Border Patrol using Flock Camera Data

Our Take

Credit to KIMA Action News for surfacing the University of Washington Center for Human Rights findings, because this is exactly the scenario we've been warning about since local police departments started bolting Flock cameras onto every intersection: data collected under the banner of "catching car thieves" doesn't stay local. Flock's national lookup network means a plate scanned in a small Washington town can, in theory, be queried by federal agencies with entirely different missions — like immigration enforcement — often without the local city council or residents ever voting on that use.

This is the core problem with ALPR infrastructure: once the cameras are up and the data is flowing into a shared system, the guardrails depend entirely on policy promises, not technical limits. Vendors and police chiefs routinely claim these networks are for solving violent crime and stolen vehicles, but the audit trail research keeps showing federal agencies, including Border Patrol and ICE, showing up in the query logs. Communities that never asked for a border-enforcement partnership may be providing one anyway, just by hosting a camera on Main Street.

If your town has Flock cameras, you deserve to know who's actually pulling data from them and why. Check our camera map to see what's been deployed near you, and if you want to push back at the local level, our take-action page has steps for demanding transparency from your city council before the next contract renewal.