If you drive in Massachusetts, a private company in Atlanta almost certainly has a record of where your car has been. Not a guess. A photograph, a timestamp, a location, and a description of your vehicle accurate enough to find it again without ever reading the plate.
The company is Flock Safety. Most people first hear the name when a camera goes up on a pole in their town, or when a story breaks about an officer using one to track an ex-girlfriend. Very few people know what the company actually is, who owns it, what it keeps, or who can search it. This is that explanation.
What is Flock Safety?
Flock Safety is a private surveillance company. It sells cameras, and more importantly it sells access to the database those cameras feed.
The core product is an automated license plate reader, usually shortened to ALPR. It is a solar-powered camera, roughly the size of a shoebox, bolted to a pole beside a road. Every vehicle that passes gets photographed. Software reads the plate, converts it to text, and writes a row to a database: plate number, date, time, GPS coordinates, and an image of the car.
What separates Flock from the plate readers police have used for twenty years is the second half of the record. The system also logs what the company calls a vehicle fingerprint: make, body type, color, roof rack, bumper stickers, a dent on the rear quarter panel, a ladder on the roof. That matters because it means the camera can identify a car with no plate, a covered plate, or a stolen plate. Removing your plate does not remove you from the system.
Flock also sells gunshot detection, drone-as-first-responder programs, and fixed video surveillance. The plate readers are the business.
The scale is the part people underestimate. Flock has said its network performs more than 20 billion vehicle scans in the United States every month, across a footprint described in July 2026 as more than 6,000 communities in 49 states. Twenty billion scans a month is not targeted surveillance of suspects. It is a continuous recording of ordinary driving, retained by default, searchable later.
Who owns Flock Safety?
Flock Safety is privately held. It is not listed on any stock exchange, so you cannot buy shares, and it publishes no audited financials.
It was founded in 2017 in Atlanta by three Georgia Tech alumni: Garrett Langley, Paige Todd, and Matt Feury. Langley is the chief executive. The founding story the company tells is a small one: Langley’s Atlanta neighborhood had a string of property crimes, police had no evidence to work with, and he decided the missing piece was a camera that captured cars rather than faces.
Ownership now sits mostly with venture capital. Flock raised $275 million in March 2025 at a $7.5 billion valuation, in a round that put roughly $950 million of total venture money into the company. Reporting in April 2026 put the valuation nearer $8.4 billion after the company authorized new shares. Its backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners and Greenoaks Capital.
That ownership structure explains more about Flock’s behavior than any policy document. A company carrying an $8 billion private valuation on roughly a billion dollars of venture money has to keep growing into it. Growth means more cameras in more towns, and it means the network gets more valuable to each customer as it gets larger, because a plate read in Revere is only useful to a detective in Ohio if the two departments are connected.
How the cameras actually work
There are three functions worth separating, because towns debating Flock contracts routinely mix them up.
The hotlist alert. A plate passes a camera. The system compares it in real time against loaded lists: stolen vehicles, warrants, AMBER Alerts, missing persons, and whatever custom list the department has built. A match pushes an alert to an officer’s phone within seconds. This is the function police describe in public meetings, and it is the least controversial one.
The historical search. Everything else that passes the camera is also stored, whether or not it matched anything. Standard retention is 30 days, and the customer agency sets it. During that window an officer can search backwards: show me every silver pickup with a roof rack that passed this intersection between 9 and 11 p.m. on the fourteenth. No warrant is required in most departments. This is the function that generates almost every scandal.
The network search. Agencies can opt to share lookups with other agencies, which is how a search run from a desk in Texas reaches cameras in Massachusetts. Flock’s national lookup network is the reason a local contract is never really local.
One clarification, because it is the most common misconception: a Flock camera is not a speed camera and it will not mail you a ticket. Massachusetts does not authorize automated speed or red light enforcement. If you get something in the mail, it did not come from one of these.
Is Flock Safety legal?
In Massachusetts, largely yes, and that is the problem people are actually complaining about when they ask this question.
There is no Massachusetts statute governing automated license plate readers. No warrant requirement, no retention cap, no audit mandate, no penalty aimed specifically at misuse. What governs a Flock deployment in a Massachusetts city is the contract the city signed and the policy the police department wrote for itself, and departments can revise their own policies.
