In case anyone's interested, several bills have been introduced in Congress regarding the federal government's use of this technology.
This includes PRIVACY Act (H.R. 9716), which would, in part, require federal law enforcement to obtain a warrant before accessing data from an ALPR. This is reasonable.
Another bill called the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act (H.R. 9800), prohibits federal agencies from purchasing, using or accessing these systems.