TOLEDO – Interactions with pictures, phrases or videos on Instagram, X or TikTok are watched, weighed and measured. 

While this may not be ideal, it is tolerated, as long as the surveillance is contained within the user’s phone and the info is used for seemingly benign things, like targeted ads. 

But now, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has allowed pattern recognition to inch its way into the material world with an improved ability to verify identity and track behavior outside of the use of phones.

“We used to use what’s called ALPR devices on our police vehicles,” said Mike Navarre, the Lucas County Sheriff. “ALPR is Automatic License Plate Reader; that’s what it stands for.” 

From what Navarre remembered of the technology while working as the police chief in Toledo and Oregon, he said the old ALPRs weren’t specific. “It wouldn’t distinguish between different states’ [license plates].” And they also weren’t very accurate. “The reader would catch a license plate number of a car that was either passing the vehicle or they saw parked on the side of the road.”

The mix of unspecific and inaccurate data provided by ALPRs on law enforcement cars weighed down the effectiveness of the system.

“We utilized it, but it wasn’t really great,” Navarre said.

“But then along comes Flock cameras,” he said. 

Flock

Flock Group Inc. is a privately held company based out of Atlanta, Ga., valued at around $7.5 billion last March, its last funding round.

Garrett Langley, the current CEO of Flock and one of its three founders, has stated the mission of Flock is to get rid of crime altogether. 

In an interview with Forbes, Langley said, “The full mission is we just genuinely don’t think that crime should exist. We actually think it’s a decision we’ve made as a society that crime is allowed to happen, and we think with technology, with people, with policy, crime can be a thing of the past.”

Since its startup in 2017, Flock has become most known for its license plate reader cameras, but Langley breaks down Flock products into three categories. 

“Devices that detect evidence,” which includes ALPRs, gunshot detectors, mobile security trailers and traditional security cameras. 

The second part of Flock’s product line is their Application Programming Interface or API, and this is the software that works to decode the massive amount of surveillance information coming into law enforcement or companies. This software makes it easier for customers of Flock to find what they’re looking for.

The third and final part of their product line are fast response devices, mainly drones they are marketing as Drone First Responders (DFR).

According to Mohamad Nasser, a sergeant with the Toledo Police Department (TPD), TPD has “approximately 107” ALPRs, and at least one DFR. 

Toledo’s first contract with Flock was signed in 2022, and Nasser said it was an upgrade from the previous system. In November 2025, Toledo City Council renewed this contract for three years, an $846,000 contract, paying $282,000 to Flock a year. The only dissenting vote on the Flock contract was City Council Member At-Large Nick Komives. 

Nasser told the Toledo Free Press, “The main benefit is faster, more accurate identification of vehicles involved in crimes, which helps solve cases more efficiently and keeps officers safer by providing real-time alerts. For example, Flock cameras have assisted in locating stolen vehicles and suspects in hit-skip investigations, which led to quicker arrests.”

The Sheriff has corroborated the effectiveness of the camera system, and while Lucas County’s investment is much less at $62,500 a year for 28 cameras, Navarre has been pleased with the results. 

“The technology has improved tremendously,” said Navarre, and called Flock cameras a “tremendous success.” 

Specifically, Navarre cited improvements in searchable qualities of the ALPRs, like being able to lookup make, model, year, color, partial plate numbers, or qualitative aspects to vehicles, like specific damage or markings on the vehicles.

“Let’s say that a [vehicle had a] Trump/Vance bumper sticker on the back. Then you could search for vehicles that had that bumper sticker,” he said. 

According to Flock’s website, each time a vehicle passes by the camera, it takes in the following information: 

• License plate image 
• Vehicle image 
• Vehicle characteristics (e.g. color, make)
• License plate number
• License plate state
• Date
• Time
• Camera location

Then it holds that data for 30 days by default, but those settings could be altered by whichever organization is using the cameras. 

Sheriff Navarre shared a shortlist of Flock success cases from the county, including quickly picking up a man in violation of parole who was later convicted of murder; a stolen Hyundai Elantra was flagged, leading to arrests; and a stolen Ford Escape was returned to the owner, and the individual who stole the vehicle was apprehended with what appeared to illegal substances.

