Your license plate is being tracked. You deserve to know.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. What they found was damning: agencies logged hundreds of searches related to political demonstrations — including the 50501 protests in February, Hands Off protests in April, and No Kings protests in June and October of 2025.

EFF also documented that more than 80 law enforcement agencies used discriminatory language targeting Romani people in their Flock searches — including terms like "possible g*psy" and "g*psy ruse" — often without specifying any suspected crime. The Grand Prairie Police Department in Texas alone searched using a racial slur six times while using Flock's "Convoy" feature, which identifies vehicles traveling together, effectively targeting an entire traveling community based on ethnicity.

The EFF concluded: "Abuses stem from the architecture itself, not just how it is used."

In one of the most disturbing documented abuses of Flock's system, a Texas law enforcement officer used the network to conduct a nationwide search for a woman who had self-administered an abortion. The search reached Flock cameras in Washington, Illinois, and other states where abortion is lawfully protected.

Audit logs from the Prosser, Washington Police Department revealed a May 9, 2025 search by a user from the Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office — with the listed reason: "had an abortion, search for female." By October 2025, reporting confirmed that law enforcement had considered bringing criminal charges against her.

The case triggered a formal congressional investigation. Representatives Garcia and Krishnamoorthi sent a demand letter to Flock's CEO, noting that a single national query can reach more than 83,000 cameras and that the system was being used "to wrongly track and potentially harm people in violation of Americans' privacy, freedom, and civil liberties."

Law enforcement agencies routinely promise that new surveillance technologies will only be used for the most serious crimes. Flock Safety was marketed as a tool to recover stolen vehicles and solve violent crime. That promise has already broken down.

In December 2025, the Georgia State Patrol ticketed a motorcyclist for holding a cell phone — with the citation reading "CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND." Flock, whose cameras were never advertised as traffic enforcement tools, published a post claiming compliance with the Fourth Amendment just weeks before the incident became public.

Meanwhile, California's attorney general filed suit against the City of El Cajon for illegally sharing Flock ALPR data with out-of-state agencies. In Mountain View, the police department shut down its entire Flock network after alleging that Flock — not the department — had unilaterally enabled access for outside agencies to query their cameras.

Flock Safety has repeatedly insisted it does not work with ICE. The evidence tells a different story. Research by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights found that at least eight Washington state agencies had enabled direct data sharing with U.S. Border Patrol during 2025, with audit logs showing at least 10 additional agencies' data was accessed through what researchers termed a "back door" — without explicit authorization.

In San Francisco, the EFF and ACLU found that SFPD shared its 415-camera Flock network with agencies in Georgia and Texas — both states with severe abortion restrictions — and with agencies whose searches were marked as ICE-related. This occurred in a city with sanctuary protections, in direct violation of California law.

Virginia passed a law in 2025 requiring a case number for every out-of-state Flock search and blocking federal agencies from establishing new sharing relationships with Virginia networks. Local agencies in the Shenandoah Valley should be asked, on the record, whether those protections are being enforced.