Tech and AI

Number plate camera supplier reverses itself and makes abuse controls compulsory after officers used its data to stalk

By Staff Writer  |  14 August 2026

Flock Safety had argued that guardrails were a matter for legislators. Its chief executive now says the company got that wrong and will switch the controls on for every force.

Flock Safety, which runs more than 120,000 automatic number plate readers across at least 6,000 American cities, will make its abuse detection tooling compulsory for every customer over the coming weeks. The announcement on 13 August follows reports of officers using the system to track former partners and others for personal reasons.

Three things change. Audit Assistance, until now an optional feature that flags irregular search patterns and locks a suspect account out until an administrator reviews it, becomes standard for everyone. Every search will require a case code, so a query has to be tied to a file rather than run on a whim; an administrator can override that in an emergency such as a missing child, and the override is automatically flagged for review. The default retention period for camera data falls from one month to one week, with a preservation mode that holds material tied to a case number rather than letting it age out.

Sharing arrangements are also being broken up. A locality could previously share its data with another force only on an all or nothing basis. It will now be able to permit a neighbouring force to search for a stolen vehicle or a violent offence while blocking searches connected to immigration enforcement.

Audit Assistance has been available as a voluntary option since April. Only a third of forces turned it on, and among those that did, detection of misuse went up.

The reversal, in the chief executive's own words

The company's earlier position was that lawmakers, not the supplier, should decide what controls a policing tool carries. Little legislation followed. Garrett Langley, the chief executive, says he has watched how slowly that process moves and has changed his mind about where the responsibility sits.

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.'

Garrett Langley, Chief Executive, Flock Safety

He still prefers legislators to make the principal calls, and he is candid that the proposals are not wholly altruistic: rules the company adopts voluntarily put pressure on competitors to match them. He also predicts that more officers will be dismissed and more arrested for abusing police powers as the auditing spreads, which is an unusual thing for a supplier to say out loud about its own customer base.

Why the critics are not satisfied

The American Civil Liberties Union published a point by point response the same day. It treats the shorter retention default as a possible step in the right direction, short of the 48 hours it has asked for, while warning that everything turns on how the preservation mode works: if it holds only the hits an investigator marks as evidence, that is one thing, and if it holds everything that anybody searches, retention gets worse rather than better.

Its harder point is about proof. A search reason requirement was rolled out once before and officers worked around it by typing anything at all into the box, so the field was replaced by a menu that offered a list of acceptable answers instead. Nobody outside the company has ever tested whether the audit tool catches 5 per cent of misuse or 95 per cent, and the group wants an independent evaluator to say which.

My biggest concern was and will continue to be that they are a mass surveillance company that collects billions and billions of license plate scans every month on people who have done nothing wrong.

Chad Marlow, Senior Policy Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union

The pattern will be familiar to anyone who procures systems for a regulated function. A control that exists but is optional is not a control, it is a defence for the vendor. Making it compulsory moves the argument from whether the tool was available to whether the audit trail it produces was ever read, and that is a much harder question for a buyer to answer three years later.