“It’s extremely efficient. It’s made solvability rates tremendously higher,” said Rodney Theis, the associate vice president for public safety and Chief of Police for the for the University of Toledo. Theis said the University of Toledo Police Department (UTPD) followed The Ohio State University’s lead on Flock, citing their successes with the new system. 

Here in Toledo, Flock put a sharp end to catalytic converter theft, Theis said, applauding the technology as “one of the best resources we put in place.”

Interlocking parts

Successes with Flock have helped the company grow its reach across law enforcement groups, and in the private sector. 

Locally, Lowes, ProMedica and some private schools use Flock cameras for their own security systems, and Meijer uses another brand of ALPR, Genetec, to monitor their parking lot. 

Part of the effectiveness of the Flock system deals with its integration, sharing data from cameras across multiple jurisdictions, entities and areas to create a massive interlocking system of surveillance that is able to catch perpetrators across cities and states.

Companies and law enforcement control who they share their Flock data with. 

Up until recently, Flock planned to integrate with the Amazon subsidiary, Ring, allowing owners of the Ring cameras to share their camera feeds with law enforcement. 

But following pushback from Ring’s Super Bowl ad, promising integration across cameras to find lost pets, in a feature called “Search Party,” the deal between Ring and Flock backtracked. 

“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” read a statement from Ring in Fortune.

The most recent estimate for the total number of Flock cameras in the United States is 90,000+ as reported by The Guardian, not including other ALPR companies.

Depending on data sharing preferences or hierarchy in law enforcement, much or all of this data potentially could be consolidated, allowing for an incredibly powerful surveillance tool. 

Concerns over Flock

As Flock has spread across thousands of organizations in the United States, its use has raised concerns over privacy.

“The problem with mass surveillance is that it always expands beyond the uses for which it is initially justified,” wrote Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, when specifically writing about the Flock ALPR system. 

Lucas County Commissioner Pete Gerken moved to take a stand against the Flock system on July 22, 2025, but was too late to affect its reach into Lucas County. 

“We’re living in a time when mass surveillance has now become a federal policy, and it has had chilling effects on our population, especially the minority population in our community,” Gerken said, and claimed the system would disproportionately affect minorities in Lucas County. 

“Even though I did vote in favor of this, I must ask to reconsider my vote, and I would like to bring this back before the board.” 

After some words from Commissioner Lisa Sobecki, who had further questions on the matter, and wanted to delay the vote, Anita Lopez, Lucas County Commissioner, and Gerken voted against the contract with Flock. 

A week before, at the July 15 meeting of the commissioners, the Flock contract was approved by all three commissioners without comment, along with multiple other items from the sheriff, and Navarre signed the contract with Flock that day. 

This made the contract with Flock binding, locking Lucas County into a five-year contract, seemingly just as Gerken and Lopez were starting to question its use. 

Surveillance studied

In 2013, before the Flock Group Inc. existed, Neil M. Richard wrote an article, “The Dangers of Surveillance,” in the Harvard Law Review, and argued that “our society lacks an understanding of why (and when) government surveillance is harmful.”

Richard outlined the potential intellectual and political harms, claiming that surveillance is harmful first, “because it can chill the exercise of our civil liberties.”

“Intellectual Privacy” is the term Richard used to explain how people can come to their own conclusions freely, and explained how new ideas or innovations could be considered controversial or taboo, leading to their suppression under surveillance.

The first amendment, he said, is so important that “its protection should err on the side of caution;” otherwise, he warned, more practically that mass surveillance, “could lead to discrimination, coercion and selective enforcement,” of the law.

At the core of why this happens, Richard said surveillance creates an unequal power dynamic between the watcher and the watched. “That information gives the watcher increased power over the watched that can be used to persuade, influence or otherwise control them — even if they do not know they are being watched or persuaded. ”

“As a society, we are thus of two minds about surveillance,” he said. 

“On the one hand, it is creepy, Orwellian and corrosive of civil liberties. On the other hand, it keeps us and our children safe.”

Can surveillance be safe?

Firm boundaries on information gathering have not yet been determined, and much of this is due to the rapid advances in the digital era. 

