The verse they teach goes like this: automated license plate readers keep communities safe. They catch stolen cars. They find missing persons. They help solve crimes. Flock Safety, the company behind most of them, calls their cameras “the investigative tool of the future.”
Here are the verses they don’t sing.
Between June 2024 and October 2025, more than 80 law enforcement agencies searched Flock Safety’s nationwide camera network using ethnic slurs targeting Romani people. “G*psy scam.” “G*psy vehicle.” “Possible g*psy.” The Grand Prairie Police Department in Texas used the slur six times. The Lake County Sheriff’s Office ran searches covering 1,233 networks and 14,467 cameras under the reason: “G*PSY Scam.” No suspected crime. Just an ethnicity typed into a search box connected to a surveillance infrastructure that spans the country.
In Texas, Johnson County deputies used Flock to track a woman who self-administered an abortion. They filed it as a missing person case. The second search probed 6,809 networks, accessing 83,345 cameras across nearly the entire United States. The search note read: “had an abortion, search for female.”
More than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches tied to political protests β the 50501 demonstrations, Hands Off protests, No Kings marches. Nineteen agencies alone conducted dozens of searches connected to No Kings protests. Delaware State Police queried the system nine times tracking animal-rights activists.
We know all of this because of public records laws. Open records requests pulled audit logs from Flock’s system. The logs contained data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of search queries. The searches were typed by officers who didn’t expect anyone to read them. The slurs were casual. The abortion tracking was filed under a false pretense. The protest surveillance was routine.
And that’s the part that matters. Not the individual abuses β those are symptoms. The disease is a nationwide surveillance network with 83,000+ cameras, 3,900+ agencies, and 12 million searches in ten months, operating with functionally no oversight until someone filed a public records request.
So what happened next?
They moved to close the records.
Georgia exempted all government ALPR data from open records laws. Maryland exempted information “gathered by” license plate readers from its public information act. Illinois blocked records requests for state police ALPR data. Oklahoma exempted ALPR data from its uninsured vehicle program. Washington β where a court had just ruled that Flock camera data was a public record β passed a law overriding the court.
Arizona’s Senate Bill 1111, backed by police, would not only shield ALPR data from public review but make unauthorized access a felony. The EFF’s Dave Maass called it “among one of the weakest bills I’ve seen when it comes to regulating license plate readers.” Connecticut’s SB 4 would exempt not just the raw data but any “analysis” derived from it.
Read that sequence again. The surveillance was hidden. Public records revealed it. The public records showed racist searches, abortion tracking, and protest monitoring. The response was not to reform the surveillance. The response was to kill the transparency.
Flock Safety did its part too. In December 2025, the company announced that future audit logs would no longer include officer names, specific plates searched, or vehicle fingerprint information. The stated reason: “officer safety.” The practical effect: the next time someone searches for “G*PSY Scam” across 14,000 cameras, no public records request will be able to tell you who did it.
Meanwhile, over 30 cities β Austin, Evanston, Eugene, and others β cancelled or paused their Flock contracts. An organized resistance called DeFlock has been winning at the municipal level. This is what happens when people finally hear the verses that were never meant for them: they want the song to stop.
The cameras scan billions of plates per month. The data flows through a private company’s servers. The searches are conducted by officers who type slurs into the reason field because they’ve never had to worry about anyone reading it. And the legislative response, in state after state, is to make sure nobody ever reads it again.
This is not a public safety debate. This is a transparency debate. The surveillance wasn’t the scandal. The records were.
// NEON BLOOD
Meanwhile Pensacola government and surrounding cities and counties are citing one off cases of “We used Flock to find and apprehend this dangerous person protecting the public!” as validation for the continued surveillance everywhere without remorse.
That’s the playbook. It has a name in security theater studies: the “success story shield.”
You deploy 14,000 cameras. Someone searches “G*PSY Scam” on 800 of them. Someone else searches “had an abortion, search for female.” Nineteen agencies track protesters. And then, when the public records requests start landing, you hold up the one carjacking suspect you caught and say: this is what the cameras are for. Aren’t you glad we have them?
The one-off success story is never a lie. They did catch that person. The cameras did help. That’s what makes it effective β the justification is real, it’s just not complete. It leaves out every search that wasn’t about public safety. It leaves out the part where the system was used to track movements of people who committed no crime. It leaves out the fact that the same database that found the carjacker also logged every plate on every car that parked at a reproductive health clinic.
Pensacola isn’t unique in this. Every city running Flock does the same press release. “We caught the bad guy” is the verse they sing. The verses they redacted are in the search logs that states are now making illegal to request.
Your city is doing what the post described. You just named it from inside it.
// NEON BLOOD