flock safety

The following is a detailed overview of Flock Safety, including the company’s products and their capabilities and capacities.

This is mostly collected via open source research and will be updated over time. Please contact us at sassisouth@proton.me if you would like to contribute to this.

  • Flock Safety was founded in 2017 in Atlanta by Garret Langley. The Georgia Tech graduate says that he was inspired to create the product after his Atlanta community experienced a rise in crime. Soon after, he started selling automated license plate readers to homeowners associations, businesses, and other private entities before adding police. With more than 4,500 customers across the country, Flock has grown dramatically in a few short years and offers multiple products which perpetuate the criminalization of Black, brown, and poor communities.

  • Flock Safety has benefitted from and furthered the rapid growth of the police surveillance industry. While Flock now sells multiple products, this section will mostly focus on the company’s ALPR product:

    • Flock is a for-profit company who profits from crime and has no interest in ending it.

      • Flock Safety sells ALPRs to police, homeowners associations, and businesses in order to make money, lots of it. Their profit is driven by fear and the continuation of crime and violence in communities. As a result, Flock and their investors have no interest in creating a product that addresses the root causes of crime, conflict, and violence. Spending thousands on ALPRs will never create safe communities.

    • ALPRs have not been conclusively proven to deter or reduce crime

      • Tracking and tracing our cars can’t prevent crime from happening, and there isn’t comprehensive evidence that ALPRs actually reduce crime. Surveillance, in general, doesn’t make people more safe. 

    • ALPRs are always on and always recording.

      • ALPRs are dragnet surveillance and violate civil liberties and civil rights, especially those of Black, brown, and poor people. Everyone is surveilled with ALPRs but a specific group of people are criminalized.

    • ALPRs, like other police surveillance technologies, are used in ways that reinforce racist police practices.

      • ALPRs are routinely deployed in discriminatory and racist ways.

    • ALPRs are often sold as a crime prevention or forensics tool but they can be used for other purposes that hurt criminalized communities.

      • Despite claims by elected officials that ALPRs keep communities safe, many elected officials want ALPRs to track cars and people with unpaid fines and fees.

      • Many cars added to local “hot lists” which trigger alerts to police when an ALPR scans the license plate are only added to the “hot list” because the driver has outstanding fines or fees. There’s no real mechanism for holding police accountable to which cars are added to hot lists.

      • ALPR data will be used to criminalize people for abortions.

        • Anti-abortion activists have long surveilled abortion clinics, where they would collect license plate information. This practice is now digitized and the government owns the data through the expansion of ALPRs. Flock’s TALON network is one instance of where people seeking abortions may be criminalized.

      • Sanctuary city policies for abortions or immigration are nearly impossible to enforce.

        • Due to the presence of a Fusion Center in every state, there are major holes which allow for data to be shared across police departments. In response to “Sanctuary” status laws designed to protect undocumented people, ICE has been able to access data via Fusion Centers or simply through government entities sharing data with data brokers. 

        • One expert said, “If abortion is criminalized, fusion centers would undoubtedly play a role in tracking any person or organization assisting those seeking abortions.” (​​Who Becomes A "Terrorist" in Post-Roe America?)

        • In Cook County, county officials shared data criminalizing undocumented people with LexisNexis, which was then shared with ICE despite the City of Chicago passing a Sanctuary city ordinance. (to add: mijente sign on letter)

    • There are few mechanisms, if any, for ensuring that ALPRs are used in a way that doesn’t violate laws.

      • There’s little that can be done to ensure police follow any laws regulating their use of ALPRs and data.

    • Flock Safety offers a program called TALON, now integrated into FlockOS, that puts everyone’s safety and privacy at risk.

      • TALON is a nationwide database network where license plate scans from every Flock customer are shared with other customers. This network enables a car to be tracked as it drives from jurisdiction to jurisdiction across the country and police are able to access data that is outside of their own jurisdiction. With several thousand customers, Flock customers can potentially follow a car as it drives across the country, even if the car is not on a hot list. TALON is offered to customers for free.

    • ALPRs are machines and, like all machines, they make mistakes. This can lead to dangerous encounters for community members who are mistakenly stopped by police when there is a faulty license plate read. 

