Flock's "Immutable" Logs Aren't Anymore

Introduction

In November 2025, Flock Safety's company blog made a promise: "Immutable accountability. Every user action and search reason is recorded in an indefinitely available audit trail." Three weeks later, on December 11, 2025, Flock stripped officer names, searched plates, vehicle fingerprints, and search reasons from the Network Audit Logs it shares between agencies. Within weeks the same data fields had been used by civilians to expose officer stalking, and Flock pulled the fields out of the cross-agency view.

The Logs That Worked Until They Worked Too Well

Flock Safety operates roughly 80,000 automated license plate reader cameras across more than 5,000 U.S. police agencies and 1,000 businesses in 49 states. One officer's search can sweep tens of thousands of cameras at once. The pitch to skeptical city councils has always been the same: yes, this is a national surveillance grid, but every search is logged with the officer's name, the plate searched, and the stated reason, and those logs are "immutable." That's the exact language from Flock's own marketing, used while San Jose grew from four cameras at a single intersection in 2021 to 475 cameras running roughly 15,000 searches per day by late 2025.

I covered the broader Flock network in a prior piece on discriminatory searches, protest surveillance, and the ICE data-sharing side door. This one is about what happened when the safeguard Flock sold actually started working.

The trigger was a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com, built by technologist Cris van Pelt after police departments inadvertently released unredacted audit logs through public records requests. Those logs contained data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of searches. For a few months, you could type a plate into a free civilian site and see which officers had run it, when, and what they typed into the reason field. That's how the Milwaukee stalking victim found out she was being tracked.

The Sixteen Cases

The Institute for Justice has compiled a running list, updated May 13, 2026, of 16 documented cases of officers using ALPR systems (including Flock) to stalk romantic partners, exes, or strangers. The bulk of those incidents happened in 2024 or later. Nearly all of the officers were criminally charged, and most lost their jobs.

The case sizes are not small. Sedgwick, Kansas Police Chief Lee Nygaard tracked his ex-girlfriend's vehicle 228 times over four-plus months in 2024 and followed her in his patrol car; he faced no criminal charges. Jerome County, Idaho Sheriff George Oppedyk ran more than 700 searches for his wife's vehicle between July and September 2025; the state attorney general accepted his "system reliability test" rationale and found no crime. Oppedyk retired two years early in April 2026.

Then there's Milwaukee. Officer Josue Ayala, an 8-year MPD veteran earning roughly $120,000, was charged in February 2026 with misconduct in public office for 179 unauthorized searches: 124 of his dating partner's plate and 55 of her ex's, over two months in spring 2025. He typed "investigation" into the reason field (sometimes misspelled), and nothing inside Milwaukee PD or Flock flagged it. His victim discovered the searches because she checked HaveIBeenFlocked.com herself. Ayala resigned in a March 2026 plea deal.

According to IJ's review, only Niceville FL, Kenosha WI, and Jerome County ID were initially surfaced through internal police audit. The rest came to light because victims reported the stalking themselves, or because civilian tools built on top of public audit data made the searches visible to outsiders.

December 11, 2025

On December 11, 2025, Flock updated its system. The Network Audit Logs, which were the cross-agency view that civilian tools relied on, would no longer include officer names, the specific plates searched, vehicle fingerprint information, or the open-text search reasons. Flock VP Chris Colwell explained the change in a December 9 email obtained by Footnote4a and 404 Media; the data, he said, was being removed "to protect officer safety and active investigations."

The change was retroactive. Flock didn't just stop recording these fields going forward. It also went back and replaced unique officer identifiers in public Transparency Portals with the word "REDACTED." Around the same time, Flock tried to get HaveIBeenFlocked.com taken down via a Cloudflare abuse report. Cloudflare declined, but the data feeding the site has been hollowed out anyway.

The "immutable accountability" blog post is dated November 2025. The stripping took effect December 11. The Milwaukee Ayala criminal complaint was filed February 25, 2026. Flock removed the data more than two months before the case that would have most dramatically validated the audit-trail product became national news, by which point HaveIBeenFlocked.com had already been doing the validation work for free.

The PR Product Where the Logs Used to Be

Seven weeks after Ayala was charged, on April 16, 2026, Flock launched "Audit Assistance" at no additional cost as part of its Trust & Compliance suite. The feature "automatically surfaces search patterns that deviate from an agency's typical usage." CPO and co-founder Paige Todd said in the press release: "Public safety technology should come with the same built-in accountability standards we expect from any other tool officers use on the job." The release never names the stalking cases or the December 11 data stripping that preceded it by four months.

