Flock cameras scanned 345,000 license plates. Police searched the data 58 times

Our Take

Credit to WSB-TV for getting cameras rolling inside a police department's Flock dashboard, because the numbers tell their own story. Loganville PD scanned 345,000 license plates in 30 days and ran 58 searches against that haul. Do the math: for every search tied to an actual investigation, roughly 5,950 plates were vacuumed up from drivers who were never suspected of anything. That's the business model of ALPR networks — blanket collection first, justification later.

Calling this a "transparency portal" is generous. It tells us how many plates got scanned and how many searches happened, but not who requested those 58 searches, what crimes they were tied to, or whether any crossed the line into the kind of misuse that's already drawing scrutiny across Georgia departments. A dashboard with raw numbers isn't oversight — it's a press release with a counter on it. Real accountability means independent audits, public search logs with justification, and hard limits on data sharing, not a department grading its own homework.

Loganville is one city. Flock's network spans thousands of communities doing this same scan-first, ask-questions-later collection with far less disclosure. Check our camera map to see what's logging plates near you, and visit take action for ways to push your local council for real guardrails before your plate becomes the next unexamined data point.