“So you will hear a ‘right to privacy’ inferred in court cases,” said Ben Stickle, Professor of Criminal Justice at Middle Tennessee State University, while cautioning that the “right to privacy” is an inferred right derived from multiple constitutional amendments and a large lexicon of case law. 

Explicitly, “That’s not a right that we have,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s not implied.”

Generally, if people were out in public, even viewable from a public place, the law has held that kind of information as public. 

“And that might have made sense a number of years ago,” he said. “But now that, within seconds, all of these digital trails can be pieced together to know exactly who’s where at all times, what they’re doing, who they’re standing close to, whether you’re driving left or right or too fast or too slow, I don’t know that that’s really been addressed quite yet from a legal perspective.”

Stickle, who has done research on crime dealing with package theft and the effects of the now popular Ring cameras, mentioned ALPRs and other cameras feel invasive, but makes a counterpoint that the infrastructure for massive surveillance already exists. 

“How is this any different than the fact that your credit card company knows everything that you’re doing, so does your phone company, so does your internet, and you put those three things together and they know everything?” he said. 

“One could argue, well, this is already occurring. Now, it’s just video,” Stickle said, while he affirmed, “I think it’s time in our society we at least have a discussion about how this works together.”

Lawsuits against mass surveillance

At the forefront of the conversation over police surveillance are court cases against the use of Flock, and general objections to the massive reach of the Flock system. 

Lee Schmidt argued that “he effectively cannot leave his neighborhood without the NPD [Norfolk Police Department] knowing about it,” in Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington v. City of Norfolk, Virginia.

This case provides details on some of the capabilities of Flock framed differently than law enforcement, or how Flock frames the use of their equipment, and argued the issue of mass surveillance has already been ruled against in a previous court case. 

In “Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down an aerial surveillance program precisely because it created record of where everyone in the city of Baltimore had gone over the past 45 days,” the complaint reads in the filing. 

According to the 2021 ruling by Chief Judge Roger Gregory, “because the AIR [Aerial Investigation Research] program enables police to deduce from the whole of individuals’ movements, we hold that accessing its data is a search, and its warrantless operation violates the Fourth Amendment.”

Other specific arguments of note in this case include that, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement officers would not and could not monitor and catalogue the whole of a person’s movements over 30 days.”

“Society has likewise not expected police to be able to reconstruct the entirety of a person’s movements retrospectively, even without knowing in advance that they want to follow a particular person.”

Other grievances include the availability of the system, no need for probable cause or a warrant to access the massive database, and the prevalence of the cameras (172 cameras in the city of Norfolk). 

An excerpt from the complaint outlines the specific reality Lee Schmidt observed in his city:

“Once he [Lee Schmidt] leaves his neighborhood, he routinely passes some of the many other cameras posted at undisclosed locations throughout the City. In fact, Lee has noticed cameras other than the ones outside his neighborhood during his daily travels in Norfolk. 

“Each time, the Flock Cameras have taken pictures of his car as it passed by and stored those pictures, along with the associated data, for at least 30 days.”

The court complaint goes into detail surrounding “what Flock calls a ‘Vehicle Fingerprint.’”

“The ‘fingerprint’ includes the color and make of the car and any distinctive features, like a bumper sticker or roof rack. Flock’s software converts each of those details into text and stores them in an organized database. Flock users can then easily filter their searches based on those features because the ‘Vehicle Fingerprint’ automatically links different images of the same car within Flock’s database, creating a record of that car’s movements over time.”

Schmidt and Arrington hope to permanently get rid of Flock cameras in Norfolk for good under this precedent.

Is 500 cameras too many?

In a similar case with different specifics, San Jose, California’s use of the Flock system is particularly encompassing, utilizing 500 cameras across the city, and storing the “vehicle fingerprint” on city-goers for a rolling one year, far longer than the default save for data by Flock.

In the lawsuit, Services, Immigrant Rights & Education Network; Council on American-Islamic Relations, California v. City of San Jose, the plaintiffs hold that law enforcement should need a warrant to access the Flock system. 

“Records show that the Police Department routinely conducts warrantless searches of its ALPR location database,” the complaint reads. 

