How the system works

A Flock camera is not a traffic camera and does not issue tickets. It records every vehicle that passes, reads the plate, logs a description of the car, timestamps it, and uploads the record to a searchable database. The surveillance is not in any one record. It is in the ability to ask where a specific car has been.

What the hardware does

A Flock Falcon is a small solar-powered camera on a pole beside a road. It has no operator. When a vehicle enters its field of view, it records the vehicle and processes the image on the device.

For each passing vehicle it records:

• The license plate, converted from image to text by optical character recognition.
• A vehicle fingerprint — Flock's term for make, body type, color, and distinguishing visual features such as roof racks, bumper stickers, damage, or a spare tire.
• The time and date, to the second.
• The camera's fixed location, which is to say the road you were on.

The image and that structured record are uploaded to Flock's cloud platform, where they become a searchable row in a database.

What happens after the record is made

Two things happen with each record, and they are worth separating because they carry different risks.

1. Real-time alerts against hotlists

Plates are compared against lists of wanted vehicles — the FBI's National Crime Information Center, state stolen-vehicle files, and lists an agency maintains itself. A match sends an alert to officers, who may then stop the vehicle.

This is the function that produces wrongful stops, in two ways. The camera can misread a character — a 7 as a 2, a letter O as a zero. Or the camera can read correctly and the list can be wrong, because a plate was never removed after the reason for listing expired. Roughly two-thirds of the documented wrongful-stop cases nationally trace to bad data or officer error rather than a misread.¹ Details and cases are on the accuracy page.

2. Retained records, searchable after the fact

Every read is stored, whether or not it matched anything. An officer can later search a plate and get a list of every time and place the network saw that car, or search by vehicle description to find cars matching a partial description in an area.

This second function is the one that has almost nothing to do with stolen cars, and it is by far the more heavily used. Oak Park, Illinois — the only jurisdiction we found publishing regular numbers — recorded 373 investigative searches against 2 stops in six months with eight cameras.² Roughly 2 searches of residents' movement data per day, in a village with eight cameras. Deer Park has nine.³

How long the data is kept

Flock's standard retention is 30 days, after which reads are deleted unless flagged as part of a case.

The important point for Deer Park is that retention is a setting, not a law. Ohio has no statute capping ALPR retention.⁴ Nothing in state law prevents a longer period, and nothing published by the city tells residents what Deer Park's period actually is.⁵ Colerain Township, in the same county, wrote 30 days into a policy document so that it is a rule rather than a configuration.⁶

Who can search Deer Park's cameras

This is the part of the system least understood and most consequential.

Flock's platform allows agencies to share access with each other. An agency can enable sharing with neighboring departments, with a statewide network, or with Flock's National Lookup, which extends searches across participating agencies nationwide.

We do not know which of these Deer Park has enabled. It has never been stated publicly, and it is the single most important unanswered question about the program. What we do know is that Deer Park's cameras already appear in another agency's Flock device list — that is precisely how the Atlas of Surveillance obtained the count of nine, from a shared-devices list released by a different agency under a public records request.³

The reason this matters is that in four separate cities, sharing turned out to be broader than the local department believed:

• Mountain View, California learned that federal agencies had accessed one camera's data from August to November 2024 through a nationwide setting "enabled without MVPD's permission or knowledge."⁷
• Illinois state auditors found Flock had given Customs and Border Protection access to Illinois plate data, and ordered it cut off. Flock's CEO acknowledged the company "didn't create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users."⁸
• Cleveland's safety director told council in July 2026: "We are no longer involved in a national lookup," after immigration authorities accessed city camera data without the city's knowledge.⁹
• Cambridge, Massachusetts found Flock had installed two cameras after the city shut its program down.¹⁰

In each case the department found out from someone else. That is the risk a nine-camera city inherits by joining the network.

Who owns the data

Flock's marketing has long said customers own their data. The contract is where the answer actually lives, and it changed on February 16, 2026.

The December 2025 terms said, in section 4.1:

Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data. Flock Safety Terms and Conditions, December 2025, § 4.1¹¹

That sentence does not appear in the February 2026 terms.¹² What section 4.1 now says is:

Customer hereby grants to Flock a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to (a) use and disclose Customer Data to provide the Flock Services; and (b) use Customer Data to support and improve Flock's products and services. Flock Safety Terms and Conditions, February 16, 2026, § 4.1¹²

Ownership still formally rests with the customer. But the no-sale promise is gone, the license is now perpetual, and clause (b) is new.

