Atlanta police searched the Flock Safety license plate reader network for immigrants, records show

Our Take

Credit to the Atlanta Community Press Collective for doing the unglamorous work that makes accountability possible: filing an open records request, waiting months, and actually reading the audit logs Flock Safety generates but rarely lets the public see. What they found is exactly the scenario critics of this technology have been warning about — a network built and sold as a tool for local police to catch car thieves and hit-and-run drivers instead being used, by two accounts with APD credentials, to run 15 searches in a five-day window looking for immigrants.

This matters because Flock's whole pitch rests on the idea that each city controls its own network and its own policy. But the system is interconnected by design — that's the entire point of the product, letting one department query cameras thousands of miles away. When a single agency decides immigration status is fair game, it doesn't just affect that department's jurisdiction; it exposes the fiction that local control means local accountability. Sanctuary city policies, city council votes, community trust — all of it can be quietly routed around by a handful of officers with login credentials and a search bar.

The only reason we know this happened is because someone asked for the logs. Most cities don't have a local outlet willing to file and follow through on records requests, which means this kind of misuse is almost certainly happening elsewhere, unseen. Check our camera map to see what's tracking your area, and visit our take-action page if you want to push your own city for the same kind of transparency Atlanta just got.