'Treated like a criminal:' Witnesses testify on abuse of Flock cameras

A Florida woman, Lindsey Isaacs, testified that a Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) image led to her being wrongly identified as the driver in a fatal crash, spending 13 days in jail and enduring solitary confinement, mental-health housing, public mugshot exposure, inmate harassment and denied bond before prosecutors dropped the case. Troopers had used a camera-captured image that placed her vehicle a few miles from the scene despite eyewitness reports of a different-colored car and the lack of damage to her vehicle; only when her attorney produced photos showing no crash damage was bond granted and charges later declined. Isaacs told senators the surveillance data became a central piece of an investigation that upended her life.

Lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, led by Josh Hawley, pressed Flock and other ALPR vendors about the technology’s reach and accuracy. Flock operates roughly 120,000 cameras across 49 states and reportedly catalogs some 20 billion images monthly in a searchable database that can be queried by plate, make, model, color, location, time and visual markers; company correspondence acknowledged the ability to search images of people, and Flock has applied for a patent that could enable individual tracking. About half of Flock’s customers are law enforcement. Other major suppliers include Axon, Motorola Solutions and Verkada; their CEOs did not attend. Law enforcement witnesses, including a sheriff who ended his agency’s contract, warned that private, government-funded camera networks risk creating an AI-driven dragnet and could prompt sweeping judicial pushback.