What are Flock cameras, and how do they work?

The hardware

A fixed Flock Safety license plate reader is a compact camera on a pole. The City of Campbell, California, which uses them, says Flock cameras run on solar and battery power and send data over LTE cellular. That setup needs no power line and no wired internet connection.

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What a Flock camera records

The system is designed to capture passing vehicles and read their plates. Flock's software also describes the vehicle itself, and Flock says it recognizes thousands of vehicle characteristics. The City of Campbell describes the captures as license plates and vehicle characteristics, not people or faces. Each record carries the time and the camera's location.

A vehicle does not need to be on a hotlist to generate a record. Coverage, camera direction and capture conditions affect whether a particular passage is recorded; a map point cannot prove a capture. In a lawsuit over Norfolk, Virginia's cameras, the city's data showed one plaintiff's car logged 526 times in about four months, NBC News reported.

Flock Safety says its license plate readers do not use facial recognition. Its separate FreeForm product offers people searches by visible attributes in enabled video feeds; those searches should not be confused with biometric face matching.

Hotlist alerts

Flock compares each plate it reads against hotlists, which are lists of plates police want to find, such as stolen cars. Flock says agencies get alerts when a vehicle matches “a customer-defined or NCIC hot list.” NCIC is the FBI's National Crime Information Center.

A hit gives an officer a lead to check. It can be wrong. EFF has documented drivers stopped at gunpoint after a reader misread a plate, and a driver flagged because a stolen-car list was never updated.

Searching past reads

Police can also search stored reads by plate or by vehicle description. Flock's LPR policy says every query is logged with the username, a timestamp and the stated purpose. Flock says police searches will require a case code by the end of 2026.

Searches can reach far beyond one town, because agencies can share their camera networks with each other. Flock describes its network as connected across 49 states. In one 2025 Texas case documented by EFF, a single search reached 6,809 networks and 83,345 cameras.

How long reads last, and who else sees them

Flock's published default is to delete plate reads after 7 days, and each agency can set a different period within its state's law. Flock Safety says its customers own the data and decide who can search it.

Federal agencies have reached local networks anyway. The University of Washington Center for Human Rights found U.S. Border Patrol searches running across Washington camera networks in 2025, in several cases through departments that had never knowingly turned on federal sharing.

How long Flock keeps data

Related guides

Do Flock cameras use facial recognition? · Do Flock cameras track speed or give tickets? · Can the public view Flock camera footage? · How long does Flock keep license plate data? · How to request your city's Flock audit logs · How to avoid Flock cameras, legally · All guides · Live camera map · Get the app