How to request your city's Flock audit logs

3 min readGuide

Send a public records request under your state's law to the police department or sheriff that runs the cameras, asking for its Flock search audit logs for a set date range in CSV or spreadsheet format, after checking whether its transparency portal already publishes a search audit.

What an audit log shows

Every search of a Flock system is logged. Flock Safety's LPR policy says each query records the username, a timestamp and the stated purpose. An audit log is the list of those searches: who looked, when, and the reason they gave.

Released logs have exposed misuse. In Milwaukee, an officer ran 179 searches on an ex-partner and her new partner, each logged as “investigation,” and it came out when one of them looked up her own plate in released logs, 404 Media reported.

Check the transparency portal first

Flock says a transparency portal can include a public search audit showing the case number, search reason, offense type, an anonymized user ID and how many cameras or networks each search covered. If your agency's portal has one, start there. It won't name the officers, and a records request might.

Find your agency's portal

File the request

The federal FOIA doesn't cover city or county police. The Justice Department notes that FOIA applies only to federal executive branch records and that every state has its own law for state and local records. Send the request under your state's law to whoever runs the cameras, which could be a police department, a sheriff, a university or another public body.

Name a date range and a machine-readable format. Some agencies have answered open-ended requests with PDF screenshots that can't be sorted or searched. This wording has been filed and answered through MuckRock:

User account audit logs documenting each time a department account has conducted a search or taken another action on the department's ALPR system from [DATE] until the date this request is processed. Please provide in database format (.csv or .xls).

Ask who else searched your cameras

Ask for the outside-agency log too: which other agencies had access to your city's cameras, and which of them ran searches. That record set off several of the 2025 and 2026 contract cancellations after Illinois audited it.

Records identifying all external agencies granted access to [AGENCY]'s ALPR network, and all searches run by external or federal agencies against that network, from [DATE] to present.

More request wording and what happened next

What to expect

Expect redactions. Plate numbers, search reasons and case numbers are often withheld, and some agencies reply that no records exist. Deadlines, fees and appeal rights vary by state.

Courts have backed access in at least one state. In November 2025 a Washington state court ruled that Flock camera images held by Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley are public records, even though Flock stores them. MuckRock can file a request for you and publishes the responses.

Search logs that are already public

Have I Been Flocked? collects Flock audit logs released through records requests and transparency portals, and lets you search for a plate. A match shows that someone searched for that plate, with the stated reason and, where released, the operator's name. The site notes that a match doesn't mean you were stopped or investigated, and that its data is incomplete.

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Questions people ask

Can I find out if police searched my license plate in Flock?
Sometimes. Search your plate on Have I Been Flocked?, which collects audit logs already released. For your own agency, file a public records request for its Flock search audit logs for a set date range. Released logs often redact plate numbers, so a request may not answer the question for one plate.
Are Flock audit logs public records?
It depends on the state's records law, and many agencies have released them. A Washington state court ruled in November 2025 that Flock camera images held by two cities are public records even though Flock stores them.
Should I ask for the camera images instead?
Usually not. Agencies routinely refuse image requests from the public, while search audit logs are more often released. Ask for the logs in a spreadsheet format with a set date range.
Does FOIA apply to my local police department?
No. The federal FOIA covers federal executive branch agencies only. Every state has its own public records law for state and local agencies, and that is the law to cite in a request to a city police department or sheriff.

Related guides

How long does Flock keep license plate data? · How to find Flock cameras near you · What are Flock cameras, and how do they work? · All guides · Live camera map · Get the app

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