Every entry below happened, is dated, and links to reporting or a primary document. The sections follow the questions residents ask about these systems: whether the data reaches federal agencies, whether it can follow someone to a clinic or a protest, whether an officer can use it on someone they know, whether it stops the wrong person, whether its use is disclosed, whether it leaks, and what the companies do when a town says no. Entries marked NC happened in North Carolina. Charges are called charges, not convictions. Corrections welcome; this page is meant to be checked.
Federal and immigration reach
Date
What happened
Source
May 27, 2025
Local police in 5,000-plus communities ran more than 4,000 nationwide or statewide Flock lookups with reasons including “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,” “illegal immigration,” and “ICE WARRANT”; every lookup listing “immigration” came after January 2025
Customs and Border Protection had access to more than 80,000 Flock cameras through a pilot; one department said it did not know it was sharing; Flock “paused all federal pilots”
ICE’s HSI (nearly 200 searches), the Secret Service, and Navy investigators had access to the network; Sen. Wyden to Flock: abuses “are not only likely but inevitable”
Henderson County’s sheriff lists 2,048 agencies with access to his plate reads, including the FBI, the US Postal Inspection Service, an Air Force base, and HIDTA
North Carolina law permits disclosure to “a similar official at a federal law enforcement agency” on written request and requires no log (What the Law Lets the County Do).
Sharing in violation of state law
Date
What happened
Source
2015 to 2023
California barred out-of-state plate-data sharing in 2015; agencies continued for eight years before the state Department of Justice issued a bulletin; the 2020 State Auditor found major agencies did “little to no auditing” of searches
Flock removed Illinois, California, and Virginia agencies from National Lookup after the ICE and abortion searches, because those states’ laws bar such sharing; North Carolina’s does not
Memphis police ran fake social-media accounts to monitor Black Lives Matter activists, in violation of a federal consent decree in force since 1978; an ACLU lawsuit and trial established it
San Francisco police monitored a business district’s 300-plus camera network live for eight days during the George Floyd protests, without the approval the city’s surveillance ordinance required
The NYPD used facial recognition on an Instagram photo to identify a protest organizer, then held his apartment building for five hours without producing a warrant
A Johnson County, Texas deputy searched 83,000-plus cameras across 6,809 networks, including in states where abortion is legal, for a woman who had self-managed an abortion, logged as “had an abortion, search for female”; the sheriff called it a welfare check
North Carolina is the second-largest destination state for abortion care; through August 2026 Asheville’s plate data reached a 500-mile radius (Who Gets Watched).
Officers using it on people they know
Date
What happened
Source
2016
The AP documented officers disciplined more than 325 times in two years for misusing confidential law-enforcement databases; no national tracking existed then or now
A Kechi, Kansas police lieutenant tracked his estranged wife through a neighboring department’s Flock account and texted her “You were spotted”; he pleaded guilty and received 18 months’ probation
A Jerome County, Idaho sheriff’s more than 700 searches for his wife’s vehicle came out through a television station’s records requests; the state attorney general found no crime, and the sheriff retired early
KMVT records requests; see “How the cases came to light” below
2026
A New Bedford, Massachusetts officer was accused of tracking an ex-girlfriend; a judge found “substantial likelihood of immediate danger of abuse”; the city suspended its Flock program
”More than a dozen” officers arrested nationwide for using Flock to stalk; an Orange City, Florida officer ran his ex-girlfriend’s plate 69-plus times and her parents’ plates 39 more
A Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer was charged on an SBI affidavit with looking up a plate in Flock and CJLEADS at the request of the target of a Watauga County drug investigation; the plate was an undercover officer’s. The SBI found it from its own investigation and notified CMPD; the charge is a Class 1 misdemeanor, the first in North Carolina over a Flock search
The Washington Post counted at least 50 officers charged with or accused of misusing plate readers against partners, former partners, and women they wanted to meet, 46 of them on Flock; in most cases the victims discovered the surveillance themselves, and audit logs were “usually reviewed only after receiving complaints”
A Mooresville officer was arrested for searching Flock 31 times to track a boyfriend’s ex-wife, 29 searches logged as “motor vehicle infractions” and 2 as burglary investigations; the department’s monthly audit flagged the pattern. After the arrest the department began requiring an active case number per search
The same Mooresville audit flagged ten more officers; the department’s review found “several policy violations,” brought no further charges, and referred the officers to an internal personnel process it does not discuss publicly. Under G.S. 160A-168 the personnel outcomes are not public records
Colleton County, South Carolina fired a sheriff’s lieutenant after an audit found more than 2,700 unauthorized Flock searches over about a year involving 14 people (the audit was ordered Aug 11, Flock’s audit tool enabled Aug 12, the misuse identified Aug 13); a second lieutenant was fired after the same review found 62 unauthorized searches, including vehicles registered to his spouse, and the sheriff asked the state law enforcement division to investigate
Brunswick County’s sheriff announced that a routine audit had flagged possible Flock misuse, that an internal affairs investigation followed, that the employee resigned, and that the matter was referred to the SBI; the office said it is building a Flock transparency portal. The sheriff’s statement: “Public trust requires more than simply having policies in place.”
Across the cases above, the misuse was found by: the person being tracked, through complaints or protective orders (most of the Washington Post’s 50); a civilian-built website (a Milwaukee officer’s about 180 searches surfaced through HaveIBeenFlocked.com); a television station’s records requests (the Jerome County sheriff, via KMVT); a news outlet’s bulk requests for audit logs (the immigration and abortion searches, 404 Media); an unrelated SBI investigation (Charlotte); and, from August 2026, departmental audits (Mooresville, Colleton County, Brunswick County, the Georgia agencies), most of them begun after the national coverage of that summer.
Audit logs and reason fields
Date
What happened
Source
2025
EFF’s analysis of 11.4 million Flock searches found more than 14 percent logged with the single word “investigation” as the justification
LAPD’s inspector general: in two months, 161 innocent people were investigated on false stolen-vehicle hits out of 210.5 million reads, with high-risk stops, backup, and air support; the department let Flock lapse pending “a full audit process”
Jackson County, NC logged 4,652 hot-list hits against 563 searches in one month; how many hits were wrong is not published (Jackson County).
Tracking people, not plates
Date
What happened
Source
May 14, 2025
Leaked materials showed Flock building Nova, a people-search tool joining plate reads to public records, data brokers, and breached data: “jump from LPR to person… link to other people that are related to that person”
Records show hundreds of Flock searches for people by description, “person on skateboard,” “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” some including race or political indicators
Digital Recognition Network, a commercial plate-scan company, scans “500+ million” plates a month for lenders, insurers, and repossession agents, and sells the data
The mechanism, step by step, is on What a plate read becomes. The county sheriff’s platform pulls “offender monitoring, and criminal justice databases” into the same screen as the cameras (Buncombe County).
Hiding the tool from courts and the public
Date
What happened
Source
Jan 27, 2026
Police in multiple states were told to be “as vague as permissible” about Flock use to blunt records requests
An Iowa sheriff’s policy: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE” and “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY”
The National Park Service is using Flock at Yosemite and Golden Gate; a ranger: “I fear for the day when a visitor’s National Park experience is interrupted by being pulled over and held at gunpoint because a license plate reader misread their plate”
