Who's watching the parking lot: inside Flock's camera dragnet
142,000 cameras, thousands owned by private companies — and the verbatim audit logs of what police search them for.
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Are they watching your street?
Enter a ZIP code or city — see how many mapped cameras are near it. Nothing is sent anywhere; this page works offline.
142,367 mapped Flock cameras in the US. Everything quoted below is verbatim from released police audit logs.
TL;DR
- Home Depot and Lowe's run more of America's plate cameras than most police departments — and any cop can search them.
- Three out of four searches cite no case at all. Officers type "make your own case" (MYOC) 15,000 times — including to track a journalist who criticized them.
- Mass deportation is a dropdown option. "Immigration (civil/administrative)" — a civil status, not a crime — is a one-tap search reason, used thousands of times by agencies with no ICE partnership.
- One search hits a median of ~30,000 cameras across ~1,700 agencies. The widest single query swept 257,806 cameras at once.
- None of it requires a warrant — because no law covers it. When the Senate finally held a hearing, every surveillance CEO invited refused to show.
It roughly doubled this year
Volunteers mapped 3,800 cameras in 2024, then 47,000 in 2025 — 90,000+ so far in 2026.
| Year | Cameras |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 30 |
| 2022 | 100 |
| 2023 | 269 |
| 2024 | 3816 |
| 2025 | 47479 |
| 2026 (so far) | 90651 |
One search sweeps a median of ~30,000 cameras
One query doesn't hit one town — it hits every network that agreed to share. Median search: 1,729 agencies and 30,592 cameras. The biggest we found — a Missouri drug task force's "ICE detainer" query — swept 25,263 agencies and 257,806 cameras at once.
Not just plates: officers type plain-English descriptions — "gray lexus with gold rims," "Brinks armored truck" — and "convoy" searches find groups of cars traveling together. 41% of searches rewind 8–30 days of everywhere a car has been.
The owners aren't who you think
Flock sells to anyone — stores, malls, casinos, hospitals, HOAs, a mortgage lender. Cameras tagged to a named private owner:
And the long tail: Target, Fred Meyer, Wegmans, BJ's Wholesale, QuikTrip, Buc-ee's, Scheels, Academy Sports, Total Wine, Dick's, Micro Center, WinCo — malls like Destiny USA, Walden Galleria, Arizona Mills, Coral Ridge, Stonestown, Tanger outlets — hospitals like ProMedica, Baylor Scott & White, AdventHealth, WakeMed, Barnes-Jewish, Northwestern Medicine — casinos like Palms, Harrah's Cherokee, Rio, Table Mountain, M Resort — FedEx, UPS and DHL facilities, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, GM, DTE Energy, Sentry Insurance, Vanguard, a Central Bank — plus ~80 HOAs and gated communities, two LDS churches, a synagogue federation, a country club, a yacht club, and car washes.
The stores named in police searches
2,839 searches name a store. Retail-theft queries sweep a median 4,074 agencies — 74% cross 1,000+, for a shoplifting case.
Verbatim from the reason field: "shoplifter large quantities of makeup. develop pc." · "Red Chev Equinox, Victoria's Secret theft suspect" · "MYOC Willowbrook ULTA retail theft vehicle" · "Theft orc" (organized retail crime) · "Develop PC — Kohl's Theft Suspect"
"Develop PC" = develop probable cause — searching the network specifically to manufacture a reason to stop someone. "MYOC" = make your own case.
It's not just shoplifters — here's the whole search box
All 157K search reasons, bucketed. The biggest written-down reason is immigration. Second: searching the network to manufacture a reason to stop a car.
| Actually typed into the reason field | Agency | Count |
|---|---|---|
| "MYOC/ FOLLOWING CHILD AROUND LIBRARY/" | Chesterton IN PD | 285 |
| "suspicious person ame church santee sc" (AME = Black church) | SC Law Enforcement Division | 90 |
| "mosque shooting threat" | Fremont CA PD | 54 |
| "church stalkers" | Montgomery Co. TX SO | 6 |
| "Church BNE" — a month of watching churchgoers | Berrien Co. MI SO | 772 |
| "Welfare Check — ELDERLY MALE AND FEMALE DID NOT SHOW UP FOR CHURCH" | Rocklin CA PD | 8 |
| "Random post on social media claimed vehicle was involved in human trafficking" | Suwanee GA PD | 25 |
| "Anon tip of .19. Follow and observe only" | German Twp. OH PD | 10 |
| "establish PC known to have fentanyl" | Flowery Branch GA PD | 16 |
| "REGISTERED OWNER IS S40'S EX-WIFE. S40 IS USING VEHICLE ACCORDING TO EX." | Porter Co. IN SO | 4 |
| "Stalking — Susp — Roessner Gregory — 06301949 / Develop PC / INFO ONLY" | (named individual + DOB in log) | 4 |
| "Immigration (civil/administrative) — Test" (test searches on live data) | dozens of sheriffs | 891 |
| "Open investigation for partner organization" (no reason given) | 47th District Attorney TX | 137 |
| "MYOC vehicle parked in front of 785 Juniper" (it was just parked) | Porter Co. IN SO | 36 |
| "trump rally POI" (POI = person of interest) | Plover WI PD | 56 |
| "Intel (Patriot Front)" | Framingham MA PD et al. | 35 |
| "LOUDERMILK PROTEST" | Woodstock GA PD | 100 |
| "Develop PC to conduct ID stop, use Officer Safety as firearm is outstanding" | San Mateo CA PD | 232 |
| "FBI Suicide Threat Guardian" (tracking suicidal people) | Forsyth Co. GA SO | 43 |
| "myoc … male suicidal fled to see if he has guns" | Carmel IN PD | 6 |
The pattern: "develop PC" — develop probable cause — appears 12,372 times. Find the car first, invent the legal reason second. One Harris County constable typed "Suspicious vehicle — Develop PC, Stop and ID Occupants" hundreds of times, with her government email pasted in as the contact.
