Every entry below happened, is dated, and links to reporting or a primary document you can read. Nothing here is a prediction. The categories follow the questions people actually ask: can it reach federal agencies, can it follow someone to a clinic, can an officer use it on an ex, can it stop the wrong person, can it be hidden from a defendant, can it leak, and what do the companies do when a town says no. Entries marked NC happened in North Carolina. 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 | 404 Media |
| Jun 16, 2025 | Oregon police analysts ran an informal group facilitating surveillance-tool sharing with immigration enforcement | 404 Media |
| Aug 12, 2025 | A DEA agent used a local officer’s password to run immigration surveillance in Flock | 404 Media |
| Aug 25, 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” | 404 Media |
| Oct 16, 2025 | 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” | 404 Media |
| Nov 20, 2025 | More than 50 federal, state, and local agencies used Flock around the “No Kings” protests | 404 Media |
| Apr 6, 2026 | Florida wildlife conservation officers searched thousands of Flock cameras for ICE | 404 Media |
| Aug 22, 2026 NC | 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 | Henderson County |
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).
Reproductive care and protest
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| May 29, 2025 | A Johnson County, Texas deputy searched 83,000-plus cameras, including in states where abortion is legal, for a woman who had self-managed an abortion, logged as a welfare check | 404 Media |
| Oct 7, 2025 | Court records showed the same office was running a “death investigation” and “considered charging her with a crime” | 404 Media |
| Jun 25, 2025 | 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 | 404 Media |
| Aug 12, 2026 | State fusion centers circulated bulletins tracking anti-Flock social media accounts and the DeFlock National Week of Action | 404 Media |
Asheville context: North Carolina is the second-largest destination state for abortion care, and the city’s plate data reaches a 500-mile radius (Who Gets Watched).
Officers using it on people they know
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Jun 10, 2026 | ”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 | 404 Media |
| Jul 29, 2026 NC | A Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer charged on an SBI affidavit with looking up an undercover officer’s plate for a drug-investigation target | WFAE |
| Aug 5, 2026 NC | A Mooresville officer arrested for searching Flock 31 times to track a boyfriend’s ex-wife; a review of ten more cases found “several policy violations” and no further charges | WBTV · WBTV |
| Aug 3, 2026 | The Washington Post counted about 50 officers disciplined or charged for plate-reader misuse, 46 on Flock | The Abuse Record |
The discovery pattern, documented on The Abuse Record: victims, journalists, and luck, almost never the safeguards.
The wrong person, stopped
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Jul 13, 2026 | 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” | 404 Media |
| Jan 14, 2026 | Body-camera footage showed an officer using Flock to accuse a woman, then refusing to look at evidence that cleared her | 404 Media |
| Mar 26, 2026 | Police used a Flock image to ticket a driver for holding a phone, despite the industry line that the cameras are not for traffic enforcement | 404 Media |
| Aug 5, 2026 | Officers tracked a man across state lines with Flock to manufacture a pretext to search his car | 404 Media |
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” | 404 Media |
| May 30, 2025 | After employees objected (“pretty horrified to hear we use stolen data in our system”), Flock dropped dark-web data from Nova | 404 Media |
| Jul 16, 2026 | 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 | 404 Media |
| Dec 1, 2025 | Flock’s AI is trained by overseas gig workers in the Philippines classifying footage | 404 Media |
| ongoing | Digital Recognition Network, a commercial plate-scan company, scans “500+ million” plates a month for lenders, insurers, and repossession agents; the data is sold | DRN |
The mechanism, step by step, is on What They Can Actually Learn About You. The county sheriff’s platform already 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 told to be “as vague as permissible” about Flock use to blunt records requests | 404 Media |
| Aug 4, 2026 | 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” | 404 Media |
| Aug 3, 2026 | Flock’s leaked guide teaches police to “own the narrative” | 404 Media · The Flockbook |
| Aug 6, 2026 | Cities dropping Flock adopt Axon readers that mount on streetlights and are “designed to completely blend in with their surroundings” | 404 Media · Axon |
| Jul 2025 NC | Asheville refused a records request for its Flock audit logs | Records Center |
Data that leaks
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 3, 2025 | Government users’ Flock credentials found in malware logs; no mandatory MFA; senators asked the FTC to investigate | 404 Media |
| Dec 22, 2025 | About 60 Flock Condor cameras left streaming to the open internet; reporters watched themselves | 404 Media · Benn Jordan |
| Jan 13, 2026 | A Flock redaction error unmasked millions of surveillance targets in released records | 404 Media |
| Jun 11, 2026 | Officers’ search reasons and plates indexed by DuckDuckGo and Bing | 404 Media |
| Aug 2026 | Flock’s OS Investigate code leaked via public login pages; Flock made MFA mandatory the same month | Wikipedia · Flock |
What the companies do when a town says no
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 26, 2025 | Flock sent a cease-and-desist to DeFlock’s founder over the project’s name; EFF answered that the claims were “groundless” | 404 Media |
| Apr 30, 2026 | Flock ran sales demos on a Jewish community center’s gymnastics-room, pool, and playground cameras in Dunwoody, Georgia | 404 Media |
| May 28 and Jul 22, 2026 | Cities put trash bags over cameras Flock would not remove; Verona, Wisconsin’s emails show a “maintenance” work order instead of removal | 404 Media |
| Jul 23, 2026 | Flock’s CEO said the cameras take “a static picture of a car” after a year of announcing live video on every reader | 404 Media |
| Aug 3, 2026 | A Flock government-affairs manager quit: “They lied” | 404 Media |
| Aug 7, 2026 | Flock pitched putting readers in 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and delivery vehicles | 404 Media |
| Aug 18, 2026 | 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” | 404 Media |
| Jul 2026 NC | Macon County commissioners voted 5 to 0 to end Flock; the sheriff: “I respect the decision” | Macon County |
How to use this page
Pick the category that matches the claim you are answering. “It can’t be used for immigration” has four dated answers. “Officers are audited” has the Mooresville outcome: thirty-one searches, found by a monthly audit, after the fact. “The cameras are only for serious crime” has a phone ticket and a pretext stop. The point is not that every one of these will happen in Asheville; it is that every one of them happened somewhere that was told it would not.
Related: Flock Safety · Axon · The Abuse Record · The National Wave · What They Can Actually Learn About You · Who Gets Watched