      • There are many documented cases of ALPRs misreading license plates which have led to encounters where cops pull someone over and pull their gun on a driver of a car that was mistakenly read to be on the hot list. Studies show that ALPRs misread license plates at least 10% of the time.

    • ALPR technology can be used on any image from any camera from anywhere.

      • The technology to read license plates, similar to the technology that can scan and “read” a pdf, can be used on any image or footage taken by any camera. An OCR scan is not limited to Flock’s or any other ALPR vendor's cameras. This opens a wide net and where, when, and how people can be surveilled. If your city has a contract with Flock and existing surveillance cameras or Ring cameras, those can be used to supplement Flock’s camera network.

  • Products

    • ALPRs

      1. Falcon

        1. Known Clients: Louisville, Bloomington, Champaign, Peoria, Oak Park, Niles, Shelby County (Memphis), Fort Worth, Fort Myers Beach,

        2. Deployed with over 1,500 customers (Flock website, April 1, 2022).

        3. Homeowners Associations were a primary market before moving into police

        4. Cameras cost roughly $2,500/each. Significantly less than Motorola’s Vigilant Solutions product, Flock’s primary competitor.

      2. Falcon LR: ALPR cameras for highways

      3. Falcon Flex: ALPR cameras for temporary installation 

    • Video Cameras

      1. Condor: video-as-a-surveillance

        1. Framed as a complement to the ALPRs

        2. Surveillance cameras for capturing video footage.

      2. Wing

        1. Software that distills thousands of hours of camera footage into easy to search frames. This is used with the company’s “Vehicle Fingerprint” technology to identify not just license plates but other distinguishable features of cars.

    • Software

      1. FlockOS/Talon

        1. Real time crime center software designed for integrating multiple surveillance technologies. 

      2. FlockOS 911: A new partnership, as of 2/24, with Prepared, a company that integrates AI tech into 911 calls. 

      3. Advanced Search

        1. A tool that has now been wrapped into FlockOS. This feature allowed for users to upload still images and photos not taken with Flock cameras for review. This dramatically expanded the power of Flock as the Flock software was no longer exclusive to Flock cameras.

      4. Camera Network Expansion

        1. A new feature that allows users to upload a picture of a vehicle from any source, including private cameras like Ring cameras, and then perform a search to see if any of the company’s cameras have seen it.

      5. Convoy Analysis

        1. “Convoy analysis allows users to enter a license plate number, and then search cameras to find vehicles that frequently travel with that vehicle. The idea is to help identify accomplices to crimes — for instance, when multiple people regularly steal vehicles, they might drive to a location in one car, and then the two vehicles might drive away together. By entering the license plate of the stolen vehicle, an officer might be able to find the car they drove to the theft site.”

      6. Multi-Geo Search 

        1. “Multi-geo search gives users the ability to search for vehicles that have been in multiple specified locations recently. The idea is that if an officer knows or suspects that multiple incidents in different locations are connected, they can perform a search to see if any vehicles were spotted in the given locations and then use that information as a lead to find a suspect.”

      7. Vehicle Fingerprint Technology: Identifying Car Features - not just License Plates

        1. “The company has designed its software to recognize vehicle features such as paint color, type of vehicle and distinguishing features such as roof racks.”

    • Audio Detection/gunshot detection technology

      1. Raven

        1. Known Clients: Peoria, Champaign (Given Raven as part of promotion for signing ALPR contract at end of 2021)

        2. Gunshot detection technology is highly controversial and there’s little evidence it actually works as promised by vendors like ShotSpotter and Flock.

        3. Took this product to market in late 2021. Initially, they sold this tech in conjunction with their ALPRs.

        4. Have expanded into other jurisdictions but there is weariness around signing contracts since the technology is relatively new. 

    • Drones

      1. Flock Aerodome

        • Flock recently purchased Aerodome and is now offering “drones-as-first-responders” technology.

  • Flock has had multiple problems with obtaining proper permits and licenses.

    Flock has faced multiple lawsuits claiming the company’s ALPR system violates constitutionally protected rights.

    Flock funded a study claiming that the company’s products are instrumental in solving 10% of crime in the US.