“According to publicly released audit documents, the Police Department searched for driver locations 261,711 times between June 5, 2024 and June 17, 2025.” 

Granted that these are separate searches of different vehicles over one year’s time, San Jose Police have searched roughly a fourth of the city under the Flock system. 

“By tracking where people are across time, ALPR information can reveal a map of a person’s private habits, movements, and associations and other ‘privacies of life.’”

Carpenter v. United States, a Supreme Court case involving the use of cell tower data to pinpoint the locations of a suspect in robberies in the Midwest was cited in the San Jose case. 

This cell data was obtained without a warrant, and the majority of the Supreme Court ruled that “the Government’s acquisition of Carpenter’s cell-site records was a Fourth Amendment search,” and should have required a warrant. 

The plaintiffs are arguing the same against the city of San Jose. 

Where are the cameras?

In a different case in Oregon, Seth May is suing the city of Eugene, Ore. to know the specific locations of Flock cameras in the city, which they have refused to share (May v. City of Eugene).

The main argument for this lawsuit is that the city is in Violation of Oregon Public Records Law (ORS 192.311–.431).

The Lucas County Sheriff’s Office shared a list of the locations of all their Flock cameras with the Toledo Free Press, and the Toledo Police Department (TPD) shared an “approximate” number: 107. 

But this transparency has been at the discretion of the department or organization. 

Like many issues surrounding Flock and surveillance in the United States, there aren’t uniform rules for how the technology is used across the country or across departments. 

In an effort to push back against widespread surveillance, Will Freeman, a software engineer and privacy advocate, created a website and began facilitating community around stopping the spread of ALPRs. 

Named in reaction to the Atlanta-based company, DeFlock.org shares educational resources on ALPRs, connects visitors to the site with anti-surveillance groups and contains a GPS map where people report and/or observe the location of ALPRs in real time. 

The online map doesn’t claim to be all-encompassing, but it has been correct in the instances observed by the Toledo Free Press. Over 15 separate locations provided by DeFlock were inspected by the Toledo Free Press, and were correct; the only mistake was one location with one camera instead of two claimed by the anti-surveillance website. 

Langley, when speaking to Forbes, openly said the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) were legitimate opponents of Flock who worked within the law, and differentiated their work from DeFlock. 

“And then unfortunately there’s terroristic organizations, like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos,” Langley said. “They are closer to Antifa than anything else.” 

It should be noted that DeFlock hasn’t broken the law, and doesn’t advocate for breaking the law. It should also be noted their stance is firmly against the spread of automated license plate readers, and most of their resources undermine the use of Flock as a legitimate tool for law enforcement.

DeFlock states outright on their website, “Our mission is simple: to shine a light on the widespread use of ALPR technology, raise awareness about the threats it poses to personal privacy and civil liberties, and empower the public to take action.”

Enabled misuses

For decades, surveillance cameras have been a normal progression of security, but May v. City of Eugene highlights the main difference between the Flock system and localized security cameras. 

“Flock allows and intends for its mass surveillance data to be broadly shared outside the local jurisdiction where individual cameras are located, including with federal agencies and private parties.

“While individual cameras may be deployed by a single municipality or police department, the data captured by the cameras is then uploaded unencrypted to an AI-powered surveillance platform maintained by the private Flock Safety corporation.

“Law enforcement officers or even private parties across the country can then access that data with little to no oversight.

“Reporting and records show that Flock camera networks are routinely shared with and accessed by multiple local, state, federal, and private law enforcement agencies without clear consent or notice.” 

“This cross-agency data access has enabled misuse,” the filing claims, and then lists five sources to back up their claims, showing how searches were performed on behalf of agencies violating different department’s terms of use of the Flock system and even state law in some cases. 

More specifically, most of these searches were in service to immigration enforcement, and many of these instances involve local law enforcement credentials being “borrowed” by federal agencies. 

DEA in Illinois

Palos Heights Detective Todd Hutchinson, shared his password with an unnamed Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent who searched for immigration violations using Hutchinson’s password. 

State law prohibits LPR data to be used in immigration cases, and Hutchinson was disciplined for sharing his password. Although, after he changed the password for Flock, he was again accosted for it. 

“Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Unraveled Press ‘this is not something that is supposed to happen.’

