Flock Lawsuit Calls Out Alleged Law Enforcement Misuse of Nationwide License Plate-Reading Camera Network

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges that Flock Group Inc.’s network of more than 120,000 license plate-reading cameras nationwide has enabled some members of law enforcement to wrongfully turn their access to the surveillance technology “on the people in their own lives.” 

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The 35-page Flock lawsuit states that, as of August 2026, journalists working from police and court records found that no fewer than 50 officers face charges or allegations pertaining to their use of license plate reader systems. Per the complaint, Atlanta-based Flock’s technology—which includes not only cameras but hardware, software and a hosted platform housing indexed records—is central to 46 of these instances, and in 26, “the person on the other end of the query was a wife, a girlfriend, an ex, an ex’s new partner, or a woman the officer had taken an interest in,” the suit says. 

The class action lawsuit, filed by a Tennessee law enforcement officer, alleges that Flock is aware that its surveillance platform is misused by customers yet has made anti-abuse guardrails optional, “where it has provided them at all,” while continuing to expand its network. 

“Plaintiff and the members of the Class did nothing to warrant law enforcement attention,” the suit asserts. “They drove to work, to school, to medical appointments, and to places of worship, and Flock recorded them doing it.” 

According to the lawsuit, access to Flock’s network comes via a contract with a governmental customer. Flock contracts, the suit says, “hand the customer a set of responsibilities” while maintaining for Flock “the power to curtail or shut off access” under certain circumstances. 

Per the case, Flock has touted its network’s reach as a feature, with search functionality that covers participating agencies in 49 states. Broadly, the value of Flock’s system expands as more camera feeds are able to be searched, the filing adds.

In contrast to a red-light camera, which typically fires “because a driver did something,” a Flock camera engages simply when a driver exists within its field of view, the case explains. The records captured by a Flock camera, once in the company’s searchable database, are enough to “line up into an itinerary” for a particular vehicle, “which is to say into a picture of where someone goes, on what schedule, and beside whom,” the complaint reads.

Amid that context, the complaint alleges that misuse of Flock’s network is a known issue with many different causes. Per the case, incidents sometimes involve “credentialed officers hunting private targets,” while others involve “logins that outlived the employment they were issued for.” Other reported instances involve Flock staff accessing customer cameras or even data crossing boundaries that customers never agreed to and the law does not permit, the case alleges. 

“Some involve the software reading the wrong plate,” the filing adds. “Some involve it reading the right plate and someone drawing the wrong conclusion.” 

In one instance among several detailed in the lawsuit, a dispatcher supervisor for the Conyers, Georgia, police department ran more than 30 Flock searches “unrelated to any law enforcement purpose,” leading the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to arrest the individual, the suit shares. Another incident in Orange City, Florida involved a police officer spending “the summer of 2024 running the plate of a woman he used to date, at least 69 times by the count in the court record, alongside at least 24 runs of her mother’s plate and 15 of her father’s,” the complaint shares. 

In Wisconsin, the suit goes on, a deputy learned that a colleague she once dated searched her license plate 16 times in a single day. 

“None of this reads as a single lapse of curiosity,” the case scathes.

Additionally, the class action suit highlights that Flock cameras regularly misread license plates. Though Flock claims that its cameras accurately capture roughly 93 out of every 100 license plates, this rate, applied to the more than 20 billion readings Flock reportedly processes each month, indicates a seven percent error rate, or “approximately 1.4 billion inaccurate readings each month,” the lawsuit alleges. 

Mentioned in the case is Roseville, California, which put Flock’s plate-reader accuracy claims to the test and found that, of the 1,427 automated vehicle alerts its police officers received across 2023 and 2024 flagging vehicles as stolen or linked to felonies, 1,011 of those alerts involved a misread plate, a failure rate of more than 70 percent. 

The lawsuit alleges that drivers have no way of avoiding Flock’s system as “Flock puts cameras where people simply go.” 

“Plaintiff and the Class members are recorded, their records are retained, and their records are made searchable, without their consent and without any suspicion that they have done anything wrong.” 

The Flock lawsuit looks to cover every person whose vehicle was photographed and whose license plate was read, recorded, and retained by any Flock automated license plate recognition camera anywhere in the United States during the relevant time period. 

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