About Flock Safety

The company

Flock Safety (legal entity: Flock Group Inc.) is an Atlanta, Georgia-based technology company. The company was founded in 2017 by Garrett Langley and Matt Feury, both Georgia Tech alumni. The two are also the named co-inventors on both of Flock's most-cited patents (see Flock's own patents).

CEO Garrett Langley has publicly characterized Flock as a "technology crime-fighting company." In the same AJC interview he also said the company plans to begin working with the federal government and to add its first international customers using the March 2025 capital infusion.

What they make

Flock sells a multi-layer surveillance stack — not a single product. The layers are designed to fit together. The LPR camera (the part that's installed in our community) is only the data-collection edge of a much larger system. The full product line, as listed on flocksafety.com/products, is:

Edge devices (data collection)

• License Plate Readers (LPR) — the Falcon camera deployed in our community. Solar-powered, with on-device AI. A lighter, smaller version called the Sparrow is also sold.
• Flock Video Cameras — a separate product line for general video monitoring, with AI-powered analytics.
• Mobile Security Trailers — portable, solar-powered video coverage that can be deployed without permits or wiring.
• Gunshot and Audio Detection — real-time acoustic sensors that identify gunfire, street takeovers, vehicle accidents, and other "critical sounds."
• Flock Drones — "Drone as First Responder" (DFR), launched in 2025. The drones are built at a new 100,000-square-foot Atlanta facility.

Backend software (data integration)

• FlockOS® — described on flocksafety.com as a "secure RTCC-like hub" (a Real-Time Crime Center, the kind of multi-screen police command center used in major-city precincts).
• Flock Nova™ — the cross-system search platform. Pulls data from RMS (Records Management System), CAD (Computer-Aided Dispatch), LPR, jail data, and public records into a single search interface. See the next section.
• Flock FreeForm™ — a natural-language search product that lets officers query video and LPR data using plain-English descriptions (e.g., "landscaping trailer with a ladder").
• Flock911 — streams live 911 calls and shares them across agency boundaries, with the goal of letting responders see neighboring jurisdictions' calls before arriving on scene.

The network (the value proposition)

• National LPR Network — Flock's own name for the cross-agency plate-read sharing. The product page describes it as: "Tap into the nation's largest crime-solving LPR network. Agencies get real-time alerts and footage from partners across the country to stop crime in motion."

The LPR camera installed in our community is therefore not a standalone product. It's a data-collection node that feeds Flock Nova, which feeds FlockOS, which feeds the National LPR Network — a system in which the value of the network increases with every city that signs up. That network effect is the actual product. The LPR is the input.

What it costs

The list price Flock quotes for the Falcon LPR camera is $2,500 per camera per year, with a one-time installation fee of around $250–$300 per camera. The subscription includes installation, maintenance, footage hosting, cellular service, and software updates.

Source: City of Campbell, California, FAQ (a municipal government page documenting the price for a public records inquiry) and Proptia.

The per-camera price is consistent across deployments. The total cost to a city is therefore roughly proportional to the number of cameras deployed. For a community of our size, with 35 cameras deployed (per the community's research), the per-year cost to the city is in the rough neighborhood of $80,000–$100,000 — before any additional fees for the Flock Nova integration, the Flock Business Network, or related software.

The exact total for our city is one of the things the IPRA request on this site asks about.

Flock's own patents

Flock's product is a two-layer stack. The Falcon camera is the data-collection edge device. What it captures feeds Flock Nova, the law-enforcement user portal, which markets itself as a single search across LPR data, RMS, CAD, jail data, and public records. Flock holds patents on both layers. Quoted directly from the patents themselves:

1. The LPR camera (US 11,030,892 B1)

The patent for the camera itself. Inventors: Garrett Langley and Matt Feury. Assignee: Flock Group Inc., Atlanta, GA. Published 8 Jun 2021. The CPC codes (G08G 1/0175, G08G 1/0116) are the official ALPR / vehicle-detection classifications, confirming this is the LPR patent.

Title: "Method and system for capturing and storing significant surveillance images."

Abstract: "A method and system for capturing and filtering surveillance images are described. A processor detects motion of an object in a field of view and then generates a plurality of images in response to detecting motion of the object in the field of view. The object may comprise a vehicle having a license plate."