“‘The fact that PHPD did not know about this until journalists caught it is a sign that this agency as a whole is not acting responsibly with this data’ he added.”

According to the same article by Unraveled, “data collected by researchers showed cops and sheriffs in states like Florida and Texas performing searches of Illinois license plate reader networks.”

Colorado

In Loveland, Colorado, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), were able to access the Flock system through Flock’s now discontinued federal pilot program, which invited the Loveland Police Department to share their Flock information one to one (1:1). The LPD accepted the sharing invitation, but like in Illinois, sharing such information violated state law. 

Searches made in the Flock system under the subject “ICE” tipped off investigators. 

And now, Denver, Colo. has disabled national data sharing with Flock after an audit of their system showed it was used over 1,400 times for immigration enforcement without their consent. 

The city of Denver is now looking for an alternative to the Flock system.  

Similarly, the Richmond, Va. police department blocked the The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from accessing their Flock data after using it for an immigration search. 

Sharing

In August of last year (2025) Langley, CEO of Flock, addressed the Flock system’s use by DHS: 

“While it is true that Flock does not presently have a contractual relationship with any U.S. Department of Homeland Security agencies, we have engaged in limited pilots with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), to assist those agencies in combating human trafficking and fentanyl distribution. 

“We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users.”

Langley said the company would appoint a new Chief Legal Officer, and take these steps: 

“All federal customers will be designated within Flock as a distinct ‘Federal’ user category in the system. This distinction will give local agencies better information to determine their sharing settings. Moving forward, federal users will not be added to Statewide or Nationwide lookup. Any sharing request, audit or display of these agencies will clearly delineate that an organization is federal.”

Each police department chooses who it shares with, and these are the options as listed by Flock.

“There are customizable options for data sharing amongst agencies:

1:1 Sharing – police departments can choose to share camera access with other PDs, in order to solve cross-jurisdictional crime, on a 1:1 basis (one PD to one PD), within a specific geographic radius (sharing with all agencies within 10 miles, for example), or within their state. Agencies can also elect not to share any data outside their own agency, or remove themselves from sharing at any time. 

National Lookup – police departments can choose to join Flock’s National Lookup network, which enables a unique type of sharing. Specifically built for far-reaching crimes like human or narcotics trafficking and missing persons, National Lookup allows police to search for the full plate number of one specific, known license plate (only a complete license plate) across cameras that other police departments have also opted in to share with this network. 

Some states, like California, do not allow any sharing across state borders. For those states, Flock has disabled National Lookup to make compliance easier. And private customers never have access to law enforcement data.”

Policy by policy

Flock use and access to ALPR data is dictated – like most things surrounding the new technology –  on an individual, organizational level. 

Each organization using Flock in northwest Ohio dictates what the technology is used for. ProMedica addressed the use of Flock cameras around their facilities, and Tausha Moore, the associate vice president of strategic communications for ProMedica, said, “We have established strict protocols that balance security needs with patient privacy and ethical data management.” Moore assured the Toledo Free Press that the surveillance equipment was in compliance with HIPAA regulations. 

Separately, Metroparks Toledo, a public park district that employs park rangers, also uses Flock for their own law enforcement. 

The Metroparks use less surveillance than many other governmental entities in the area, only using one ALPR and four traditional Flock security cameras, but have stated they used Flock for criminal investigations surrounding “smash and grab” thefts. 

Scott Carpenter, the director of public relations for Metroparks Toledo, said on the topic of Flock cameras, “We use Flock cameras because of their ease of use, quality of the cameras and their ability to be installed anywhere with no separate power or internet. Also, because of the ability to share and use information between law enforcement departments when investigating crimes.

“All of our Flock cameras are actually used in our Riverfront Development, so Glass City Metropark and the Riverwalk. It’s just a more densely populated, heavily visited area.”

For those five cameras, the Metroparks have available a Flock transparency portal, a webpage used to give the public more specific information on how they use Flock cameras. 

Metroparks Toledo specifically prohibits the use of their cameras for immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment, intimidation or personal use. 

