Flock's public responses

Flock Safety answers its critics, and those answers deserve to be read rather than paraphrased. This page quotes the company's public statements at length and in their own words. Some of them hold up. Several have since been contradicted — by a Senate oversight letter, by a state audit, or by the company's own subsequent admissions — and where that has happened we set the statement beside what came after it.

Why this page exists

A council member will hear Flock's side, either from the company or from a department that finds the product useful. If the only place they encounter it is from Flock, our version looks like advocacy. So the strongest form of the company's argument belongs here, sourced.

Everything below is a direct quotation from a Flock statement or from reporting quoting Flock officials. We have not shortened quotations in a way that changes their meaning, and where a quotation is partial we have said so.

There is a second reason to gather the company's statements in one place. Read in date order, several of them are answered by later documents — including documents Flock itself provided to a Senate office. A quotation that was the company's public position in June 2025 and was contradicted in writing by October 2025 tells a council something that neither statement tells it alone.

"It is a local decision. Not my decision, and not Flock's decision."

This is the company's central answer on federal access, and it comes from the CEO directly. In a June 19, 2025 statement subtitled "Setting the Record Straight," Garrett Langley framed every instance of federal involvement as a choice made by local police:

In all of these cases, local law enforcement, who are customers of Flock, chose to work with federal authorities for the safety of their communities. This was not a "back door" into Flock, as some in the media have claimed Garrett Langley, Flock Safety, June 19, 2025¹

The point is: it is a local decision. Not my decision, and not Flock's decision. Garrett Langley, June 19, 2025¹

Where this holds. The examples the statement gives are real and they are not immigration cases: a child sex trafficking ring investigated with Homeland Security Investigations after the 2024 NFL Draft in Detroit, an FBI retail theft investigation in Denver, a six-month electronics burglary case in Gwinnett County, Georgia.¹ Local police do collaborate with federal agencies on serious crime, that is ordinary, and a council member should not be told otherwise.

Where it does not. Within three months of that statement, Flock confirmed to a Senate office that it had given CBP, Homeland Security Investigations, the Secret Service, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service access to its system as part of a pilot — approximately 200 CBP searches and 175 HSI searches.³ No local customer decided that. It was a company decision, and the company had been telling those same customers it had no DHS relationship at all.³

"Not a back door" and "not Flock's decision" are the two claims the pilot most directly undercuts. Mountain View makes the same point from the customer's side: the nationwide search setting through which federal agencies reached its data was, in the city's own words, "enabled without MVPD's permission or knowledge."⁷

Our assessment. The statement is not a lie about the Detroit or Denver cases. It is a general framing — federal access happens only because your neighbors chose it — that was untrue about Flock's own conduct at the time it was published. Set out in full on the claims page.

On the security research

Flock published a response on November 6, 2025 to compiled security research on its devices.⁴ Its central argument is that the vulnerabilities are difficult to exploit:

would not only require physical access to a device Flock Safety⁴

and that exploitation would additionally require

intimate knowledge of internal device hardware Flock Safety⁴

On operational impact:

none of the vulnerabilities detailed in the report have an impact on our customers' ability to carry out Flock Safety, on customers’ public safety objectives⁴

And its bottom line for customers:

No customer action is required. Flock Safety⁴

Where this holds. The physical-access requirement is real and it is a genuine mitigation. A CVSS score of 9.8 describes what an attacker could do once they reach the interface, not how hard reaching it is, and Flock is right that the two are different questions. The company also registered these vulnerabilities as CVEs itself through MITRE and has pledged to CISA's Secure By Design initiative.⁴ That is meaningfully better conduct than the alternative, and we say so on every page where the CVEs appear.

Where it does not. "Requires physical access" is a strong defense for a server in a locked room and a weak one for solar-powered hardware bolted to a pole on a residential street. Deer Park's nine cameras are, by design, in places any member of the public can walk up to.

And the framing has not held across Flock's product line: 404 Media documented Flock Condor cameras reachable over the open internet without authentication.⁸ Condor is a different product from the Falcon plate readers, and we are careful about that distinction — it is not evidence Deer Park's cameras are exposed.⁸ It is evidence that physical access has not always been required.

