Whatever Happened to Flock Safety's Ethics Board?

Our Take

Credit to Business Reform for doing the unglamorous work of holding a company to its own words. Back in June 2020, amid nationwide protests over policing and privacy, Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley publicly promised an ethics board to check the company's power. Six years on, that board is nowhere to be found — and what Flock offers instead is a in-house "policy review" staffed entirely by its own legal, privacy, and product teams. That's not oversight. That's a company grading its own homework.

The comparison to Axon is instructive, and damning. Axon's AI ethics board is made up of outside experts in civil rights, law, and law enforcement who have publicly pushed back on the company — including reportedly forcing Axon to shelve a Taser-armed drone concept. Flock has no equivalent friction built into its process. When the same people who profit from selling ALPR contracts to police departments are also the ones deciding what's "ethical" about deploying that surveillance, the fox is guarding the henhouse. There's no outside voice with the standing or incentive to say no.

This matters because Flock's cameras aren't a hypothetical privacy debate — they're already tracking millions of vehicle movements a day across American towns, often with little public input and even less independent accountability. A broken promise about an ethics board might sound like a footnote, but it's a window into how the company treats accountability generally: as a PR line item, not a structural commitment. If you want to see how far this network has spread in your own community, check the map, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment where you live, our take-action page is a good place to start.