For those concerned with privacy, these prohibitions seem like great news, until looking at the Metroparks’ sharing information. Under the section labeled, “Organizations granted access to OH – Metroparks Toledo data,” there are 1,242 separate entities listed, with only 298 within Ohio. 

This means the cameras at the Metroparks could be accessed from any number of agencies outside of Ohio and who may not be held to Ohio’s laws or to the specific uses the Metroparks dictate for their data.  

Navarre said the Lucas County Sheriff’s Office shared their Flock data “strictly in Ohio, and it’s only with other agencies that have Flock cameras.”

Theis expressed a similar sentiment held by the UTPD, and explained a bit of why there was an attention to keeping Flock data inside the state. 

“There was an issue with Flock back in December,” Theis said. “If a department shared information with other agencies, specifically, out of state agencies, those public records requests were held differently, so that data could become more public.”

And this is part of the problem with an openly shared mass surveillance system without strict regulation. Not every department is playing by the same rules, and it’s unclear who has access to which cameras Toledoans may pass on a daily basis. 

LCSO and UTPD said they limited sharing Flock data to entities inside the state of Ohio, and limited their use for criminal investigations. But depending on other local department preferences, another integrated Ohio law enforcement entity could violate cross-jurisdictional policies of another department. 

Nasser spoke for TPD: “Sharing is governed by department policy and is limited to approved law enforcement agencies, primarily to support legitimate cross-jurisdictional criminal investigations.”

This statement doesn’t tell us much, only that law enforcement may access TPD’s Flock data, and only for law enforcement purposes.

Even so, multiple sources have reported sharing login credentials from different police departments with federal agencies. 

And while coordination between federal, state and local departments is normal, sharing login credentials provides ample room for a legitimate organization to facilitate a breach of their own data and other departments’ data. 

Regarding ICE’s access to the county’s Flock system, Lucas County Sheriff Navarre said, “I’m not aware that they’ve [ICE has] asked to use our cameras,” and then reaffirmed, “They can’t do it automatically.” The caveat to all this is the chain of command. 

“I can tell you that if we get a request from ICE to assist them, we’re going to assist them. We’re not gonna tell them no,” he said. 

But ICE might not need to ask. 

Local sharing

Flock cameras for Sylvania, Holland and Ottawa County all stipulate through their Flock transparency portals that the cameras should not be used for “immigration enforcement.”

But if all three share their data with Rossford PD, a police department that allows their cameras to be used for immigration enforcement, the whole system is compromised on their specific uses. 

Theis countered this sentiment. “What we have to do as law enforcement leaders is we got to make sure we have good protections in place, good procedures and policies in place.”

And he made mention that UTPD audits their systems to find violations against improper surveillance use. 

“We [have] got to hold people very, very accountable,” he said. “By that, I mean if somebody were to violate the public’s trust by using a system, unauthorized access to a system, they’re probably going to face criminal charges and termination of their position. And we stress that with our officers. You put regulations in place, you put policy in place, you put training in place, and you hold people accountable.”

When asked about how UTPD is able to hold other departments accountable to their own policy guidelines for use of Flock, or if they know when or how their system is searched from a department they freely share with, this was their statement: 

“The University of Toledo Police Department (UTPD) is not notified when a law enforcement agency that has been granted access to its Flock Safety vehicle and license plate data searches the database.”

Local abuses of intelligence

Not too long ago, former Rossford Police Officer Glenn Goss Jr. was held accountable for his misuse of a police database.

Goss Jr. resigned from his position after being indicted under “two fifth-degree felony counts of unauthorized use of the Law Enforcement Automated Database System (LEADS), one third-degree count of tampering with evidence and two misdemeanor counts of menacing by stalking,” according to WTOL 11. 

The Court of Common Pleas of Wood County found Goss Jr. guilty of all counts, and was sentenced in 2021. 

Goss Jr. was found to have stalked two women, one of whom screenshotted her correspondence with Goss Jr. 

In the text conversation the woman appeared noticeably disoriented, and asked, “Who even are you[?]” “So how’d you even know who I was[?] lol.” 

Goss Jr. informed the woman he was law enforcement by sending a picture of himself in uniform, and told her he looked up her information using the woman’s license plate number.