The full CVE table and Flock's response in context are on the security page.

"We clearly communicated poorly" — the CEO's acknowledgment

This is the most significant admission in the record, and it came from Flock's chief executive rather than from a critic.

After the Illinois Secretary of State audited 12 agencies and found Flock had allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois plate data in violation of state law, Langley published a statement conceding that the company

didn't create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users Garrett Langley, quoted by NBC Chicago²

that

some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information Garrett Langley, quoted by NBC Chicago²

and, plainly:

We clearly communicated poorly. Garrett Langley, quoted by NBC Chicago²

Our assessment, with the credit it is due. A vendor conceding in public that its own statements were inaccurate is doing something most vendors do not do, and we are not going to treat the admission as though it were the offense.

But note what the admission does and does not cover. "We clearly communicated poorly" describes a communications failure. What Flock confirmed separately to Wyden's office was more specific than poor communication: that customers "were inaccurately informed that Flock did not have any relationship with DHS, while pilot programs with sub-agencies of DHS were briefly active."³ A denial that was untrue is not the same thing as a message that landed badly, and the company's chosen phrasing is doing work.

Note also what was conceded on the product side. Not a bug. A missing permission architecture — the system had no mechanism to enforce the local-compliance limits Flock's own sales materials described. For Deer Park the consequence is direct: assurances about who can access data are worth only what the platform can enforce, and the company has acknowledged that in at least one respect it could not enforce them.

Both corrections arrived after somebody outside the company looked. Illinois ordered the access shut off.²

"Every single search … is saved in an audit report"

Flock's accountability argument rests on the audit trail, and the company states it broadly:

To underscore accountability, every single search conducted in the Flock LPR system is saved in an audit report. Every time a search is run on the Flock system, that search and search reason is preserved permanently in the audit trail of every agency whose camera was included in the search. Garrett Langley, Flock Safety, June 19, 2025¹

This is part of our commitment to transparency and accountability from the beginning of the design process. Garrett Langley, June 19, 2025¹

Where this holds, and it genuinely does. The statement notes that auditing "is not a legal requirement for Flock in most jurisdictions, nor is it something that all LPR vendors do," and that Flock makes it the default anyway.¹ That is true and it matters. The audit logs are also the reason a great deal of what is known about ALPR misuse is known at all — including the Columbus audit and most of the officer-stalking cases on our misuse page. A vendor that logs everything has built the thing its critics use against it.

Where it does not. The log records what an officer typed into a free-text box. Flock "does not require its law enforcement users to enter a case-specific reason, nor does Flock prohibit law enforcement customers from entering meaningless, generic reasons such as 'investigation' or 'crime'" — and in 11.4 million nationwide searches, more than 14 percent of reasons were the single word "investigation" with no case number.³

That limit becomes concrete in how Flock used its own audit. Answering reporting about a Texas search whose stated reason referenced abortion, the June 2025 statement said:

Following this event, Flock conducted an audit of all searches conducted on Flock LPR and found not a single credible case of law enforcement using the system to locate vulnerable women seeking healthcare. Garrett Langley, Flock Safety, June 19, 2025¹

The ACLU's Jay Stanley stated what that finding can and cannot mean:

What they mean is that they found not a single case where a law enforcement officer had logged an abortion search as such. Jay Stanley, American Civil Liberties Union, October 31, 2025⁹

We label the ACLU advocacy, as we do everywhere. But this particular point is not an opinion about Flock's motives — it is a description of what anyone reading the words an officer typed into a free-text box is capable of detecting, and Wyden's letter reaches the same conclusion independently.³

"Significantly reduces the risk of misuse" — the filter

The same June 2025 statement announced a technical fix and characterized its effect:

After discovering that certain non-Illinois agencies were using impermissible search reasons to access Illinois data, we released a new feature to automatically flag and exclude any search of Illinois camera data with terms that indicate an impermissible purpose. This proactive measure significantly reduces the risk of misuse, whether intentional or inadvertent. Garrett Langley, Flock Safety, June 19, 2025¹