Immigration is the #1 written reason — and it's built into the product
51,367 immigration-flavored records — "ICE," "ero," "Deportation Warrant," "ICE pick up." Thousands carry the exact label "Immigration (civil/administrative) –": a checkbox in Flock's search UI, not something officers improvised. Another 891 are labeled "…— Test" — departments rehearsing deportation queries on live data. Lowndes County GA SO alone logged 6,239.
The dropdown menu says the quiet part out loud
32,692 reasons start with Flock's preset dropdown categories — the "legitimate" menu baked into the product. Civil immigration isn't a crime — it's a visa status — and it's a one-tap reason. A broken taillight ("Traffic Infraction") justifies a national movement search. This isn't misuse of a neutral tool; the tool ships these as defaults.
Seven flavors of not-cool, straight from the logs — tap a card to open it.
"Develop PC" — stop first, reason second 12,697 records
Pick a car — temp tag, out-of-state plate, "susp veh" — then search to manufacture a legal stop. Verbatim: "No charges, develop PC, stop an[d]…" · "NO CURRENT WANTS, DEVELOP PC, STOP" · "Please develop your own probable cause and identify all occupants" · "Suspicious AL dealer tag… Been driving around ATL area exclusively. Develop PC" — being from Alabama in Atlanta was the whole reason. Houston PD: 3,519×.
Protests, rallies, and people the government dislikes 3,998 records
"trump rally POI" (person of interest), "Intel (Patriot Front)", "LOUDERMILK PROTEST" (the Loudoun County school-board fights), "DxE Protest Suspect Vehicle" (an animal-rights group), "giu unity rally" watched by a gang-intel unit, "LPR — Sturgis Rally Surveillance," and SC's state police logging "HOMELAND SECURITY — SITUATIONAL AWARENESS — NEO NAZI AT JEWISH FACILITIES PROTESTING." Lubbock PD tracked a "protest veh" for a month.
Watching houses of worship 6,284 records
Berrien County MI logged "Church BNE" 772 times — weeks of watching one congregation. SC state police ran "suspicious person ame church santee sc" 90 times. Rocklin CA ran a welfare check because "ELDERLY MALE AND FEMALE DID NOT SHOW UP FOR CHURCH."
"Someone posted it online" counts as a reason 1,164 records
The justification: someone posted about the car online. Suwanee GA PD searched the national network because "Random post on social media claimed vehicle was involved in human trafficking" — a rumor became a dragnet. Carmel IN ran 406 searches chasing goods fenced on Facebook Marketplace. Officers paste strangers' names, birthdates, and addresses into the reason — which becomes public record.
Kids, the suicidal, and the missing 285× one car
Chesterton IN PD searched "MYOC/ FOLLOWING CHILD AROUND LIBRARY/" 285 times. The FBI's suicide-threat pipeline (Guardian) shows up in Forsyth GA logs; welfare checks hit people who skipped church and a "male suicidal fled to see if he has guns." A depression episode or a custody dispute puts your car in the same dragnet as a felony warrant.
Exes, DOBs, and named individuals 824 records
The genre-defining entry: "REGISTERED OWNER IS S40'S EX-WIFE. S40 IS USING VEHICLE ACCORDING TO EX." — tracking a car through the owner's ex. Others dump full identities into a public-record field: names, DOBs, physical descriptions, home addresses — one entry reads like a rap sheet: "NAME: G., CAROLINE, M. WHITE-HISPANIC\FEMALE\06151993\5-03\145\BLACK\BROWN…"
"Suspicious" is the whole reason 2,242 records
Reason given: the car seemed suspicious. Parked. Circling. Out-of-state tag. "MYOC vehicle parked in front of 785 Juniper" (it was parked). Georgia's prison intel unit ran 307 hunting drone-drop cars.
The stuff even the headlines missed
Tap a card to open it.
