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Flock's letter to the Senate puts the search audit on the agencies that buy its cameras
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.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- A Senate Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Josh Hawley, with Dick Durbin as ranking member, took testimony on how Flock Safety's plate-reader data is secured, searched and shared.
- Four companies were invited and none sent a witness: Flock, Axon, Motorola and Verkada; Flock's chief executive Garrett Langley sent a letter that Hawley read aloud instead.
- The five witnesses included a Florida woman wrongfully jailed after a Flock camera image, an Arizona sheriff who ended his county's contract, a security researcher and attorneys from the ACLU and the Institute for Justice.
- Langley's letter told the subcommittee that Flock conducts very little oversight of client searches and relies on its clients to police themselves.
- Alasdair Whitney of the Institute for Justice told the committee his organisation has cataloged more than 240 incidents of ALPR misuse, including officers tracking current and former partners.
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Why it matters
- exposure Because the customer owns the search records and sets retention, a public records request or a wrongful-arrest claim reaches the city's legal budget before it reaches the vendor.
- constraint The catalogued misuse involves officers operating the tool, so a remedy has to be written into departmental rules and supervision, and no camera or software change substitutes for it.
- decision Cancelling is now a documented option: the Arizona sheriff who ended his county's contract is a witness other sheriffs and county boards can point their procurement staff at.
- precedent The subcommittee could only invite Langley this time; converting to an investigative hearing would let it subpoena him and question him on the statements his own letter put on the record.
Until last year, an officer who wanted a plate run through Flock's network could justify the search by typing anything at all into a free-text box [5]. Hawley pointed to reasons logged as "search" and "lol" [6].
Those are the entries the field collected. The record of those searches does not sit with the vendor. Flock is the largest U.S. seller of these cameras [1]. "The underlying search records are owned and controlled by each customer agency. Flock clients control the data retention," Langley wrote in the passage Hawley read into the record [5]. The log showing which officer ran which plate, and the setting that decides how long the log survives, belong to the department that bought the hardware.
Lindsey Isaacs told the subcommittee that a Flock camera photographed her Dodge Durango and investigators tied the image to an October 2025 crash that killed three people [7]. The camera had placed her vehicle two to three miles from the scene, investigators were looking for a black Durango, witnesses had described a maroon one, and 911 callers had given a partial plate [8]. Troopers impounded the SUV and told her it had collision damage she could not see [9]. The crash was in October 2025 and the charge came six months later, in about April 2026 [16]. She spent 13 days in a cell, and a warrant had issued months after the crash with bond denied [7][9]. Her attorney got her out by showing the court photographs of the SUV sitting undamaged in the impound lot; prosecutors then declined to charge her, and another person was charged later [9]. Durbin asked why the investigation moved forward when the vehicle itself showed no signs of a crash [10].
Much of the session treated Flock as the source of the harm, by Mashable's account, while in many of the cases the witnesses described the cameras gathered the data and officers made the decisions [14]. For anyone signing a renewal, two questions are answerable from the contract text: which party stores the search log, and which party is obliged to read it. On Flock's own account to the subcommittee, the customer answers both [5]. Langley's letter does not say what replaced the free-text field.
What to watch
- Whether Axon, Motorola or Verkada send witnesses to a later session after skipping this round of invitations.
- Whether Flock takes on search auditing itself and publishes what replaced the free-text justification field.
- Whether the Florida agencies that arrested Isaacs on a plate-reader hit open their own review of the case.