The Shaky Evidence That Flock Cameras Reduce Crime Rates

A working paper promoted by Flock Safety claims its automatic license plate reader (ALPR) network reduces motor vehicle theft and improves clearance times. The analysis used data from 216 law-enforcement agencies that adopted Flock between 2017 and 2023 and 3,108 agencies that did not, reporting an 11 percent drop in vehicle thefts, a 15.9 percent increase in theft arrests, and a 0.28‑day reduction in median recovery time for some recovered cars. Those headline numbers are the basis for Flock’s argument that fixed ALPR deployments produce measurable crime‑control benefits.

An Institute for Justice review led by Matthew West finds those causal claims unsupported. Agencies that adopted Flock were already on favorable arrest and theft trajectories before installations, many deployed cameras in response to prior spikes and alongside other anti‑crime measures, and key results depend on weighting choices: the 11 percent decline appears only when data emphasize agencies with larger initial problems, while population‑weighted or unweighted averages show no statistically significant theft reduction. West also flags confounders such as COVID lockdown effects and the viral “Kia Challenge” theft surge. Those problems don’t prove the reported effects false, but they undercut claims that ALPR deployment alone produced the observed improvements, leaving the surveillance technology’s true impact unresolved.