During several coercive attempts to flirt with wth woman, Goss Jr. referenced how fast she was driving, and this caused the woman to ask, “Am I in trouble?!”

Goss Jr. replied, “You were almost in trouble,” and told her, “The next person I stopped wasn’t so lucky hahaha[.]”

A similar instance of stalking with the use of police surveillance systems happened in 2022 when “Kechi Police Lieutenant Victor Heiar was arrested by the Wichita Police Department after it was discovered he utilized his position within the police department to unlawfully access WPD’s Flock license plate reader technology to monitor where his estranged wife was located,” KWCH 12 News reported.

“Every single search conducted inside of Flock has to have a reason you’re doing the search, and then is stored in perpetuity,” Langley said about the potential misuse of Flock during an interview with Forbes.

Thomas Brewster, senior editor for Forbes, pushed back on the efficacy of officers needing to put in a reason for searching the database. In some of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that had been made public, Brewster said the search credentials were filled out with broad, meaningless and short entries like “INV” or simply “Investigation” that could mean anything. 

In reaction to whether it was a concern that police could obfuscate their search with broad language Langley said, “I think we will never be satisfied with the level of which we can provide transparency and controls to elected officials.”

“I don’t think it’s our job to police the police, because no one has asked to; no one is actively asking us to.”

Langley did however say Flock had tools in development for administrators or internal affairs for the “person whose actual job it is to police the police.”

It remains to be seen if the safeguards in place are adequate, especially considering federal use of the systems through credential sharing. 

Misunderstanding of police databases

Heiar and Goss Jr. are easy to label as bad eggs, but the conviction of former Rossford Police Chief Glenn Goss Sr., father of Glen Goss Jr., shows at the very least a misunderstanding of when it is appropriate to use a police database. 

Goss Sr. pleaded guilty to two instances of accessing a police database after he had retired from his position as police chief after over three decades of work in law enforcement. 

He was initially charged with three to seven felony counts of unauthorized use of the Law Enforcement Automated Database System (LEADS), identical to his son’s charges, but the charges were downgraded following a plea deal. 

“At the time I didn’t realize it, but at this time I realize that it is a criminal act,” Goss Sr. said according to reporting by the Sentinel-Tribune. 

Jerome Phillips, Goss Sr.’s attorney, said all the information Goss Sr. looked up through the database was publicly available through public Bureau of Motor Vehicles records, which begs the question of why he didn’t look up the information through the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. 

In his own defense, Goss Sr. said he looked up the active status of his wife and father’s licenses, but according to older reporting, it’s hard to say whether he looked up his wife and father’s licenses three to seven times. 

Goss’ use of the database took place from 2019 to 2024 after he resigned from his duties as Chief of Police in 2018, but Goss remained on with the RPD in a lesser role until 2022. 

The former police chief’s actions were deemed not to be malicious, but even the well-meaning misuse of a police database does not inspire confidence in the use of the powerfully upgraded Flock system. 

Because of his plea deal, the only meaningful punishment for the multiple felonies, downgraded to misdemeanors, was paying about $500 in court costs, probation and bad press.

Each of his misdemeanors carry 180-day jail term, which could be enforced if Goss Sr. violates the dictates of his probation.

Watching increased investigations into the public 

Beyond the inconsistent policies across law enforcement departments using Flock, beyond the unclear accountability measures in place to hold law enforcement to account, beyond the unclear sharing guidelines and practices, the Flock system has opened up new data sets for the government to look into. 

Flock has defined certain cross state movements as “suspicious.” 

According to reporting by the Associated Press and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), “chat logs show Border Patrol agents and Texas sheriff’s deputies trading tips about vehicles’ travel patterns — based on suspicions about little more than someone taking a quick trip to the border region and back,” the article reads. 

Government observation of movements is creating more reasons for law enforcement to confront Americans.

What was initially labeled a missing person’s case in Texas, has drawn ire after the words “had an abortion, search for female” were used to search the Flock system twice, first accessing 17,684 cameras, and then broadened to 83,345 cameras, according to reporting by 404 Media and documents obtained by the EFF. 

“Over two days in April, the woman went through the process of taking medication to induce an abortion. Two weeks later, her partner – who would later be charged with domestic violence against her – reported her to the sheriff’s office,” a report from the EFF reads.