Background section (the company's own description of what an LPR is for): "LPR cameras are often used by law enforcement personnel in order to identify and track automobiles who may be associated with operators who commit traffic violations. LPR cameras are also used by law enforcement personnel to identify and track automobiles of operators who may be wanted criminals or operators who may be conspiring to commit future crime(s)."

The patent also shows the LPR isn't a dumb camera — it has on-device AI. A passive-infrared (PIR) motion detector wakes a low-power processor from sleep mode, then a neural network scores and filters images locally before transmitting them over the cellular network (Fig. 5). What cities buy from Flock is a smart, networked surveillance device, not a passive reader.

Source: Download PDF (1.9MB, 18 pages) · Google Patents · USPTO PatentCenter

2. The aggregation network the LPR feeds into (US 11,416,545 B1)

The patent for the backend the LPR data gets tied into. Same inventors (Langley, Feury), same assignee, published 16 Aug 2022. Where the first patent is about capturing one plate at a time, this one is about querying across a "dynamic surveillance network" of cameras.

Title: "System and method for object based query of video content captured by a dynamic surveillance network."

Abstract: "A solution for a video surveillance system and method that leverages a dynamic geographic footprint and supports an object-based query of archived video content."

Drawings (Fig. 1 legend): "NSD = portable neighborhood surveillance device" — the same kind of device Flock sells alongside its LPRs.

Background section: the system ingests video from "surveillance cameras in a neighborhood watch system, store cameras at local convenience store, traffic site monitoring cameras at a nearby street intersection, a smart phone associated with a pedestrian" — so the "dynamic geographic footprint" isn't limited to fixed cameras. The system also builds object fingerprints for every detected object (Hough lines, object height, object width, black/white pixel ratio, white balance, hash value) and can identify "people (male, female, race, etc.)."

Source: Download PDF (2.9MB, 29 pages) · Google Patents · USPTO PatentCenter

How the company markets it

The "aggregation" layer in patent #2 is sold as Flock Nova, with the tagline "search once, see everything." From Flock's own blog (16 Jun 2025):

"Search the way you think. Just type a name, phone number, or plate. Flock Nova surfaces what is connected. See everything in one place. RMS, CAD, LPR, jail data, public records, and more."

So a single LPR plate read doesn't sit in isolation. It can be joined in the Flock Nova portal to records management system (RMS) data, computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data, jail booking data, and public records — searchable by a name, a phone number, or a plate. That's the backend patent #2 is describing.

That's the misnomer

The "safety" in the company name is a marketing choice. Both patents use the word surveillance to describe what the system is. The LPR patent's own background section describes the device as one used to "identify and track automobiles." And the company's own tagline for the aggregation layer is "see everything."

Why the misnomer works as a sales tactic

The LPR camera is a genuinely useful tool for a local police department — it helps find stolen cars, AMBER alerts, BOLOs. Cops aren't being lied to about what their camera does. What's missing is the conversation in council chambers and police procurement meetings about whether signing a contract for "a license plate reader" is also signing up to be a node in a nationwide surveillance network — and whether that's a decision a city should be making deliberately.

Each new city adds a node to a network whose value compounds with every new node. Local tax dollars pay for the cameras; the vendor owns the aggregation. The "Safety" name sells the local use case; the "see everything" tagline describes the network. That's the asymmetry: a useful tool at the local level, a nationwide network at the company level, and the gap between them is what the city never got to vote on.

The network is the product

The previous section closed on a one-sentence observation that the company name says safety and Flock's own marketing says see everything, and that those are not the same word. Flock's cameras are the input devices. The network is the asset — and it is the asset Flock protects, even against its own customers. The clearest external statement of that comes from Greg Reese of The Reese Report, writing in December 2025:

What that looks like in practice (May–June 2026)

In the months since Reese's essay, the same dynamic has surfaced in cities that have tried to end their relationships with Flock. The pattern is consistent enough to be a category, not a series of isolated incidents:

