Over 100,000 AI cameras. More than 3,000 law enforcement agencies. Flock Safety has quietly built a surveillance network that tracks cars across America. The system creates "vehicle fingerprints" logging color, make, model, dents, bumper stickers, and wheel type. A feature called Convoy Analysis even tracks which vehicles appear near each other repeatedly, mapping associations between drivers without warrants.
A journalist drove 300 miles through rural Virginia. Nearly 50 cameras across 15 agencies captured his trip. When he requested his own footage, he found patterns that made his movements "predictable to anyone looking at it."
That's one drive.
The racial disparity hits harder. In Oak Park, Illinois, 84% of drivers stopped based on Flock alerts were Black. The town is 21% Black, according to Freedom to Thrive. And in Kansas, a police chief used the system 228 times to stalk his ex-girlfriend and her new partner.
Flock was founded in 2017 by Georgia Tech graduates Garrett Langley and Timothy McCluskey after a neighborhood burglary went unsolved. Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round in 2022, pushing the company past a $3 billion valuation. That cash bought speed. Cameras go up faster than communities can debate whether they want them.
A Virginia judge compared the Flock network to putting GPS trackers on every car in a city. The Supreme Court has said that requires a warrant.
The Stop Flock advocacy site compiled this research and makes a blunt case: real public safety comes from investing in communities, not tracking them. Private companies now collect and sell surveillance data with fewer restrictions than government agencies face. Companies like Webloc and Fog Data Science have shown how easily this data can be weaponized against individuals without warrants. The cameras aren't going away. The question is whether anyone will set rules before the next abuse.
Florida's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission police are using Flock Safety's license plate scanners to perform searches for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).