A Cop's Case for Flock

A police officer makes a case for Flock Safety’s automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras as a precision tool that reduces police intrusion while improving crime detection. Flock, founded in 2017, sells solar roadside ALPR units that photograph vehicles, record make and color, read plates, and instantly check them against national and local hotlists; a typical annual subscription is about $3,000 and nearly 30 percent of U.S. police agencies subscribe. Evidence cited includes a working paper finding a 15.9 percent relative increase in recovered stolen cars for adopters (raising the national solve rate from 8.2 to about 9.5 percent), Atlantic City’s post-expansion drops in motor-vehicle thefts (20%), property crime (34%) and fatal shootings (almost 40%), and Flock’s claim that its data helps solve roughly 10 percent of reported crime. Officers can run time- and feature-filtered lookups tied to case numbers and hotlists; the system does not identify drivers or scan phones.

The piece acknowledges the recent backlash - more than 150 jurisdictions have deactivated or canceled contracts and cameras have been vandalized - rooted in fears of abuse, stalking and constitutional intrusion. It details real misuse incidents (an Institute for Justice count of 51 since 2024, with most officers charged or fired) and common technical problems (misreads, stolen-front-plate confusion), but stresses built-in protections: required reason codes, case-numbered hotlist entries, seven-day retention, audits and automated flags. Legal precedent is invoked (a 1983 Supreme Court holding on no expectation of privacy in public movements and a January 2026 federal ruling that plate scans don’t invade privacy). The argument: keep ALPR with strict oversight and penalties for abuse rather than banning a tool that measurably improves precision in policing.