I asked police to prove Flock deletes after 30 days. Nobody checks.

Our Take

Magnetic Norse did something strikingly simple: took a police chief's reassuring quote at face value and then asked the obvious follow-up question. If Flock data really gets "purged" after 30 days, who checks? The answer, as the video lays out, is nobody. No audit log, no third-party verification, no paper trail that proves the retention policy is anything more than a sentence on a vendor's marketing page.

This is the pattern we see again and again with ALPR deployments: departments repeat Flock's own claims back to the public as if they were independently verified facts. A 30-day retention policy is only meaningful if someone outside the company is actually confirming deletion happens, auditing access logs, and publishing results the public can see. Absent that, "it's purged" is just a promise, and promises aren't oversight. Data that sits in a privately-run, searchable, nationwide network for even 30 days is still data that can be queried by any agency hooked into Flock's network, shared across jurisdictions, or pulled for an immigration or abortion-related investigation before that window closes.

Credit to Magnetic Norse for pressing officials on the gap between what they say and what they can actually demonstrate — it's exactly the kind of local accountability journalism this issue needs more of. If you want to see whether these cameras are watching your own streets, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on your city council or police department, our take-action page has the tools to start asking the same hard questions.