company
Axon Enterprise makes public safety technology, including TASER devices, police body cameras, license-plate readers, and AI-driven crime-center software.
No evidence-backed relationships are recorded.
Sens. Josh Hawley and Bernie Sanders introduced license-plate camera bills within three days, each covering every ALPR vendor, including Motorola and Axon. Departments that left Flock for a rival in recent weeks would sit under the same rules.
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VIDIZMO pitched Johnson City, Tennessee police in May on facial recognition across Flock and Axon footage in one platform. Flock's pledge against face recognition covers its own devices; VIDIZMO's route starts with clips an agency exports itself.
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White House drug program HIDTA, with 33 regional programs covering every state, pulls local Flock and Axon plate data onto federal servers, 404 Media reports. The outlet calls it an end-around to the limits cities are now placing on how Flock data is used.
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Sen. Josh Hawley's bill would make agencies permanently delete license-plate reader data within 10 days unless a criminal investigation is open. Police who trace where a car went weeks ago would lose that search in any case not yet opened.
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The licence plate reader company is making most of its new safeguards mandatory on 1 January, after its chief executive conceded that optional abuse controls sat unused at two-thirds of agencies.
Perspective Coverage
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Republicans and Democrats on the Senate crime subcommittee both objected that plate reader vendors leave abuse detection to the police departments buying the cameras, and the four invited chief executives did not appear.
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Flock's chief executive sent a Senate subcommittee a letter instead of testifying. It says customer agencies own and control the search records and set retention, and that Flock does very little oversight of how clients search its network.
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Cities are swapping Flock license plate cameras for Axon's after reporting on searches run for ICE and a nationwide abortion-related lookup. Axon keeps the same search-by-search record under four report names. Six agencies have handed theirs over.
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A Senate subcommittee will ask four camera vendors on Sept. 23 who has access to hundreds of millions of Americans' data. Verkada answered in writing first and said its chief executive cannot attend.
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The city's report on its 2025 Flock trial says data went to outside law enforcement agencies while both the agreement and the company said sharing was off, and hackers separately pulled people and bicycle detections off a camera.
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EFF pulled Flock Safety's plate-reader search logs through public records requests and found 'LOL', 'LMAO' and 'sexy' entered as justifications. Flock says a dropdown of crimes improved the system.
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EFF pulled Flock's own audit logs through public records requests and found officers logging jokes, insults and keyboard mash as their reason for license plate searches run between 2023 and late 2025.
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The president told reporters he likes Flock's license plate readers, a month after Josh Hawley opened a formal investigation into the company's data practices and Greg Abbott halted Texas state funding for the cameras.
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The only public account of what Johnson County deputies said about charging a woman who took an abortion pill is an Axon Draft One summary of body camera audio the department will not release, redacted or otherwise.
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The department let its Flock agreement lapse over data ownership, yet 138 city cameras keep filling a cloud it cannot read. The replacement deal is a spec sheet of data terms.
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At least 56 municipalities cut Flock Safety contracts this year. Axon has already replaced it in at least seven, which tells you where the real control point sits.
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WIRED found 14 prompts in Flock Safety's unreleased investigation tool that need no plate, name, or description. The predicate for the search becomes the buyer's problem.
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