During a city council meeting in a suburb of Wisconsin in April, the city of Oshkosh considered whether it should approve a contract to use automatic license plate readers (ALPR) from Flock Safety, a prominent company that provides ALPRs to law enforcement agencies across the country. During the meeting, one city council member asked Flock if the company’s ALPR system created heat maps that could reveal where a particular vehicle had driven over a period of time. Flock’s chief information security officer, who was in attendance, told the council that Flock’s system did not “create a pattern or heat map of an individual’s movement” through the tracking of their vehicles. At the end of that meeting, the Oshkosh City Council approved a contract with Flock. The very next morning, the city learned that Flock had lied.
Later that day, the city council reconvened to discuss what it had learned. Confronting Flock, Oshkosh Deputy Mayor Joe Stephenson said “I don't know how this body can govern if someone tells untruths, mistruths, exaggerated truths. I don't know how I can make a decision or discern what's right or what's wrong, or even the capabilities of this system if you lie to me.”
“Shame on them,” Oshkosh Mayor Matt Mugerauer added. “All I'm saying is if you give bad information, then I just don't want to work with you.”
Ultimately, the Oshkosh City Council voted to immediately revoke its approval, thereby setting a record for the shortest time between a city approving and cancelling a Flock contract: one day.
Flock later admitted that its ALPR system does indeed produce a “heat map” that shows where “point-in-time images have been captured of a vehicle” for up to an entire month. However, the company chose to respond to the revocation of its contract by attacking the City of Oshkosh and its city council, complaining that Flock had “not [been] afforded the opportunity” to explain its lie after being caught. Flock also sought to trivialize its factually inaccurate statement by categorizing it as “one small misconception” and referring to the dispute over the system’s heat map tracking feature as “a minor nuance.”
What happened in Oshkosh was not an isolated incident. Rather, it reflects a pattern of Flock regularly misleading or even lying about its business practices, safety record, commitment to privacy, and efforts to protect vulnerable populations. And as was the case in Oshkosh, Flock’s lies are not just directed at the general public; they often specifically target Flock’s potential government customers. The urgent takeaway for government officials and police departments is that they should be extremely hesitant to believe anything Flock’s tells them about its company, its products, or its commitment to safety and privacy.
Privacy & Technology
Fight Creepy ALPR Cameras
Privacy & Technology
Fight Creepy ALPR Cameras
Flock's Pattern of Lies
This is far from the first time Flock has misled the public and elected officials. The company has demonstrated a pattern of treating legitimate operational questions and concerns not as problems to be solved, but rather as mere public relations issues.
In Colorado, Loveland Police Chief Tim Doran raised concern that federal agents were accessing the town’s ALPR data. Flock responded by telling the chief that federal agencies no longer had access to Loveland’s license plate readers, and had their CEO reiterate to the press that federal data sharing was a non-issue because Flock had no federal contracts. After contradictory information later came to light, the company was forced to admit that it did, in fact, have contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security (DHS) for pilot projects that gave those agencies direct access to license data. “We clearly communicated poorly,” Flock’s CEO said, acknowledging that Flock’s “public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information.”
Last year, reports revealed that, even in the absence of federal contracts, cooperating police officers and departments were regularly sharing Flock ALPR data and search results with immigration agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP. The company responded to the reports with a disingenuous blog entitled “Does Flock Share Data With ICE? No. Flock Does Not Work With ICE.” In its blog, the company pushed back by asserting that “ICE does not have direct access to Flock cameras, systems, or data” and that license data is “owned and controlled by the customer.”
Flock knew that, despite not being a customer, ICE had indirect access to Flock’s data and system through the company’s state and local law enforcement customers. The issue was never about having direct access to Flock’s data, it was about having any access to the data. But rather than address these data security and control issues on their merits, Flock released a misleading blog which reads as an attempt to confuse the public and create a false sense of security among its potential government customers. Ultimately, Flock was forced to accept that its denials were simply not credible. The CEO admitted Flock was used for immigration enforcement but argued that such matters were not Flock’s problem.
In May 2025, the press began reporting that Flock’s ALPR system had been used by law enforcement in at least one state, Texas, to track down a person seeking abortion care in another state, Illinois. Flock sought to assuage concerns about its system being used for cross-state abortion enforcement by unveiling “New Product Solutions to Strengthen Compliance” led by its “Proactive Search Term Tool.” In describing this new tool, Flock wrote:
While Flock claimed its new oversight tool would “significantly” reduce the risk of improper uses like abortion enforcement, in reality the tool doesn’t work. As an investigation by our colleagues at the ACLU of Massachusetts found, Flock network audits showed police frequently enter vague terms like “investigation” or “susp” instead of information about the substance of the investigation into the search reason field. In September 2025 alone, a local Oregon police department was allowed to search Flock’s ALPR system after entering “investigation” into the search reason field 111 times and “hehehe” into the field on 20 occasions, which demonstrates how easy it is to search Flock’s system while avoiding security-triggering words like “abortion.” Flock certainly would have known, if it conducted even a rudimentary test of its system, that the search field’s protections were extremely simple to circumvent. Nevertheless, Flock’s financial interests appear to have been better served by the company misrepresenting the efficacy of its security features to the public and its potential government customers.
Flock Even Lies About Partnering with the ACLU
Flock has even made false claims to the public and elected officials about working with the ACLU. Earlier this year, after the ACLU of New Mexico and Flock supported the same state-level ALPR legislation — albeit for very different reasons — Flock’s Senior Director of Public Affairs took to social media to claim that Flock partnered with the ACLU of New Mexico to craft the bill and pass it.
This was not the first time the ACLU has caught Flock falsely claiming to have worked with us. During an Urbana, Illinois City Council meeting in 2021, the company told councilmembers 23 minutes into the discussion that “Flock has worked with groups like the ACLU to design an ALPR system that takes considerations they have into account.”
To be clear, neither the ACLU nor any of our affiliates have ever partnered with Flock Safety or worked with them to design any ALPR system. As an organization that has spent 106 years earning our good name and reputation, we can confidently advise Flock that lying to the public and elected officials about your work and your relationships is not how you get there.
Ultimately, reputable governments should not do business with disreputable companies. While governments should think long and hard about not using ALPRs, if local governments insist on doing so, at a bare minimum, they should adopt strong guardrails governing future ALPR use – including strictly limiting data retention, data sharing, and what crimes they can be used to enforce. And, of course, they should refuse to partner with any company that regularly misleads the public, elected officials, and even its own customers.