That gap is worth naming precisely, because "you own your data" is the line a council is most likely to hear. It is still true, and Flock's privacy page still says it — "Our customers control their own data," "Access is controlled locally, not by Flock."¹³ What changed is not the claim. It is the enforceable promise sitting behind the claim, and it changed in the contract rather than in anything the company says out loud. The full clause-by-clause comparison is on the claims page.

What the plate readers do not do

We want this page to be usable by someone who will hear the counterarguments, so these are worth stating plainly. Every item here is about the Falcon plate reader — the device Deer Park is documented as operating. The section after this one is about the rest of the catalog, and the distinction is the point.

• They do not perform facial recognition. Flock's plate readers record vehicles, not faces, and the resolution is not oriented toward identifying drivers.
• They do not issue citations, and no Deer Park resident will get a ticket from one.
• They are not hidden. The cameras are visible on poles, and Flock publishes their general existence, if not always their locations.

On continuous video we have to be more careful than this page was in an earlier draft, which stated flatly that the Falcon does not record video. What the plate reader does by default is capture stills on vehicle detection, and Flock's governing policy document for the plate readers lists what it collects — plate image, vehicle image, vehicle characteristics, plate number and state, date, time, and camera location — with no video among them.¹⁴ But Flock has announced, shipped to at least one agency, and then withdrawn a live-video capability for the same hardware, and a council deciding on renewal should have that history rather than a one-line reassurance. It is the section immediately below.

The video capability Flock announced for these cameras, then withdrew

This matters for Deer Park because every announcement below is about the plate readers the city already owns — not a different product it would have to buy.

On June 9, 2025, under the heading "Live Video on LPR Cameras (Coming Late 2025)," Flock wrote:

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. See basic video clips for every plate read. Flock Safety, "Why Video Is the Missing Link in Your LPR Program," June 9, 2025¹⁵

The same post states: "Fixed live video is coming to all LPR cameras, free by end of 2025."¹⁵ Marketing written for departments Deer Park's size, in February 2026, says "Every LPR read is paired with a video clip to immediately confirm or dismiss a lead."¹⁶

Flock's chief executive described the same capability to Forbes in a piece subheaded around the company "turning its license plate readers into fully-fledged surveillance cameras." Customers, the article reported, "will soon be able to request either live feeds or 15 second clips." Garrett Langley's description of the use:

We will just open up the five nearest cameras in real time and say, here's what's happening right now. Garrett Langley, Flock Safety CEO, to Forbes, June 4, 2025¹⁷

Set that against what the same executive said on July 23, 2026, in a television interview about the LAPD dropping the company:

The technology is really simple. A car drives by, we take a picture. It's a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That's what the technology is — it's actually not that complicated, it's pretty simple. Garrett Langley, Flock Safety CEO, to ABC7 Los Angeles, July 23, 2026¹⁸

We are not going to characterize that for you. We are going to put the company's own sentences next to each other and let a council member decide what weight to give the vendor's descriptions of its own product.

Two further details from the reporting, with their sourcing labeled, because they bear on how much of the above rests on Flock's own account.

The launch announcement itself — headed "LPR Cameras Can Become Video Cameras" and describing a "move that will transform the largest network of LPR cameras in the nation" — has been deleted from Flock's site. We could not retrieve it, and we quote it only through the reporting that preserved it, including Flock chief strategy officer Bailey Quintrell's line that "Flock customers don't have to do a thing or pay a thing" because "this will be a no-cost software update we push over the cloud."¹⁹ The June 2025 post we quote directly above was still live when we retrieved it on July 29, 2026; readers should expect that to change.

And the pilot reached working police use. Text messages from Dunwoody, Georgia, obtained by public records request in January 2026, record a Flock employee asking an officer "Are y'all able to live stream LPR video yet?" and the officer answering "Yes" — adding "It's been about a month and it's pretty cool feature."¹⁹ We have not seen those records ourselves, so we attribute them to the reporting rather than to a document we have read. They do not contradict Flock's statement; a five-agency pilot is consistent with one agency using it. What they establish is that live video from a Flock plate reader was not a slide in a deck.

