Your license plate is being tracked. You deserve to know.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. What they found was damning: agencies logged hundreds of searches related to political demonstrations — including the 50501 protests in February, Hands Off protests in April, and No Kings protests in June and October of 2025.

EFF also documented that more than 80 law enforcement agencies used discriminatory language targeting Romani people in their Flock searches — including terms like "possible g*psy" and "g*psy ruse" — often without specifying any suspected crime. The Grand Prairie Police Department in Texas alone searched using a racial slur six times while using Flock's "Convoy" feature, which identifies vehicles traveling together, effectively targeting an entire traveling community based on ethnicity.

The EFF concluded: "Abuses stem from the architecture itself, not just how it is used."

In one of the most disturbing documented abuses of Flock's system, a Texas law enforcement officer used the network to conduct a nationwide search for a woman who had self-administered an abortion. The search reached Flock cameras in Washington, Illinois, and other states where abortion is lawfully protected.

Audit logs from the Prosser, Washington Police Department revealed a May 9, 2025 search by a user from the Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office — with the listed reason: "had an abortion, search for female." By October 2025, reporting confirmed that law enforcement had considered bringing criminal charges against her.

The case triggered a formal congressional investigation. Representatives Garcia and Krishnamoorthi sent a demand letter to Flock's CEO, noting that a single national query can reach more than 83,000 cameras and that the system was being used "to wrongly track and potentially harm people in violation of Americans' privacy, freedom, and civil liberties."

Law enforcement agencies routinely promise that new surveillance technologies will only be used for the most serious crimes. Flock Safety was marketed as a tool to recover stolen vehicles and solve violent crime. That promise has already broken down.

In December 2025, the Georgia State Patrol ticketed a motorcyclist for holding a cell phone — with the citation reading "CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND." Flock, whose cameras were never advertised as traffic enforcement tools, published a post claiming compliance with the Fourth Amendment just weeks before the incident became public.

Meanwhile, California's attorney general filed suit against the City of El Cajon for illegally sharing Flock ALPR data with out-of-state agencies. In Mountain View, the police department shut down its entire Flock network after alleging that Flock — not the department — had unilaterally enabled access for outside agencies to query their cameras.

The 404 Media investigation that broke the Texas abortion-tracking story in May 2025 was built on datasets obtained through public records requests — making it the definitive primary source on what happened. Using Flock's national lookup network, authorities in Texas searched through more than 83,000 ALPR cameras across the country, including cameras in Washington and Illinois where abortion is a protected right, while looking for a woman who had self-administered an abortion.

The sheriff characterized it as a welfare check — the woman's family was concerned for her safety. But surveillance experts immediately identified the larger problem the framing obscures. As Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund told 404 Media: "You have this extraterritorial reach into other states, and Flock has decided to create a technology that breaks through the barriers, where police in one state can investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another."

The story crystallizes the core danger of Flock's national architecture: the justification offered for any individual search is almost beside the point. The infrastructure exists. It works across state lines. And the only thing standing between that infrastructure and its use against anyone — for any purpose a law enforcement officer deems sufficient — is a policy, an honor system, and after-the-fact audit logs. As this site has documented, those safeguards fail routinely.

At a Chandler, Arizona city council meeting on May 22, 2026, Police Chief Bryan Chapman was asked point-blank whether a Flock Safety camera was pointed directly at Galveston Elementary School. His answer: "I am not aware of any at the Galveston School specifically." Then residents started speaking.

"You say this won't be used for racial targeting or be put in residential areas, yet have placed cameras on every corner of predominantly brown neighborhoods, even having one pointed straight at Galveston Elementary School," one resident told the council. Another added: "What about the one pointed directly at Galveston Elementary School or what about the other 8 cameras in the only area of Chandler where over 60% of the population is Hispanic?"

Chapman returned to the podium mid-meeting to walk back his earlier answer. "During all of the comment section, we did work through our logistics point. That is a Flock camera on Galveston," he said. The camera — one of 14 deployed in a pilot program — came down before the meeting was over. Residents immediately called it what it was: a response to public pressure, not policy. The city council tabled its vote on renewing the Flock contract. The pole is still standing.

The Chandler incident is a textbook demonstration of two persistent Flock patterns: disproportionate placement in minority communities, and officials who don't know — or claim not to know — where their own cameras are pointed until residents force the issue in a public forum. Valley residents should be asking their own officials the same questions Chandler residents asked theirs.

The same Flock Safety cameras mounted on poles outside your local Home Depot and Lowe's — the ones scanning every vehicle that pulls in for lumber, paint, or power tools — are feeding data into the same law enforcement networks used to issue tickets, track immigrants, and surveil everyday citizens. Flock cameras have been operating in those retail parking lots since at least August 2025, according to reporting by 404 Media.

Home Depot maintains a dedicated webpage titled "Immigration Activity in Our Parking Lots" — acknowledging the reality that ICE has been using its property to target day laborers. The company claims it does not share camera data with federal law enforcement, but freely admits it shares data with state and local agencies. Those local agencies, as documented elsewhere on this site, are themselves all too willing to pass that data along to federal investigators — including the FBI and ATF — in clear violation of Virginia law.

Lowe's buries its acknowledgment in its Privacy and Security Statement, similarly confirming cooperation with state and local law enforcement. The practical result: a trip to buy drywall screws or a garden hose now means your license plate, vehicle description, and precise timestamp are captured, stored, and potentially shared with agencies whose interests extend far beyond retail theft.

Flock Safety has repeatedly insisted it does not work with ICE. The evidence tells a different story. Research by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights found that at least eight Washington state agencies had enabled direct data sharing with U.S. Border Patrol during 2025, with audit logs showing at least 10 additional agencies' data was accessed through what researchers termed a "back door" — without explicit authorization.

In San Francisco, the EFF and ACLU found that SFPD shared its 415-camera Flock network with agencies in Georgia and Texas — both states with severe abortion restrictions — and with agencies whose searches were marked as ICE-related. This occurred in a city with sanctuary protections, in direct violation of California law.

Virginia passed a law in 2025 requiring a case number for every out-of-state Flock search and blocking federal agencies from establishing new sharing relationships with Virginia networks. Local agencies in the Shenandoah Valley should be asked, on the record, whether those protections are being enforced.

On May 21, 2026, during a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee markup of a $580 billion, five-year federal surface transportation reauthorization bill, Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA, Freedom Caucus) and Jesús "Chuy" García (D-IL) introduced a single-sentence amendment that would effectively dismantle state and local police ALPR programs across the entire country. The text: "A recipient of assistance under Title 23, United States Code, may not use automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling."

Title 23 funds support roughly a quarter of U.S. public roads — the same arteries where Flock cameras are mounted on poles and overpasses. Agencies receiving those funds would have to remove their ALPR systems entirely or restrict them to toll collection. The bipartisan authorship — a Freedom Caucus Republican and an Illinois progressive — reflects how ALPR opposition has become one of the rare issues that unites civil libertarians across the political spectrum. At least 30 localities have already canceled or deactivated Flock contracts since early 2025, including Staunton and Charlottesville in Virginia.

The loophole is real and worth stating plainly: Flock Safety is a private company. It does not receive federal highway funds. If the amendment were adopted, police could simply pay Flock to operate the cameras independently and buy the data back — the same workaround already documented in Elkton, Virginia. Meanwhile, the FBI is simultaneously pursuing a multi-award contract for expanded nationwide ALPR access, moving in the exact opposite direction. The amendment is a meaningful opening, not a solution. The fight to deflock the Valley runs through city councils and county boards — not just Capitol Hill.