An excerpt from the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) detective’s sworn affidavit is posted to the article by the EFF, and shows the detective on the case referred to it as a “death investigation…of a non-viable fetus,” a crime in Texas.  

According to the Dallas Observer, “At the time, Johnson County Sheriff Adam King — who has since been indicted on unrelated perjury and workplace sexual harassment charges — denied that the license plate readers were used to investigate the abortion, stating that detectives had instead been searching for the woman as a missing person and were hoping to ensure her safety. King told The Dallas Morning News that the woman ‘was not under investigation at any point.’”

The CEO of Flock, Langley, backed the claim from King, and called reporting around this instance “clickbait” in his interview with Forbes. 

When pushed about the search query in the Flock system, and that people have been prosecuted in other cases for “unlawful abortions,” Langley focused in on the word “unlawful,” and said, “Flock doesn’t write the laws.”

“Flock has really no control over what a local government chooses to do or not do,” he said. 

Further excerpts of the investigator’s affidavit talk about how the woman came to JCSO. “Detective Miller was initially under the impression *redacted came to the Sheriff’s Office to tell her side of the story about the non-viable fetus.”

And according to reporting from the EFF, “after collecting the evidence from the woman’s partner, the investigators say they consulted the district attorney’s office, only to be told they could not press charges against the woman.”

How hackable?

“The danger here is that technologies enlisted for surveillance, implemented with inconsistent protections, threatens to undermine one set of rights in favor of others,” writes Binoy Kampmark in a 2020 journal article reacting to the spread of surveillance technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

A more recent concern with Flock is how secure the data and systems are from outside access. 

YouTuber and researcher Benn Jordan has picked up about a million views per video when he speaks about the vulnerabilities of the Flock system. Jordan’s main source when referencing over 40 security vulnerabilities is Jon Gaines (GainSec), a cybersecurity researcher, as his main source for replicating the vulnerabilities of the Flock system. 

Jordan claimed he was able to easily find passwords and login credentials on the dark web and access Flock without two factor authentication, a problem Flock has since said they have fixed. 

Gaines published a security analysis of the Flock cameras known as the Whitepaper in November of 2025, and listed it on GitHub. A major claim made by Gaines is that he could gain access to Flock cameras with “30 seconds and a stick,” to touch the camera. 

“‘The stuff that is running on the devices themselves is lacking,’ Gaines said, pointing out that his research is designed to help stop future bad actors,” in a report from News9.

Flock dismissed the findings of GainSec noting “…none of the vulnerabilities detailed in the report have an impact on our customers’ ability to carry out their public safety objectives. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities would not only require physical access to a device, but also require intimate knowledge of internal device hardware.”

404 Media conducted their own research on Flock cameras, and published an article about Flock’s Condor PTZ cameras, not ALPRs. 

“Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.”

The online article shows footage of Jason Koebler, the journalist reporting for 404 Media, walking on the street in front of what is presumed to be the Flock camera.

Throughout the article, links to Jordan’s videos showing similar claims, gaining access to the system, and following individuals from camera to camera, are provided. 

Even though Flock Safety downplayed the seriousness of Jordan, Gaines and 404 Media’s security findings, in early February, Flock hired Bishop Fox, a cybersecurity firm, to test their system and find vulnerabilities. 

Summation

“There’s always a worry of what we call a panopticon kind of state here,” said Brendan Dooley, associate professor of sociology and criminal justice for Mount St. Mary’s University. “The way I explain it to my students is sort of like Sauron, the all-seeing-eye.

“So there’s a method of a hyper control,” he said, and what we need to be aware of is the “security versus the liberty trade-off.” 

Both criminologists the Toledo Free Press talked to for this story, multiple police chiefs, and Flock’s CEO all argued surveillance on a massive scale has existed for a while, through cellphones, app data, internet and credit histories. 

What’s different now is the aggregation of data systems, the speed with which information can be searched and now, with the Flock system, there is a physical presence across most cities in America that is admitting to actual police surveillance. 

Privacy is becoming less and less of a guarantee, and the United States is now in the middle of deciding what the new boundaries will be and how they will be enforced.