Flock Cuts Data Retention After Police Misuse

Flock Safety, one of the country's largest operators of automated license plate readers, said Thursday it will force every law enforcement customer to accept privacy safeguards that until now were optional.

The default retention period for vehicle location data drops from 30 days to seven.

Officers will have to tie every vehicle search to a specific criminal case and offense type, and Flock's automated auditing system — previously switched on by only about one-third of agencies — will run across the entire network to flag unusual searches.

The company acted after reporting documented officers using plate readers to track girlfriends, ex-wives and other romantic interests.

What Actually Changed

Retention: Default storage of plate data falls from 30 days to seven. Agencies can preserve records tied to active investigations through a new "Evidence Mode," and can adopt longer retention only with approval from their governing body.

Search justification: Every search must be linked to a specific case and offense type — no more open-ended lookups.

Auditing: Flock's automated auditing tool becomes mandatory across all law enforcement customers rather than an opt-in feature.

Cross-agency access: Departments can specify which categories of investigations outside agencies may use their camera data for — permitting homicide or kidnapping searches, for example, while blocking searches tied to immigration enforcement.

The mandatory rules are set to take effect Jan. 1 for law enforcement customers.

The Backlash That Forced It

The Washington Post identified at least 50 officers accused, charged or convicted of misusing Flock or other plate-reader systems, and later confirmed more than a dozen additional cases, according to The National Desk. Recent allegations have surfaced in Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.

More than 50 agencies or jurisdictions have canceled, suspended, rejected or deactivated Flock deployments this year, according to The National Desk, as critics across the political spectrum raised Fourth Amendment, immigration enforcement and mass surveillance objections.

Flock's network runs roughly 120,000 cameras and produces about 20 billion plate scans a month.