Flock extended that filter to Oregon in July 2025 by agreement with Sen. Wyden's office. His office then tested the arrangement and reported:

subsequent oversight by my office revealed that these filters are easy to circumvent and do not meaningfully protect the privacy of Oregonians. Sen. Ron Wyden, October 16, 2025³

The privacy protection that Flock promised to Oregonians — that Flock software will automatically examine the reason provided by law enforcement officers for terms indicating an abortion- or immigration-related search — is meaningless when law enforcement officials provide generic reasons like "investigation" or "crime." Sen. Ron Wyden, October 16, 2025³

Our assessment. The filter is real and it does something. What it cannot do is read a search whose stated reason is blank or generic, which is the failure mode a vendor that designed the reason field is positioned to understand. Announcing it as a measure that "significantly reduces the risk of misuse … whether intentional or inadvertent" claims more than the mechanism can deliver against the intentional case, because an officer who does not want to be caught simply does not type the word.

One more item from the same letter belongs here, because it is about a setting rather than a statement. Flock offered customers an opt-in case-number requirement under which employees of those agencies "would not be required to document any reason at all when submitting searches of other agencies' data." Flock removed that option on August 18, 2025 — and told Wyden's office the following day, "shortly after receiving questions about it from my office."³

And against the accountability framing, the company's own account of its responsibility, from its chief communications officer:

it is not Flock's job to police the police. Flock's chief communications officer, quoted by Sen. Wyden, October 16, 2025³

Both things are Flock's position: auditing is a commitment made "from the beginning of the design process," and reviewing the audits is somebody else's job.^1,3 For a nine-camera department with two trained officers and no published policy, the somebody else is nobody.^10,11

On Mountain View — the vendor-side setting

Mountain View, California's own city bulletin reported that federal agencies accessed data from one of its cameras between August and November 2024, through a nationwide search setting that was

enabled without MVPD's permission or knowledge City of Mountain View bulletin⁷

Mountain View disabled all 30 of its cameras, and its council voted unanimously to terminate the contract in February 2026.^12,13

Our assessment. The disclosure here came from the city, not the vendor, and the mechanism was a setting on Flock's side of the system. That is the pattern worth Deer Park's attention: not misconduct by local officers, but a configuration a local department did not know existed.

On Cambridge — an outstanding work order

After Cambridge, Massachusetts deactivated and removed 16 cameras in October 2025, Flock technicians installed two more in late November without the city's knowledge.

Flock attributed this to an outstanding work order that should have been cancelled. Cambridge's response was that the incident was a

material breach of our trust and the agreement City of Cambridge¹⁴

and it terminated the contract.¹⁴

Our assessment. We think Flock's explanation is probably true and also beside the point. A stale work order is an ordinary administrative failure. What it demonstrates is that the vendor's internal processes were capable of installing surveillance equipment in a city that had voted to stop using it, and that nobody caught it before the hardware went up.

For a nine-camera city with a two-officer deployment and no written policy, that is the relevant risk: not malice, but a vendor whose operations are larger than its customer's ability to supervise them.

On the terms rewrite

Flock published a blog post responding to criticism of its February 16, 2026 terms revision.¹⁵

We are not going to characterize that post's argument, because we were unable to read it directly — Flock rewrites its terms and blog pages in place and they are not reliably archived, and the only copy available to us is a third party's saved snapshot. Rather than paraphrase a document we could not read in full from Flock itself, we will state only what we verified ourselves.

What we did do is download both versions of the contract and read them.^5,6 The December terms contained the sentence "Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data." The February terms do not contain it. December section 4.3 required training data be de-identified and "never sold or shared with third parties." February has no section 4.3. December carved gross negligence out of the liability caps. February does not contain the phrase.

Those are facts about two documents, and they do not depend on anyone's characterization. Note what they are facts about: not marketing copy, but the operative promises in the agreement a city signs. Flock's public-facing pages still say customers own and control their data.¹⁶ The contractual sentence that told a customer what ownership was worth — that the vendor would not sell it — was removed without a corresponding change to what the company says. The full comparison is on the claims page.

