Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
Flock's new plate-search safeguards leave the checking to police agencies
Flock Safety told Sen. Josh Hawley that plate searches will need a case number by year-end, on a network that scans about 20 billion plates a month. Because an emergency bypass is built in, whether the rule curbs misuse depends on agencies reading their own search logs.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- In a letter to Hawley, Flock's chief legal officer said officers always had to justify searches, but in a free-text field that produced answers that were not always specific.
- A new drop-down now offers standardized search reasons modeled on the FBI's data-reporting system.
- Some formerly optional features, including a seven-day data retention period, will become defaults, according to Techdirt.
- Local agencies have been dropping Flock cameras and contracts after reporting on officers misusing the plate database, Techdirt reports.
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Why it matters
- decision Agencies keeping Flock have to decide who reviews searches and how often, because the drop-down and case number classify a search without verifying it.
- exposure Agencies that cite the case-number requirement as their safeguard will answer for misuse that gets through an emergency bypass or an unverified number.
- cost Making the new fields mean anything costs agency staff time, since Flock's audit tooling sorts searches for review and leaves the reviewing to the customer.
Take the supervisor at a police agency who pulls a month of Flock plate searches and reads the reason logged beside each one. Until now that column held whatever officers typed into a free-text box [3]. Next year it fills with FBI-style categories and case numbers [4][5].
People put whatever lets them get past a required field, and Flock's letter to Hawley shows that happening in its own product [1][3]. A drop-down narrows the vocabulary but does not check the choice. The case number has the same gap. "A case number field only works if Flock knows which case numbers are valid (or, at the very least, follow case number nomenclature)," Techdirt wrote [10]. The site argues Flock cannot know, because its software is added on top of police systems [11], and that an officer could type anything into the box and carry on [13]. The emergency bypass is available for all of it [5].
Flock is pitching accountability to Washington with a better-labelled audit trail. "A drop-down menu may help classify searches should anyone decide to audit them," Techdirt wrote [12]. Techdirt describes Flock's new "Audit Assistance" feature as giving agencies more control and oversight of officer searches [7]. It is a tool, and someone at the agency still has to open it and read the results.
The seven-day retention default limits how far back a search can reach [6]. It does less for the cases Techdirt lists, officers looking up ex-partners and protesters [9]. I'd expect most of those searches to be about where someone is this week. At the volume Flock has cited, about 20 billion plates a month [2], a seven-day window still holds roughly 4.7 billion reads across the network [1]. The letter, as reported, does not say whether an agency can switch the new defaults off again, or how often agencies audit searches now.
An agency deciding whether to keep Flock, or how to defend keeping it, can sort each safeguard on two axes. One is whether an officer can get past it by typing something or declaring an emergency. The other is whether a named person at the agency reads the results on a fixed schedule. A safeguard that can be bypassed and is never reviewed is a form field, and the case-number box starts there. One that can be bypassed but is reviewed gives officers a reason to fill it in honestly, and the emergency-bypass entries are the first page a reviewer should read. Retention sits in a third box: officers cannot type around it, and it works without a reviewer. I'd keep the contract only with a named reviewer and a monthly pass through the bypass entries. That reviewer's hours are the cost, and the agency pays them.
What to watch
- Whether the year-end case-number requirement ships with any check against agency case records, or only accepts whatever is typed.
- Whether Flock or Hawley's office publishes how often the emergency bypass is used once the requirement is live.
- Whether agencies can switch the new defaults, including seven-day retention, back off.