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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.
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The Institute for Justice reported finding at least 14 cases nationwide in which U.S. law enforcement officers allegedly abused automatic license plate reader systems to stalk romantic partners, ex-partners, family members, or women they were interested in. The report said most identified cases occurred since 2024 and that many involved Flock Safety networks.
Former Braselton, Georgia Police Chief Michael Steffman was arrested and charged with stalking, harassment, and misuse of the Flock database after allegedly looking up his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times over eight months. The article presents this as a concrete criminal case tied to abuse of Flock ALPR access.
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Police departments across the United States have used Flock Safety's automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to monitor protest activity, according to research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Over a ten-month period, more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies conducted protest-related searches using Flock Safety's national network, targeting events such as the "No Kings" demonstrations, the 50501 movement, and "Hands Off!" protests. The EFF's findings highlight that law enforcement agencies sometimes focused on specific activist groups, raising significant privacy and civil liberties concerns. The report also notes that Flock Safety has lost police department customers following revelations of its technology being used to track undocumented immigrants and individuals seeking abortions. Flock Safety's ALPR systems are designed to scan and photograph every license plate that passes by, storing the data for later searches. While these systems have been credited with aiding criminal investigations, their widespread deployment has sparked debate over the balance between public safety and individual privacy. The growing use of ALPRs, especially by law enforcement to track protestors and other groups, has intensified scrutiny from privacy advocates and the public regarding the potential for mass surveillance and misuse of collected data.
Jun 29, 2026
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
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.
Jul 2, 2026