"MYOC" — make your own case is a doctrine 15,424 records
15,424 searches tagged MYOC — pick the person, build the case backwards. Lenexa KS ran it on a newspaper columnist who criticized them; a department-wide BOLO noted his car "was parked at his apartment as of this afternoon." The chief, on record: "you need to build your own probable cause… make your own case."
Most searches aren't attached to any case 77.7% no case #
77.7% of 157K records cite no case number; 12% give neither reason nor case. "Detective mid-investigation" is the minority use. The majority: plate in, national movement history out, no paperwork.
The rewind is basically unlimited up to 1,470 days
Phoenix PD ran a search spanning 1,470 days — four years of one car's movements. Dallas ran 1,096 days on a named woman, DOB in the reason. 158 searches span over a year.
Immigration searches cast the widest net median 3,728 agencies
Median networks swept: immigration 3,728 · retail 3,234 · all 1,729. Widest ever found: a Missouri drug task force "ICE detainer" query — 25,263 agencies, 257,806 cameras, one click.
Flock runs a fake police department "Flock City PD"
Flock runs a phantom agency — "Flock City PD – Law Enforcement Demo" (258 searches in our logs; "Flock Intelligence" ran 371 more, all blank). Per 404 Media, employees used it to search live cameras in sales pitches: "Star of David," "vehicle a pretty girl would drive," "white truck with a trump sticker." Flock's blog admitted the demos — including one on cameras at a Jewish Community Center.
One camera photographs people, not just plates 1.6M imgs / 21 days
Hackers dumped one camera in September: 1.6M images of 50,000 vehicles in 21 days. The software detects people, bicycles, bumper stickers — it isolated a flag patch on a saddlebag. The encryption key sat unencrypted on the device. ×142,000 cameras ≈ every car in America, weekly.
Washington noticed three days ago Sept 23 hearing
Sept 23: the Senate's first hearing — "Always Watching." All four invited CEOs (Flock, Axon, Motorola, Verkada) no-showed. Hawley: "If you haven't heard of Flock, Flock has probably heard of you."
Who's inside the network
- Prison intelligence units — GA/OH/IN departments of corrections (5,200+ records) hunting drone-drop cars
- Fusion centers — post-9/11 intel hubs: NCRIC, Missouri Information Analysis Center, Indiana HIDTA, WV Fusion Center
- Federal agents — ATF field offices running "ERO" (ICE removal) lookups
- Prosecutors — Riverside CA DA, Suffolk NY DA, Texas district attorneys
- School police — Huffman ISD TX (250 records), Emory, Clemson, VCU campus PDs
- Flock employees — "Flock Intelligence" (371 searches, 100% blank reasons) and a "Commercial Sales Demo" account (256) querying live surveillance data
And the "justification" box is mostly empty anyway
Everything above at least had a typed reason. The rest: 49% blank, ~19,300 one-character stubs, thousands of "myoc." Flock's own auto-flagging approved 97.5% of flagged reasons — race descriptors, political tags, all of it.
The logs leak people. A Harris County constable's work email sits inside 570+ search reasons. Officer name fragments persist — "C. Bre" alone has 3,749 searches. Officers paste suspect names, phone numbers, and real plates into a field that becomes public record.
Why this is legal
No federal law covers plate readers; ~a dozen states regulate them at all. A plate in public isn't legally private — courts haven't ruled on thousands of cameras acting as one. The "reason" box is company policy, not law. Where it is law — California bans out-of-state sharing — Houston PD and Missouri Highway Patrol ran thousands of undocumented searches into CA data anyway.
Sources
- Have I Been Flocked — 157,505 FOIA-released Flock audit records + 94,836 image-search records (all search data here)
- DeFlock / OpenStreetMap — the 142K-camera map and owner tags
- USA TODAY — the 75M-search investigation
- The Washington Post — officer misuse investigation
- 404 Media — "Flock City PD," the fake police department searching live cameras; Flock's own response
- WIRED + DDoSecrets — the hacked-camera dump (1.6M images in 21 days)
- KCUR — Lenexa KS tracked a critical columnist under "MYOC"; ACLU writeup
- InvestigateTV / The Hill — Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing "Always Watching" (Sept 23, 2026)
- DeFlock Woodland — March 2026 audit of one small CA town's cameras
Method and caveats
- Cameras: DeFlock/OpenStreetMap, 142,367 US records — crowdsourced; undercounts unmapped areas. Owner tags exist on ~16% of cameras, so private ownership is a lower bound.
- Searches: 157,505 deduplicated FOIA-released audit records plus a 94,836-record image-search feed, 2022–2026 — a sample of total activity (USA TODAY obtained 75M+).
- FOIA reaches government accounts only — retailer self-searches are invisible; we see the police side of the shared network.
- Quotes verbatim including typos. Plates are hashed by the source; the only real plates shown are ones officers pasted into reason text.