• Dayton, Ohio. In May 2026, after an internal police review found “egregious violations” of city policy — including thousands of immigration-related search requests run against Flock data — city workers covered all 72 fixed-site Flock cameras in black trash bags. City Manager Shelley Dickstein said the move was to “assuage community concerns” while the contract's end was negotiated. Flock's spokesperson warned that “crime goes up when Flock is not in use,” citing a 33% spike in auto thefts in Richmond, CA during a similar outage and several violent incidents in Austin, TX that “would've ended much earlier if the city had Flock cameras.” [Business Insider, Jun 2026]; [Fortune, 3 Jun 2026].
• Evanston, Illinois. After terminating its Flock contract in August 2025, the city covered its cameras in garbage bags while waiting for Flock to remove them. Flock did remove them — and then, according to the city, reinstalled cameras without the city's permission, prompting a cease-and-desist letter. The case Reese describes above and the trash-bag case are the same chain of events. [Techdirt, 4 Jun 2026]; [Jalopnik, Jun 2026].
• Renton, Washington. Officials announced in May 2026 they would “put a pause on” the use of Flock cameras until privacy concerns could be better understood, following public outcry over Flock data being used for immigration enforcement. [Fortune, 3 Jun 2026].

When a city has decided, through its own democratic process, that it no longer wants to be part of a surveillance network, and the only tool the city has left is to climb a ladder and physically blind the hardware with a black plastic bag.

What Flock has told cities

The patents above show what the system is. The stories in this section are about what Flock the company has been caught saying — and what the audit log shows it actually does. In several recent cases, the public record and the company's own statements have come apart.

Oshkosh, Wisconsin: a "heat map" claim that turned out to be false

On the night of 21 April 2026, the Oshkosh Common Council voted 5–2 to renew its Flock contract. By the next morning, Police Chief Dean Smith had reversed his support. The reason: officers in his agency had brought him information that "conflicted with what Flock Safety representatives shared with the council" the previous night. Specifically, Flock's representatives had told the council that the LPR system "did not create heat maps to track vehicles." The department determined that to be false. Less than 24 hours after the renewal vote, the council voted unanimously to rescind the contract.

Chief Smith, on the record, addressed the council at the rescission meeting:

"I know that you trust me to give you my best recommendations, that are in the best interest of the city, with the information I have available to me. I will not betray that trust."

Two council members, on the record at the rescission meeting:

"I don't know how I can make a decision or discern what's right and what's wrong, or even the capabilities of the system if you lie to me." — Joe Stephenson, Oshkosh City Council member.

"I mentioned yesterday how it's not just jellybeans on each side of a balance that helps me make my decision, and clearly I didn't have enough jellybeans on the right side." — Karl Buelow, Oshkosh Deputy Mayor.

Flock's public response to the rescission called the dispute "one small misconception" and "a minor nuance," and pointed to a map view in its system that does show where plate captures happened. Chief Smith said he expected all Flock cameras to be removed from the city before the start of summer. (Source: WBAY, 23 Apr 2026.)

Dunwoody, Georgia: a sales VP's live access to a customer's network

A March 2026 investigation by the investigative outlet Footnote4a analyzed audit logs from Dunwoody, Georgia's Flock deployment and found that multiple Flock employees — not police officers — had been given search accounts on the city's live network. Among the named employees:

• Bob Carter, Flock's VP of Strategic Relations & Business Development, ran 401+ searches in 2025, including queries for "rocket car," "potatoe chip van" (his spelling, verbatim), and "unicycle" — and conducted at least one 6,350-network simultaneous lookup.
• Peter Barty, Staff Engineer (ML), conducted 27 searches, including one for a "Black Mercedes GL450 4MATIC" across 45 networks.
• Amanda Bruner, NOVA Onboarding Specialist, ran five searches of the same Georgia license plate over ten weeks, each sweeping between 887 and 891 agencies.
• Kathleen Graham, NOVA Specialist, ran 11 searches of the same plate over three days, across 888 networks each — one at 11:40 PM.
• Six Flock employees in total held "Owner"-level access — the equivalent of a department administrator — to Dunwoody's account.

On 9 December 2025, the day after Carter's busiest search period, Flock SVP Chris Colwell emailed customers announcing that officer names, license plates searched, and open-text search reasons would be removed from the audit logs going forward. The change took effect immediately. (Source: Footnote4a, "The Platform", 26 Mar 2026.)

