Editorial: The Flock License Plate Reader conundrum

Flock license-plate reader data is misused across U.S., but also helps local police department solve crimes.Our local city police department and county sheriff have had automated license plate readers operated and maintained by Flock Security in place in Johnson County for over a year, as previously reported in August 2024.They provide police departments additional visibility to help solve cases through alerts when a vehicle on the Crime Information Center hitlist or local hitlist drives past a camera, as well as 30 days of video records and license plate history. At the same time, Flock Security and its products have been at the center of data misuse challenges, including providing data to third parties.Mountain City's license-plate reader cameras are on U.S. 421 S., U.S. 421 N., at the corner of Main Street and Church Street and the corner of Forge Creek Road and Cross Roads Drive. The Mountain City Police Department is using these cameras, as well as over 1,600 others across Flock's US-wide system, for what they call "intelligence gathering," meaning they are used as clues to help apprehend someone, but they have not been, to date, used in court as evidence of a crime.Clues from the Mountain City license-plate readers have enabled the police to recover three stolen vehicles, make five drug-related case arrests, apprehend three wanted persons, make arrests related to three thefts and find one elderly person.On Nov. 3, 2025, the Mountain City Police Department and Johnson County Sheriff's Office of Criminal Investigation used the Flock camera network to locate a felony suspect in Banks County, Georgia. He is currently awaiting extradition back to Tennessee for trial on multiple felony warrants issued on Nov. 2.Mountain City's license-plate reader usage policy and regular usage audits assure that the system is being used ethically by the Mountain City Police Department. "It is my responsibility that if anything bad happens (with respect to use of these cameras), I am here to stop it," says Mountain City Police Chief Joey Norris.The risk of a cloud-based license-plate reader system is that Mountain City and Johnson County cannot know exactly how their camera data is being used. There is the potential for overreach and surveillance from outside of our community that we did not expect in exchange for inexpensive license-plate reader systems.In one case, a Kansas police chief used the Flock license-plate reader system 228 times for four months to track his ex-girlfriend. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection accessed cameras in Illinois in violation of state law. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used a local police officer's password to access Flock's license-plate reader system to search for a suspected "immigration violation." Several municipalities in Washington state have turned off their Flock cameras due to public concerns that the camera data could legally be requested by anyone.The 2024 agreement between Mountain City and Flock explains that Flock owns all captured data, and the data 'lives' on Flock servers. Therefore, Flock Security is legally and technical able to sell the data to whomever they wish. The publicly-traded software company Palantir collects and aggregates data from Flock with social media, other surveillance platforms, public records, school records, medical data and more. Palantir's customers include governments, law enforcement, and private businesses around the world, as well as building a $30 million surveillance platform for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).In August 2025, journalists uncovered that Flock shared license-plate reader data with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in a "pilot program" that police departments did not appear to know about or authorize. Norris does not have a way to audit who else is accessing Mountain City's license-plate reader data and the Mountain City Police Department have declined to provide the list of entities that they have permitted to access to Mountain City's license-plate reader data. In fact, Flock Safety itself also offers a platform called "Nova" that links license-plate reader detection images with the owner's identity, address, public records and other intelligence data. These systems do not require a warrant for search.The city and county can disable sharing license-plate reader data with any other organization on the network. Since Mountain City signed its contract in 2024, Flock updated its policy on their website to state that all captured data is the property of the customer. The city can update its contract to match the policy. While these changes would not guarantee Flock and its customers will not misuse the data, it would demonstrate due diligence by local authorities.Flock Security declined to comment on whether Flock sells (or openly provides) access to third parties for any camera data including captured data, data that is generated from the captured data, or resulting AI models.This article is based on public data and data requested from the Mountain City Police Department. The author has submitted the same data request to Johnson County and will publish an update based on that information once available.Karen Miller is a Mountain City freelancer.