Audit Assistance routes flagged patterns back to the agency itself, which decides whether to investigate. That's the same arrangement under which Milwaukee PD missed Ayala's searches entirely for two months. Surfacing now happens inside Flock's walls, and the cross-agency civilian-readable audit data that actually caught officers is gone.

What the Terms and Conditions Say

The other place this story lives is the Flock Safety Terms and Conditions, last updated February 16, 2026. Officers are required to operate within a "Permitted Purpose," and Authorized End Users must enter a reason for each search. The contract specifies no verification step for that reason. There's no required audit-review frequency for the Customer either, and no real-time anomaly-detection requirement on Flock's side. Whatever's in the free-text field is whatever the officer typed.

What the contract does specify is liability. Flock's aggregate liability "will not exceed the total amount paid by Customer to Flock in the twelve (12) months before such claim arose." Enforcement gets pushed onto the police department: the contract assigns the Customer responsibility for "any use of data, information, or services obtained through the Flock Services by Authorized End Users." So "accountability built into our system by design" (Flock's exact phrase in its Milwaukee statement) is contractually optional. If nobody at the agency looks at the audit data, Flock's exposure caps at last year's invoice.

Who Benefits

Flock benefits. The company raised $275 million in March 2025 at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz's third investment. That valuation depends on contract retention across 5,000-plus agencies, and retention got harder in 2025 and 2026: Appleton WI, Dane County WI, Los Altos CA, Austin TX, Evanston IL, Eugene OR, and Scarsdale NY all canceled or paused Flock contracts after negative coverage that leaned on audit-log data. Strip the data and the evidentiary spine of the cancellation argument goes with it. Ship a glossy product six weeks later, and councils have something to cite when constituents ask whether the company has responded.

The federal footprint is small but matters. USAspending lists a $232,000 purchase order from the U.S. Park Police for D.C.-area ALPR deployment (Sept 2025 to Sept 2027), and a $44,000 order from the VA. Most of Flock's revenue lives in municipal contracts, but the federal contracts are where a future warrant requirement would attach if Congress wrote one.

The losers are everyone whose plate is in the system. Your license plate is searchable by any officer at 5,000-plus agencies. No warrant required, no supervisor approval, no automatic alert when searches against your plate spike. The Milwaukee victim found out she had been searched repeatedly only because she checked a civilian website herself. That route is now narrower — Audit Assistance routes the alert to the agency, not to you.

The Pattern Flock Just Confirmed

The audit trail was the political product Flock sold to councils so they'd say yes to the cameras. When the trail started producing the wrong stories, Flock degraded the data and shipped a marketing product that uses the word "audit" in its name. The design problem isn't unique to the stalking cases — it's baked into the accountability architecture itself.

The design pattern is industry standard rather than Flock-specific: self-reported reason field, no verification, no mandatory audit cadence, customer-side enforcement, liability cap at 12 months of fees. Axon and Motorola Solutions' VIGILANT use the same architecture. EFF's May 26, 2026 mission creep report found agencies running Flock searches for school residency verification (Buford City Schools alone ran 375-plus residency searches across more than 5,800 networks per query), as well as for employment background checks and noise complaints. None of that violates Flock's terms, because the terms define "Permitted Purpose" to cover anything an agency calls a "legitimate public safety and/or business purpose."

States are starting to notice. Washington's SB 6002 took effect March 30, 2026, the first state-level ALPR usage restrictions on the books. IJ has filed federal class actions against Norfolk (October 2024) and San Jose (April 15, 2026) arguing warrantless ALPR searches violate the Fourth Amendment, with no appellate ruling yet. Meanwhile, Arizona's SB 1111, a police-backed Republican bill, would shield ALPR audit data from public records requests entirely, closing the civilian-records pipeline that produced HaveIBeenFlocked.com. Connecticut has a similar pending bill. The legislative fight has shifted from whether the cameras get installed to whether anyone outside the agency gets to see what they were used for.

No Record, No Reckoning

The open question is whether anyone with subpoena power closes the gap before the records pipeline gets legislatively shut. Krishnamoorthi and Wyden's November 2025 letter to the FTC urged an investigation; no public action has followed. The IJ class actions are pending. The Arizona and Connecticut transparency-shield bills are live. If those bills pass and the FTC stays silent, the next stalking case stays inside the agency that ran the searches.