Footnote4a also documents a Flock customer training video recorded by Regional Customer Success Manager Gaby Mahoney. Rather than using a demo environment, she recorded the video while logged into a real customer's account. Her second sentence in the video, verbatim: "So when I log into your account and go under the sharing tab…" The selected organization shown in the recording is the Olympia (WA) Police Department.

Flock's public FAQ states: "Nobody from Flock Safety is accessing or monitoring your footage." The Footnote4a audit-log analysis says the claim "is shown to be false hundreds of times and on multiple levels."

Dunwoody, Georgia: children's gymnastics rooms, schools, and a Jewish community center used for sales demos

The same Flock deployment in Dunwoody, GA — the same audit logs the Footnote4a investigation examined — revealed a second pattern. Flock sales employees were accessing live camera feeds from a children's gymnastics room, a playground, a local school, a pool, and a Jewish community center, to demonstrate the technology to prospective law-enforcement clients. The discovery was made by Dunwoody resident Jason Hunyar through a public records request for access logs.

Flock's response: the city is part of Flock's "demo partner program," which the company says explicitly authorizes employee access to city cameras for product demonstrations and debugging. Flock's framing: "we maintain and provide access logs — that's the transparency." Critics' response: transparency about who is accessing the data is not the same as the data not being accessed. (Source: AIToolly, 2 May 2026.)

How the CEO talks about critics

The CEO's public posture toward critics of his product has escalated over a series of statements since September 2025. The earliest came in a long on-camera interview with Forbes; the most explicit came in a December 2025 email to law-enforcement customers. The most-quoted single line — that critics are "closer to Antifa than anything else" — is from the same interview footage the article was drawn from. The same news cycle is also when Flock's stated response to cities that have tried to cancel their contracts made the national press; that pattern is covered separately in The network is the product.

The most-quoted single line from Flock's CEO about the project that maintains a public map of his cameras came from the same news cycle. In a 3 September 2025 Forbes interview, CEO Garrett Langley told reporter Thomas Brewster that advocates who map Flock's cameras are “closer to Antifa than they are anything else” — a characterization the ACLU later called “simplistic, juvenile, and ultimately authoritarian.” The full Forbes exchange, which also describes Flock's offices, manufacturing facilities, and camera-installation vans as “purposefully logoless” because the CEO is “worried enough about being targeted” by activists, is here.

The December 2025 email to law-enforcement customers

In December 2025, Flock CEO Garrett Langley sent an email to the company's law-enforcement customers. The email, which was released by the Staunton, Virginia Police Department in response to a public records request, framed the wave of cities reconsidering their Flock contracts as a "coordinated attack" on law enforcement. Langley's words, as quoted by the ACLU:

"Let's call this what it is. Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack."

"The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines."

"[Activist groups] are also trying to turn a public records process into a weapon against you and against us."

When 404 Media reported the release of data on millions of police surveillance targets, Flock responded by saying "activists trying to let murderers go free" were behind the criticism. (Source: same ACLU article, 16 Jan 2026.)

At least two of the police chiefs who received the email pushed back on the record. Staunton (VA) Police Chief Jim Williams released the email and wrote back to Langley:

"As far as your assertion that we are currently under attack, I do not believe that this is so.… What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes. These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders. In short, it is democracy in action."

The Charlottesville (VA) police chief responded similarly to a local news outlet: "People have a right to disagree and have issues with things… at the end of the day communities get to have a say on how they want to be policed." (Source: CVille Right Now; the original email itself is available as a PDF from the City of Staunton.)

The pattern is worth noting. The CEO's framing of the contract debate is that it is existential — a "coordinated attack" on law enforcement by activists who "want to defund the police." The police chiefs who actually received the email, on the other hand, describe the same activity as "citizens raising concerns" and "communities having a say on how they want to be policed." Both descriptions are of the same thing: residents exercising their right to question a contract their city is signing.

How the system has been misused

This section is different from the ones above. The "What Flock has told cities" section is about what the company has been caught saying. This section is about what officers have been caught doing with the system, and what the system's design has to do with it.