What Flock sells besides plate readers

Everything above describes a plate reader. It would be a mistake to read it as a description of the company, and we made a version of that mistake ourselves on an earlier draft of this site.²⁰

Flock's own marketing to parks agencies — a page headed "Flock for Parks & Rec," "Safer Parks. Stronger Communities." — lists license plate readers alongside video cameras, gunshot and audio detection, mobile security trailers, traffic analytics, and its 911 and platform software.²⁰ The site navigation adds Drone as First Responder and Drone as Automated Security.²⁰

The video line is not a plate reader in a different housing. Flock's product page describes pan-tilt-zoom cameras with "one 90 degree wide-view angle and a 32x zoom that stream simultaneously," and fixed cameras for "areas that require constant recording."²¹ It advertises, in Flock's words:

Get instant alerts for people and vehicles— no need for constant monitoring. Flock Safety, Video Cameras product page, retrieved July 29, 2026²¹

The named features include "Guardian Mode, People Detection Alerts and Visual Alerts," and the recommended siting is "parks, parking lots, intersections and more."²¹ Flock's own parks case study is a Spokane County, Washington investigation headlined "Trail Runner Attack Suspect Arrested Quickly."²⁰

The audio line has a documented history worth stating in both directions. In October 2025 Flock announced that its gunshot-detection microphones would begin listening for signs of "human distress" — early marketing said screaming — and in July 2026, after public criticism, the company removed the feature: "after careful consideration and community consultation, we decided to remove the feature."^22,23 Flock's current audio page lists gunshot, sideshow, crash and fireworks detection, and answers the question "Is the system always recording or listening?" with "No."²⁴ The microphones remain installed where they were deployed.²³

The Condor exposure, and why we keep naming the product

404 Media documented Flock Condor cameras — the pan-tilt-zoom video product, not the Falcon plate readers — reachable over the open internet without authentication.²⁶ We name the product every time because it is not evidence that Deer Park's cameras are exposed, and we will not let it be read that way. It is evidence that "physical access is required" has not held across this vendor's product line. More on the security page.

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and device tracking: a real product, from a different company

A claim circulating widely in mid-2026 holds that Flock cameras now vacuum up Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals from phones, earbuds, smartwatches and pet tags, linking those device identifiers to your plate.

The underlying product is real. It is not Flock's. It is ELSAG SignalTrace, made by Leonardo, a different company and one of Flock's competitors in the plate-reader market. Its product sheet, reported by 404 Media in June 2026 and published on Leonardo's own site, is explicit about the concept — "identify groups of consumer electronic devices that routinely travel together, even when a license plate number is not known" — and about the correlation, describing sites that "capture and correlate them together, along with LPR data if present."^27,28 Leonardo's illustrative example of a single signature is "an iPhone 13rev2, an Audi radio, a pair of Bose headphones, a Garmin sports watch, a key finder" plus a plate number.²⁷ Leonardo states the system "does not decrypt or read content from devices."²⁷

On device categories we have to be careful about which source says what. Leonardo's own page names only "fitness trackers, smartwatches, RFID tags and mobile phones," and its page metadata adds Bluetooth tracking, RFID detection and Wi-Fi monitoring.²⁷ The wider list that circulates — vehicle systems, and specifically pet microchips — comes from secondary reporting, which says Leonardo's product materials "suggest the technology can detect signals from vehicle systems, Wi-Fi devices, RFID tags, and even pet microchips."²⁹ We were unable to open the underlying brochure to confirm that list ourselves; the copy posted to DocumentCloud no longer loads for us.²⁸ So treat pet tags as reported-but-unconfirmed, and treat tire pressure sensors as something we can no longer source at all — an earlier draft of this page named them, and we have removed the claim.²⁹

We have found no evidence that Flock Safety sells, licenses, or has announced any Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or radio-signal tracking capability, and no Flock statement on the subject either way. Deer Park's cameras are not doing this. Anyone who tells a council member otherwise is attributing a competitor's brochure to the wrong vendor, and a council member who checks will find that out — which is exactly how a true argument gets discarded. Logged on our corrections page.

The one-sentence version

Nine cameras record every car entering and moving through a city of 5,700, turn those records into a searchable history of residents' movements, retain them under settings the public has not been told, and make them visible to at least one agency outside Deer Park — under a contract the city has not published, from a vendor that deleted its no-sale clause in February 2026.^3,5,12