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Mountain View, California disabled its network of 30 Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras after discovering that Flock enabled data-sharing/search features that allowed other agencies to access the city’s license-plate data without authorization. City officials said a “statewide lookup” capability had been active across 29 of 30 cameras for about 17 months, enabling hundreds of California law-enforcement agencies to query Mountain View’s database; the issue reportedly surfaced during preparation for a public-records response. Police Chief Mike Canfield said the cameras will remain off pending a City Council discussion, and stated he opposes reactivating the system due to lost confidence in the vendor’s access controls and transparency.
A second issue involved a “national lookup” setting that was allegedly enabled on at least one camera without the city’s knowledge, potentially exposing data to out-of-state and federal agencies in a manner that could conflict with California restrictions on sharing ALPR data (including limits on sharing with out-of-state/federal entities and use for immigration purposes). Mountain View Police said there were no records retained from the period when national lookup was enabled, limiting the ability to determine what data may have been accessed or transferred. The incident has heightened scrutiny of ALPR governance and vendor-controlled configuration, particularly where local policy and state law require explicit authorization and auditability for any cross-agency data access.
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City officials said the cameras would stay offline until the Mountain View City Council discusses the matter at a scheduled meeting. The meeting was set for February 24, 2026, to consider the future of the city's relationship with Flock.
Flock Safety responded that it was working with Mountain View to resolve the issue and expressed hope that the partnership could resume. The statement came after the city suspended the camera network over unauthorized data access.
After uncovering the unauthorized sharing, the Mountain View Police Department disabled its network of 30 Flock Safety cameras. Police Chief Mike Canfield said the cameras would remain offline and that he opposed reactivating them because of lost confidence in the vendor.
While responding to a public records request, Mountain View police discovered that Flock had enabled unauthorized sharing mechanisms, including statewide and national lookup access. The finding revealed that outside agencies, including federal or out-of-state entities, could query city ALPR data without authorization.
Flock Safety enabled a statewide lookup feature on 29 Mountain View ALPR cameras for about 17 months, allowing hundreds of California law enforcement agencies to search the city's license plate data without a data-sharing agreement or city permission. Reporting indicated more than 250 agencies conducted an estimated 600,000 searches in a year through this feature.
Mountain View later determined that one Flock Safety ALPR camera was made accessible to out-of-state agencies from August through November 2024, despite California restrictions on such sharing. The city said it had not authorized this access and Flock kept no records showing what data may have been queried during that period.
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Flock Safety’s network of roughly **90,000** vehicle-surveillance cameras is facing renewed scrutiny after a false alert tied to partial license plate matching reportedly led Minnesota police to stop and arrest a driver in a Jaguar Land Rover media fleet vehicle. According to the account, a stolen New Jersey manufacturer plate was entered into Flock’s system as `34 DTM`, omitting smaller middle digits and causing the platform to match a broader `34 ## DTM` pattern. Flock said the system operated as configured and that law enforcement wanted partial-plate matching so officers could receive alerts even when plate data is incomplete. The incident has intensified criticism of Flock’s broader surveillance model, which uses Falcon automatic license plate reader cameras and Condor pan-tilt-zoom cameras to capture vehicle images and metadata, transmit them over cellular networks, and store searchable records in Flock’s cloud platform on Amazon Web Services. Privacy advocates and former law enforcement officials warn that shared cross-agency access, AI-assisted searches, insider misuse, and person-tracking capabilities can reconstruct individuals’ movements and turn bad data into dangerous police encounters. Public opposition has also grown in some communities, including Saranac Lake, where residents pushed officials to cancel a Flock contract and remove cameras.
Jul 21, 2026
An Institute for Justice review found at least **24 reported cases** in recent years in which U.S. law enforcement officers allegedly used automatic license plate reader (**ALPR**) systems to track romantic partners, ex-partners, family members, or women they were interested in. The reported misuse involved police access to vehicle-location data through departmental ALPR tools and broader camera-sharing networks, including systems associated with **Flock Safety**, allowing officers to monitor targets outside legitimate investigative purposes. The cases point to a wider pattern of surveillance abuse tied to expanding police access to private and public camera feeds, with many incidents emerging since 2024. In numerous cases, officers were fired, resigned, retired, or faced criminal charges, but some reportedly saw no criminal consequences, and many abuses were uncovered only after victims complained rather than through internal audits, raising concerns about weak oversight by both law enforcement agencies and surveillance technology vendors.
Jul 16, 2026
The Los Angeles Police Department is allowing its three-year contract with **Flock Safety** to expire, halting use of the company’s automated license plate reader services over what officials described as serious concerns about civil liberties, privacy, data collection, security, and data sharing. The move follows mounting scrutiny of Flock’s nationwide camera network, which has faced criticism over data security lapses, reported weak authentication controls for police access, and allegations that federal agencies accessed or used Flock-related systems in ways that raised policy and oversight concerns. Pressure intensified after a documented false-positive incident in which police detained *The Drive* reviewer Joel Feder for about an hour after Flock flagged a loaner Range Rover as linked to stolen plates. Authorities said they had tracked the vehicle for days through the Flock app, but the alert was later tied to an LAPD report that incompletely recorded a stolen New Jersey manufacturer plate and to Flock’s difficulty interpreting the plate’s smaller-format digits. Jaguar Land Rover ultimately confirmed the vehicle and plates were legitimate, underscoring concerns that errors in plate recognition and data handling can lead to wrongful stops and continued exposure for motorists across agencies using the system.
Jul 16, 2026