Records show police justified Flock license plate searches with answers like “LMAO” and “idk”

A hot potato: Warrantless database searches are a central part of the growing controversy around Flock’s AI-powered camera surveillance network. As police officers keep getting caught abusing the company’s license plate readers, a new analysis of its search records suggests the problem runs deeper than isolated incidents and hint at the true scale of the issue.

Search logs from Flock’s Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) database show that, over the past few years, officers across the US have routinely searched the system without offering any legitimate justification. And the company’s own fix for the problem may have made it worse.

The records, obtained by the EFF through a public records request, show officers repeatedly typing flippant or nonsensical answers into the mandatory “reason for search” field. Common entries included “LMAO,” “lol,” “idk,” and outright strings of random keyboard mashing.

Flock’s ALPRs, now deployed across thousands of US communities, use AI to log passing vehicles’ plates into a searchable cloud database that officers can use to reconstruct people’s movements. Unlike a search of someone’s cell phone location history, pulling data from Flock’s database does not require a warrant.

Officers are supposed to document a reason for every search, but plenty have simply ignored that requirement. It’s one of the core complaints about Flock’s system, alongside the dozens of officers who’ve been caught using it to stalk women.

The throwaway search justifications span roughly 2023 into 2026, even after Flock began pushing officers toward a drop-down menu of pre-set reasons in late 2025 instead of a free-text field. However, instead of fixing the issue, the change might have pushed officers to obscure random searches behind seemingly legitimate causes. Many simply select “other.”

Concerns about mass surveillance and false positives have pushed numerous towns to cancel their Flock contracts. People are also regularly caught destroying the company’s cameras outright, and rival ALPR vendors are trying to distance themselves from Flock’s reputation while marketing hardware that does essentially the same thing.

Flock, for its part, says new contracts far outnumber cancellations – and in at least one case, the company reinstalled its cameras without permission after a city had already removed them. Flock and its competitors are also expanding beyond stationary plate readers: the company’s fastest-growing business is now drones that read license plates from the sky, and police departments nationwide are increasingly using them for live surveillance, often for calls that aren’t emergencies at all.