On accuracy

Flock states that its cameras

accurately capture 93 out of every 100 license plates Flock Safety, quoted by the Institute for Justice¹⁷

Where this holds. Ninety-three percent is a defensible figure for optical character recognition on moving vehicles in weather, and we are not going to pretend it is a bad number.

Where it does not. It is a rate, and the company also markets more than 20 billion reads per month — which implies well over a billion inaccurate readings monthly.¹⁷ Most are harmless. The damage comes from the small fraction that collide with a hotlist entry and produce a felony stop on an innocent driver. The documented cases are on the accuracy page.

On whether the plate readers do video

This is the company's own account of a capability it announced, piloted, and withdrew — and it is the fullest statement Flock has made on the subject, so we quote all of it.

Asked in July 2026 why its chief executive had described the technology as "a static picture of a car" when the company had spent a year marketing live video on the same devices, Flock said the video rollout "was not a broad rollout," that "five law enforcement agencies participated in a limited pilot to test live video on select LPR devices; the LAPD was not among them," and:

In March, Flock discontinued the feature for law enforcement agencies, and it is no longer active at any of the five participating agencies. The pilot provided live video only and did not include recording or stored-video playback. Flock Safety statement, as reported July 23, 2026¹⁸

Where this holds. It is a specific, falsifiable, on-the-record answer, and it is the reason this site continues to tell Deer Park residents that nobody can pull video off their nine cameras. We have no evidence contradicting any part of it.

Where it does not. It is an answer about deployment, not about capability, and the company's own marketing is the reason the distinction matters: "All existing Flock LPRs will soon stream live video and capture clips with a free, optional software update. No new hardware, no permits, no extra cost. Same lens, same angle and field-of-view as the LPR."¹⁹ A feature delivered by cloud update to installed hardware is discontinued in the same way it was introduced. The full sequence is on the how-it-works page.

What Flock has not said publicly

Stated as open questions rather than accusations:

• Whether Deer Park is enrolled in National Lookup, and which agencies can search Deer Park's cameras. Only the city can answer this from its own audit report.
• What Flock charges Deer Park. The company does not publish rates.²⁰
• Whether Flock has published peer-reviewed evidence that its cameras reduce crime. We found none.
• Whether the February 2026 terms govern existing contracts like Deer Park's, or only new ones.
• Why the no-sale sentence was removed. Flock deleted "Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data" from its terms and we found no public explanation of the deletion.^5,6 The company is entitled to change its contract. A customer is entitled to ask why that sentence went, and whether the company will put it back.
• Which customers were told Flock had no DHS relationship, and whether they were ever individually notified of the correction. Flock has conceded the statement was inaccurate.³ We found no evidence of a customer-by-customer notice, and Deer Park's council minutes record no such communication.²¹

A fair summary of the company's position

If we were making Flock's argument as well as it can be made, it would go like this:

These are cameras in public places photographing license plates, which courts have long held carry no expectation of privacy. Retention is short, access is limited to law enforcement, and the tool solves crimes that are otherwise unsolvable — stolen cars, hit-skip crashes, missing children. Where problems have arisen, we have disclosed them, filed our own CVEs, and fixed the permissions. The alternative on offer is asking small departments to work without a tool their neighbors have.

We think that argument is answerable, and the rest of this site is the answer. But a council member who has not heard it stated that strongly has not been given the decision fairly, and a case that only survives against a weak version of the other side is not worth making.

Here is the answer in one paragraph. Most of that argument depends on assurances rather than documents — retention is short because the vendor's default is 30 days, access is limited because the platform limits it, problems get fixed because the company discloses them. Deer Park has no contract on the public record, no policy, and no audit, so assurances are all it has.¹¹ And this is the vendor whose assurance about DHS access was untrue, whose privacy filter a Senate office found "easy to circumvent," and whose written promise not to sell customer data was deleted from its own contract in February 2026.^3,5,6 The disclosure conduct on security is real credit. It does not extend to the things Flock has had to be caught at.