NYPD officers accessed Flock data for over 1,000 searches despite not having a contract

Our Take

Credit to The Washington Examiner for digging into this one: NYPD officers reportedly queried Flock Safety's nationwide license plate database over a thousand times without the department ever having a contract with the company. That detail matters more than it might seem. Flock's entire sales pitch rests on "accountability" — audit logs, reason codes, data-sharing agreements. If one of the largest police departments in the country can rack up four-figure searches outside any formal agreement, the audit trail everyone points to as a safeguard is a lot thinner than advertised.

This isn't a story about a single rogue officer. It's a story about how a private, for-profit surveillance network gets woven into local policing through informal access, borrowed credentials, or neighboring agencies' systems — with no public vote, no procurement review, and no contract for anyone to even request under public records law. When there's no agreement on paper, there's also no enforceable limit on what NYPD was searching for, how the data was used, or who it was shared with. That's the camera-network problem in miniature: infrastructure spreads faster than the rules meant to govern it.

If you want to see how far this network already reaches into your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch this happen, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.