In the first quarter of 2026, multiple Wisconsin law enforcement officers were charged or resigned after being found to have used Flock for personal surveillance. The pattern is consistent enough to be a category, not a series of isolated cases.

The Wisconsin cases

• Josue Ayala, an eight-year veteran of the Milwaukee Police Department, was charged in February 2026 with attempted misconduct in public office for using Milwaukee's Flock network 179 times to track a person he was dating and that person's ex-partner. The complaint alleged he searched one victim's plate 55 times and the other's 124 times, while on duty. Each search was logged with the reason "investigation." One of the victims discovered the surveillance by typing their own plate into a public watchdog website that monitors Flock activity. Ayala resigned; MPD initially suspended him, then cut off officer access to the LPR database entirely, restricting use to a "sensitive portion" of the Criminal Investigations Bureau. (Source: FOX6 News, 4 Mar 2026.)
• Jay Johnson, chief of the Greenfield (WI) Police Department, is facing felony misconduct in public office charges for installing a department-owned pole camera on his property during a messy divorce. He is separately accused of destroying data by deleting text messages after a meeting at which he was offered the chance to retire. (Source: Urban Milwaukee, 15 Mar 2026.)
• Frank McGrath, a former Kenosha County Sheriff's deputy, was found by an internal investigation to have "knowingly and repeatedly" misused Flock and Polaris, and to have been "not truthful when confronted by a supervisor about his actions." He received a severance agreement on resignation. (Same source.)
• A Waukesha Police Department officer was found to have used "." (a single period) as the search reason on hundreds of Flock searches. A spokesperson said the officer had been "counseled and retrained."
• The West Allis Police Department was the most frequent user of the "." search term in Wisconsin during the first half of 2025. The department told reporters its officers are "properly trained" and that it investigates misuse cases "when warranted."
• A Menasha officer ("Morales") was found to have misused Flock after a complaint was made to another police department — not through internal Menasha oversight.

The audit-log pattern

An audit-log analysis by the Wisconsin Examiner found that "investigation" was the single most common search-reason term used by Wisconsin law-enforcement agencies in the first half of 2025. Other common terms: "suspicious," "cooch," and ".". The ACLU of Wisconsin, in a separate letter to Milwaukee's Public Safety and Health Committee, characterized the pattern as "a disturbing trend in Wisconsin and across the country regarding law enforcement abuse of Flock [ALPR] technology to stalk and harass people, in most cases women."

What the system was designed to do — and not do

The system's design has two things to do with this. First, the audit log only catches abusers after the fact: the cases above were discovered when a victim discovered the surveillance and complained — often to a different police department. The agency's own internal oversight didn't catch them. Second, the search-reason field is a free-text input, not a structured categorization. Officers can type "investigation" for a routine lookup and "investigation" for personal stalking, and the system has no way to tell the two apart. The same design that lets a thousand officers run a million legitimate searches also lets a few officers stalk people in plain sight.

None of this is to say that the officers involved are representative of law enforcement generally. They are emphatically not. The point is that the system was rolled out at scale, across thousands of agencies, without the internal oversight and structured audit categories that would have caught these cases before a victim had to file a complaint. The predictable result is what we have.

"Safety" vs. "surveillance"

The company is called Flock Safety. The product line is marketed around the words safe, safety, and protect. The company's own integration marketing, by contrast, is built around the phrase see everything. And the patents the company holds — which are public record — use the word surveillance in both title and abstract.

• US 11,030,892 B1 — "Method and system for capturing and storing significant surveillance images." The patent's own background section describes the LPR camera as a device used to "identify and track automobiles." A copy of the full patent is available as a PDF and the full discussion is above on this page.
• US 11,416,545 B1 — "System and method for object based query of video content captured by a dynamic surveillance network." A copy is available as a PDF, with discussion above on this page.

The full discussion of both patents, including the relevant quotes, is above on this page. The patents and the company's own marketing language make the same case: the system is a surveillance network whose explicit purpose is to let the operator see everything. The only place the word safety appears is in the company name.

The pattern is consistent. The local sale is pitched as a single useful tool — a license plate reader that helps find stolen cars, AMBER alerts, BOLOs. The integration layer, the cross-agency search, the data-broker plug-in, the AI suspicion-generator, and the corporate blacklist network are not part of that pitch. They are the actual product, built one camera at a time, with local tax dollars.

