Cops Searched Flock’s 19,000-Camera Surveillance Network for Reasons Like ‘LMAO’ and ‘IDK,’ EFF Finds

Police officers across the United States have repeatedly entered jokes, gibberish and other flippant answers into the mandatory “reason for search” field of Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader network, according to an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, raising fresh questions about oversight of one of the country’s fastest-growing surveillance systems.

Among the cases identified by the EFF, an officer with the Lake County, Indiana, Sheriff’s Department used Flock’s system in July 2025 to search for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras covering 1,558 cities and towns nationwide. The reason entered for that search, according to Flock’s own records, was “LMAO.”

The Lake County search was far from an isolated incident. In a separate example the EFF highlighted, a Goshen Police Department officer searched 6,474 ALPR networks, representing data from 82,413 cameras, on May 7, 2025. The stated reason for that search was “idk.” The organization’s broader review of Flock’s search logs turned up a wide range of similarly dismissive entries, including “LOL,” “Hehe,” “Haha,” “blah” and “TBD,” the last of which appeared in more than 6,300 searches across more than 30 different agencies. In one case, an officer wrote: “robbery I don’t remember the case number leave me alone.” Other entries reviewed by the EFF included profanity and dismissive remarks such as “idiot,” “shithead” and “WEIRD KID,” alongside an entire category of searches where officers appeared to simply mash their keyboards, entering strings like “asdfg” and “gyghkkghghjkghjk” in place of any substantive explanation.

The searches identified in the EFF’s analysis span police departments across the country between 2023 and late 2025, when Flock changed how its reason field functions. Under the system in place during that period, officers were required to type a free-text explanation before running a search across Flock’s network, which uses automated license plate readers to collect vehicle data and allows law enforcement agencies to search information gathered by cameras across different jurisdictions.

Flock has since replaced that free-text field with a list of pre-populated categories tied to standardized offense types, a change the company has described as an improvement to its oversight process. The EFF pushed back sharply on that characterization in its published findings. “Flock Safety claims it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a dropdown list of crimes before running a search, but that only makes it easier for officers to hide improper searches behind the veneer of uniformity,” the organization wrote. “The system does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the true purpose of the search. With no warrant requirements, limited guardrails, and deficient audit processes, ALPR databases have fostered a culture of unrestricted access to everyone’s location information.”

The EFF said it contacted police departments whose officers appeared in its analysis. Some agencies confirmed that the officers involved had been counseled over their conduct, while others said they intended to investigate or review the flagged searches further. The findings add to a broader body of research the organization has published on Flock’s network over the past year, including earlier investigations documenting the surveillance of protesters, what the EFF described as discriminatory targeting of Romani individuals, and the tracking of women seeking reproductive health care, drawn from a dataset of more than 12 million searches logged by roughly 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025.

The scrutiny of Flock’s oversight practices has already prompted some law enforcement agencies to reconsider their use of the technology. Several police departments in Arizona have ended their contracts with Flock in recent months, citing privacy concerns and instances of misuse identified in internal audits, with some of those departments’ contracts subsequently picked up by competing surveillance vendors such as Axon. A review of Flock network audit data in Arizona found that property crime accounted for roughly a quarter of logged searches, with drug and narcotics investigations, traffic infractions and wanted-person checks making up smaller but still substantial shares of overall search activity.

The controversy comes as Flock has received high-profile political backing. President Donald Trump publicly endorsed the company during remarks to reporters on Sunday, marking what reporting citing The Washington Post described as his first public endorsement of the technology. “I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump said, addressing criticism of the cameras. “They think it’s an infringement,” he added. “I like them.” Flock’s camera network has grown to more than 120,000 devices nationwide, according to the same reporting.

Flock markets its technology to police agencies and private communities as a tool for solving serious crimes, including carjackings, kidnappings and homicides, with automated license plate readers scanning passing vehicles and comparing captured plates against lists of vehicles police are actively seeking. Advocacy groups and independent researchers have separately built tools allowing members of the public to check whether their own license plates have been captured or searched within Flock’s network, reflecting growing public interest in understanding the scope of a surveillance system that now spans thousands of communities across the country.

The flippant search reasons documented by the EFF do not, by themselves, establish that any individual search was improper or unlawful, since the reason field’s content does not necessarily reflect an officer’s actual investigative purpose. But the findings have sharpened a broader debate over how much oversight should accompany a surveillance network capable of searching vehicle location data across thousands of jurisdictions simultaneously, particularly as Flock and competing ALPR providers continue expanding their camera networks nationwide with limited judicial oversight or standardized audit requirements governing how officers document their searches.