The constitutional line is real but narrower than most people assume. In Commonwealth v. McCarthy, SJC-12750, decided April 16, 2020, the Supreme Judicial Court considered state police plate readers mounted on both sides of the Bourne and Sagamore bridges, which together created what the court called “a comprehensive record of vehicles traveling onto or off of the Cape.” Police used three months of that historical data, plus a real-time alert, to track a suspected heroin supplier.
The court’s conclusion is worth quoting exactly, because both sides of the current debate trim it. Justice Gaziano wrote that “while the defendant has a constitutionally protected expectation of privacy in the whole of his public movements, an interest which potentially could be implicated by the widespread use of ALPRs, that interest is not invaded by the limited extent and use of ALPR data in this case.”
Read that twice. The SJC recognized the privacy interest and then declined to find it invaded, because four cameras at two bridges were not widespread enough. It expressly flagged the widespread use of these systems as the scenario that could change the answer. A network of more than 100,000 cameras, searchable across state lines by agencies with no connection to Massachusetts, is a different object than the one decided in 2020, and no Massachusetts appellate court has yet ruled on it.
We go through the statutory and constitutional detail in our guide to whether Flock cameras are legal and what they record.
The misuse record
Flock’s defenders and its opponents both tend to overstate. The accurate version is more damaging to the company than the exaggerated one, so it is worth getting right.
Massachusetts: the Revere case
The clearest documented misuse in this state involves a Revere police officer, Michael Tiso, who ran the plate of a woman he had a personal relationship with through the camera network roughly a dozen times. His own department reviewed the conduct and cleared him before the search logs became public. We reported that case in detail, including what the logs show and what the department knew, in our account of the Tiso searches and in the public records fight that produced the logs.
The Revere matter is instructive because nothing about it required a hack, a leak, or a rogue outsider. An officer with ordinary credentials typed a plate into a normal search box. The system worked exactly as designed.
The Texas abortion search
In May 2025 it was reported that a sheriff’s office in Johnson County, Texas searched a nationwide pool of Flock cameras while investigating a woman’s self-managed abortion. Flock initially characterized the query as a missing person search. The episode is the standard example of the network problem: a Massachusetts city that shares lookups has no practical control over what an out-of-state agency is investigating when it reaches into the pool.
Immigration enforcement, and what the audits actually found
This is where careful reading matters. A 404 Media investigation in May 2025 documented more than 4,000 searches of Flock’s national database in which the stated justification referenced ICE or immigration. Flock removed federal agencies from its national lookup network in August 2025.
The Columbus, Ohio audit, covering 19,664,308 searches between November 1, 2023 and June 30, 2026, is more precise and gets misreported in both directions. ICE itself ran zero searches on that network. U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations ran 3,962, of which 657 were flagged as possibly immigration-related. Roughly 15,577 searches overall were identified as immigration-related, under a tenth of one percent of the total.
Both talking points you will hear are therefore wrong. “ICE is running searches on our cameras” was not true in Columbus. “No federal immigration searches happened” was also not true, because Homeland Security Investigations is an ICE component and it ran thousands. The honest summary is that the volume was small as a share of searches, that it was not zero, and that a city could not have told you either way without an audit it had to demand.
Cities leaving
By mid-2026 the departures had become the story. The Los Angeles Police Department announced in June 2026 that it would not renew, citing civil liberties and privacy concerns, and reporting through the summer counted more than fifty cities and counties ending Flock relationships during 2026. The ACLU has argued that the company repeatedly misrepresented its products to city councils and police departments, which is a credibility problem rather than a legal one, and credibility is what these contracts are approved on.
Can you opt out of Flock Safety?
As a driver on a public road, no. There is no consumer opt-out list, no form, and no setting. Flock’s customer is your police department, not you, and the legal theory supporting the whole system is that a license plate displayed on a public way carries no expectation of privacy in any single observation.
What you can do is narrower and still worth knowing:
- Ask your own department for its policy and its audit. Massachusetts public records law reaches police department policies and, as the Revere case established, the search logs themselves. A department that will not produce a usage audit is telling you something.
