Flock Safety Overhauls Platform After Police Misuse Scandals
Flock Safety, the surveillance technology company behind a vast network of automated license plate readers, announced sweeping platform changes on Thursday in response to mounting public backlash over documented police misuse of its system. The Atlanta-based company will make previously optional safeguards mandatory, cut data retention from 30 days to seven, and require law enforcement users to tie every search to a specific case code.
According to AP News, the company operates approximately 120,000 cameras across 49 states, serving more than 6,000 law enforcement agencies. The network records license plate numbers and vehicle characteristics of all passing vehicles, allowing agencies to search and share data across jurisdictions.
A Pattern of Abuse
The changes come after a wave of high-profile incidents exposed law enforcement officers using the surveillance network for personal purposes. A Washington Post investigation reported earlier this month finding nearly 50 instances of police officers charged or accused of using the cameras for unauthorized purposes, many for tracking current or former romantic partners or family members.
One of the most egregious cases involved Braselton, Georgia Police Chief Michael Steffman, who was arrested in November 2025 for allegedly using Flock cameras to stalk and harass multiple people, including searching his ex-girlfriend’s license plate more than 500 times over seven months. He was found dead by suicide before standing trial.
Just this week, six employees of the Savannah Police Department in Georgia were fired for searching for friends and family using the tool and allowing an outside agency officer to use the city’s cameras. WTOC reported that Savannah Mayor Van Johnson called the incident “embarrassing as hell to us” and acknowledged the case had made national news.
Mandatory Safeguards
CEO Garrett Langley said many of the changes make what were once optional guardrails mandatory by January 1. In an interview with The Verge, Langley acknowledged the company had gotten it wrong: “This is such an obvious way to curb abuse… And I said, ‘Fine. You know what? I think that’s right, and we got this one wrong. We should make it a requirement.’”
The key platform changes include:
- Mandatory Audit Assistance: All law enforcement customers must implement an audit tool that flags abnormal search behavior. Users are locked out in real time pending internal review.
- Case codes required: Law enforcement users must enter a code from their records management system tying each search to a specific case before running it. Emergency overrides are automatically flagged for review.
- Data retention reduced: The standard data retention window is shortened from 30 days to 7 days. Data can be preserved longer when tied to evidence in a case number.
- Offense Filtering: Customers can decide which offense types outside agencies can search their data for, allowing customers to block outside searches related to immigration enforcement.
Langley told USA Today that the identification of police misuse has increased since the company rolled out its voluntary “audit assistance” tool earlier this year. Only about one-third of law enforcement clients had turned it on. “As we now go from one-third of our customers to all of our customers having it, I think we will find new forms of abuse, program that into the system to prevent it happening again,” he said.
In a message to law enforcement seeking to use Flock for personal gain, Langley was blunt: “You will get caught.”
Critics Remain Skeptical
Civil liberties advocates reacted cautiously to the announcement. The American Civil Liberties Union said in a blog post that the shortened evidence retention window could be “a step in the right direction,” but characterized the other changes as “retreads” of inadequate safety measures.
Robert Frommer, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, called the changes “window dressing” from a company in “panic mode.” “This is window dressing that doesn’t address the fundamental problem, which is that police officers are the ones deciding who and when to search, and that should be done by judges with real warrants,” he said.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, said Thursday’s shifts were “better than the opposite” but called for further scrutiny in the form of “sustained democratic engagement with the rules and judicial checks on access at a minimum.” Ferguson noted that Flock and the movement against it have “captured people’s sense that maybe they don’t want to be surveilled all the time.”
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, offered a more measured perspective. “It’s a balancing act. A community has a legitimate interest in how information is used, but it also has a legitimate interest in the effectiveness of a police department in preventing crime,” he said. “I think a balance can be struck, but it’s more likely to come from department policy than company changes.”
Growing Backlash Movement
More than 50 agencies or jurisdictions have canceled, suspended, or rejected a contract or deactivated their cameras since the beginning of 2026, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, a grassroots group formed to track the use of license plate reader technology and push back against it. The group has mapped more than 129,000 license plate readers across the United States.
In Congress, Republican representatives filed at least two bills in July aiming to restrict the use of the technology. Ian Adams, an associate professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, said the concerns are not new in law enforcement. “Anyone with policing experience could have reasonably foreseen that what have been termed as ‘curiosity searches’ by officers, searches for private reasons not related to police work, were going to be a problem this technology faced,” he said.
The Company’s Defense
Flock says its cameras helped solve 1,000 missing person cases and 22,000 stolen vehicle cases in July 2026 alone. The technology has been credited with finding missing seniors and catching car thieves, and was used in high-profile cases including the search for a suspect in a fatal shooting at Brown University.
Speaking to BBC News, Langley acknowledged the company took too long to act when asked directly whether Flock had failed to protect its tens of thousands of cameras from police abuse: “Yeah… yes.” He said he has come to agree with groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that police should need an active case number to search Flock’s data. “They’re right. I think it should be required.”
Langley also addressed the broader tension between safety and privacy. “I think there’s a misconception that we have to make a choice between safety and privacy. And I just refuse to accept that,” he said. “A search without a reason is a search that shouldn’t happen in the first place.”
What’s Next
The new safeguards will be implemented across all Flock customers by January 1, 2027. The company says it will continue to refine its systems as new forms of abuse are identified. Langley has also advocated for lawmakers to add similar safeguards to all police tools, such as DMV records.
However, the broader debate over mass surveillance is unlikely to subside. As WABE reported, the company remains under scrutiny from lawmakers from both parties, civil liberties advocates, and citizens across the United States. Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, captured the sentiment driving the backlash: “There’s different reasons, but everyone is arriving at the same position, which is mass government surveillance in this country has gotten completely out of control and needs to be reined in immediately.”
With a National Week of Action Against ALPRs scheduled to begin August 16, the pressure on Flock and similar companies shows no signs of abating. The question now is whether these changes will restore public trust or merely mark another chapter in the ongoing fight over surveillance in America.