468,548 Flock Searches By Volusia Sheriff - It's higher than ANY sheriff in our area! #flock

Our Take

Credit to James Madison Media for doing the unglamorous work that actually matters here: pulling public records and counting. A number like 468,548 searches doesn't happen by accident — it means Volusia County Sheriff's deputies are running plate lookups at a volume that outpaces every other agency in the region, and that raises the obvious question nobody in uniform wants to answer on camera: what's the policy that justifies that many queries, and who's auditing them after the fact?

This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide. Flock's own sales pitch is about solving specific crimes, but once the cameras are up, the search logs tend to balloon far beyond anything resembling a targeted investigation. Without hard limits on who can search, why, and how those searches get reviewed, a network built to find one stolen car quietly becomes a tool for tracking anyone's movements, any time. Half a million searches from a single sheriff's office isn't an efficiency story — it's a scale story, and scale is exactly what should worry people who think ALPR use is rare or narrowly targeted.

If you live in or near Volusia County, this is your sign to find out whether these cameras are watching your own commute. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed nearby, and head to our take-action page if you want to push your local officials for real oversight instead of a rubber stamp.