- Ask whether your town shares lookups nationally. This is a settable option, and it is the single most consequential term in the contract.
- Go to the city council meeting before the renewal, not after. These contracts are approved as routine budget items and renewed the same way.
- Find out where the cameras are. A volunteer project called DeFlock maps reported camera locations nationwide. We covered the project and the trademark fight Flock lost against it in our piece on DeFlock.
If you are a homeowner or a business rather than a driver, the calculation is different, because private customers including HOAs and companies like FedEx and Lowe’s buy these cameras directly.
Why your town said yes
Almost nobody sets out to authorize mass surveillance. The way these systems arrive is duller than that, and the dullness is the point.
A department gets a demonstration, often with a free or heavily discounted trial period. The pitch is built around the hotlist function, and it is a genuinely sympathetic pitch: stolen cars, AMBER Alerts, a missing elderly resident with dementia. Cost is modest per camera per year, small enough to sit inside an existing budget line rather than requiring a standalone vote. The item reaches the city council as a renewal or an equipment purchase, frequently on a consent agenda, and passes with the rest of the block.
What typically does not get debated at that meeting is the part that matters most: the retention period, whether the town shares lookups with the national network, who audits the searches, how often, and what happens to an officer who runs a plate for a personal reason. Those terms are settable. They are simply not what the conversation is about when the vote happens.
If you want to influence this in your own community, the leverage point is the renewal, and the useful questions are narrow:
- Do we share lookups outside Massachusetts, and with whom?
- What is our retention period, and why that number?
- Who reviews the search logs, how often, and has any review ever happened?
- What justification is an officer required to type, and is it ever checked?
- How many searches did we run last year, and how many led to a charge?
The last question is the one that tends to produce silence. Departments rarely track outcomes, which means the effectiveness case for these systems is usually asserted rather than measured.
What this means for a criminal case
Plate reader data cuts in both directions, and defense lawyers have been slow to use the second one.
For the prosecution, a Flock hit places a vehicle at a location at a time, which is powerful and unusually hard to argue with. For the defense, the same database can establish that a client’s car was six miles away, can undercut a witness who says they saw the car at the scene, and can expose an investigation that started from an improper search. Retention is short, typically 30 days, so a preservation request has to go out early or the exculpatory version of the record is gone.
Anyone whose case may involve this evidence should be asking, through counsel, how the data was obtained, whether the search was logged, what justification the officer typed, and whether the department has produced its audit.
Common questions
What is Flock Safety in one sentence?
A private Atlanta company that sells automated license plate reader cameras to police departments, businesses and homeowner associations, and operates the searchable national database those cameras feed.
Who owns Flock Safety?
It is privately held by its founders and venture investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners and Greenoaks Capital. Garrett Langley, who co-founded it in 2017 with Paige Todd and Matt Feury, is chief executive. It raised $275 million in March 2025 at a $7.5 billion valuation.
Is Flock Safety publicly traded?
No. There is no Flock Safety stock available to retail investors.
How long does Flock keep the data?
Thirty days by default, though the customer agency sets the retention period. Data tied to an active investigation can be preserved longer.
Do Flock cameras use facial recognition?
The plate reader product photographs vehicles, not drivers, and the company says it does not run facial recognition on that feed. Flock sells separate video products, which is why the question keeps resurfacing at council meetings.
Will a Flock camera give me a speeding ticket?
No. Massachusetts does not authorize automated speed or red light enforcement, and these are not speed cameras.
Can I find out if there is a Flock camera on my street?
Sometimes. The volunteer DeFlock map collects reported locations, and your police department’s contract and camera list are generally public records.
Is it legal for police to search the cameras without a warrant?
In Massachusetts there is no statute requiring one, and most departments permit searches on an officer’s own stated justification. Whether that survives constitutional challenge at the scale of the current network is unsettled.
Company scale, funding and controversy details as reported by Flock Safety, the ACLU, 404 Media, the Star Tribune, ABC 6 and Wikipedia’s compiled sourcing, 2022 through 2026. Columbus audit figures as published by the auditing agency and reported August 2026. General information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice, and not a substitute for consulting a lawyer about a specific case.