Sources

All claims on this page link to the source they're drawn from. Key references:

• Mirtha Donastorg, "Flock Safety raises $275 million, plans major expansion in metro Atlanta" — Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 13 Mar 2025 (founders, funding, employees, agency count, plans for federal / international work).
• Jay Stanley, "Flock CEO Goes Ballistic on Critics as More Americans Question Mass Driver Surveillance" — American Civil Liberties Union, 16 Jan 2026 (the December 2025 CEO email and the police-chief rebuttals).
• Thomas Brewster, "AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America" — Forbes, 3 Sept 2025 (the long-form CEO interview that produced the "terrorists" / "closer to Antifa" lines).
• "Flock Condemns False Child Predator Allegations, Yet Calls Its Own Critics Terrorists" — IPVM, 17 Apr 2026 (the IPVM "consistency problem" analysis — same standard Flock objects to being falsely accused under, the company has not applied to its own language about critics).
• Greg Reese, "Rise of the Safety State" — The Reese Report, 3 Dec 2025 (the source for the verbatim "closer to Antifa than anything else" quote and the Benn Jordan security research that prompted the original coverage).
• "Oshkosh council rescinds Flock camera contract after 'false statements'" — WBAY, 23 Apr 2026 (the "heat map" rescission).
• "A growing rebellion against Flock cameras is playing out one trash bag at a time" — Business Insider, Jun 2026 (the Dayton trash-bag campaign, all 72 fixed-site cameras covered, City Manager Shelley Dickstein's May 1 press-conference statement on “egregious violations”, Flock's “crime goes up when Flock is not in use” response, and a national roundup of cancellations and pauses).
• "Dayton is covering Flock cameras with trash bags after officials found data use violated policy" — Fortune, 3 Jun 2026 (the Dayton policy-violation finding, the trash-bag deployment, and the Renton, Washington pause).
• "Unsure With How To Cancel Service, City Officials Are Covering Flock Cameras With Trash Bags Until They Can Be Removed" — Jalopnik, Jun 2026 (the Evanston bag-cover-then-reinstall sequence, the cease-and-desist, and the structural problem that cities cannot simply take cameras down under their contracts).
• "Because Flock Can't Be Trusted, Cities Are Covering Cameras With Garbage Bags" — Techdirt, 4 Jun 2026 (the Evanston case, the “those cameras belong to Flock even if the City is no longer paying for access to the footage” framing).
• "The Platform: Flock Safety Is Running on Promises, Not Policy" — Footnote4a, 26 Mar 2026 (the Dunwoody audit-log investigation, named employees, the Colwell email of 9 Dec 2025, the Mahoney training video, the FAQ contradiction).
• "Flock Safety Faces Backlash After Using Sensitive Camera Feeds of Children for Sales Demonstrations" — AIToolly, 2 May 2026 (the Dunwoody "demo partner program" controversy).
• "Police Misuse of Flock Surveillance Becoming Statewide Issue" — Urban Milwaukee, 15 Mar 2026 (the Wisconsin audit-log analysis, the Ayala, Johnson, and McGrath cases, the Waukesha and West Allis "." search-term pattern, the Milwaukee aldermen's letter to the FPC, and the ACLU of Wisconsin's letter to the Public Safety and Health Committee).
• "Milwaukee police officer resigns, Flock search misconduct case" — FOX6 News, 4 Mar 2026 (the Ayala case in detail, including the 179 personal searches, the 55 / 124 breakdown, and the "investigation" search-reason field).
• "Flock email to law-enforcement customers, December 2025" — City of Staunton, Virginia (public-records release). The original document.
• Flock Safety, "Product Hub" — company product line.
• Flock Safety, "One Platform. One Picture. One Clear Mission." — company blog, 16 Jun 2025 (the "search once and see everything" framing).
• City of Campbell, California, "FAQs: How much does a Flock Safety camera cost?" — a municipal government page documenting the $2,500/year + $250 install price.
• Tracxn, "Flock Safety — 2026 Company Profile" — $658M total funding figure.
• Flock's own patents — the full discussion on this page, with PDFs (LPR camera patent, aggregation network patent).