Topic
Technology such as license plate readers, facial recognition, and camera networks used by police to monitor the public, amid privacy debates.
Covington, Georgia has paid Flock $201,000 through August 2026, up from $40,000 in 2020, Wired reported. Add-ons now sit beside a maintenance fee that has itself risen, so the camera count no longer predicts the invoice.
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Graylark added interior-photo geolocation to Raven, its police AI tool, across what its CEO called millions of short-term rental units. The LAPD and Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office bought access earlier, 404 Media reported.
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Flock Safety plans to cut about 270 jobs, roughly 18% of its workforce, Reuters reported. Two days earlier Henrico County, Virginia, said it would end its contract over protection of data shared across Flock's nationwide network.
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VIDIZMO pitched Johnson City, Tennessee police in May on facial recognition across Flock and Axon footage in one platform. Flock's pledge against face recognition covers its own devices; VIDIZMO's route starts with clips an agency exports itself.
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British Transport Police is extending a £320,786 facial recognition trial that scanned over 500,000 faces and produced one false alert and no arrests. Its public defence leans on arrests officers made during deployments that its own performance data leaves out.
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Community Not Cameras wants Seattle's council to rein in surveillance procurement. The account one of its members gives of the police fusion room points instead at credential control and session logging.
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Marion County prosecutors charged five Indianapolis officers with fraud and misconduct for using Flock cameras to track ex-partners and women met on patrol. The department's answer is a case-number rule for every search plus faster audits, both run by the agency itself.
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Republicans and Democrats on the Senate crime subcommittee both objected that plate reader vendors leave abuse detection to the police departments buying the cameras, and the four invited chief executives did not appear.
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Cities are swapping Flock license plate cameras for Axon's after reporting on searches run for ICE and a nationwide abortion-related lookup. Axon keeps the same search-by-search record under four report names. Six agencies have handed theirs over.
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A Senate subcommittee will ask four camera vendors on Sept. 23 who has access to hundreds of millions of Americans' data. Verkada answered in writing first and said its chief executive cannot attend.
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A hacking group took a camera down from above a roadway and found the key to its media store sitting in plaintext on the same flash, in hardware whose business case is being cheap enough to leave unattended.
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Audit logs obtained by a Dunwoody resident show Flock Safety staff running FreeForm queries for masks, signs and religious symbols against production camera networks, with explicit permission on record for one of the jurisdictions involved.
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Audit logs obtained by a Dunwoody resident put an entity called Flock City PD on real plate readers in Georgia and Texas, running free-text AI searches for masks, crowds and political stickers while Flock pitched police.
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The city's report on its 2025 Flock trial says data went to outside law enforcement agencies while both the agreement and the company said sharing was off, and hackers separately pulled people and bicycle detections off a camera.
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Boston ran about 45 Flock cameras for 156 days under a no-cost pilot. The city's surveillance report blames a Flock vendor error for three days of out-of-network access to plate data it had contracted to keep local.
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A Republican senator wants a count of confirmed misuse across a 120,000-camera network. Only a product that logs who searched what, and why, can produce one.
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Clearview says InquiryIQ is a prototype no police user has ever touched, but WIRED found its interface text sitting in files the login page hands to any visitor, and that text is now the thing procurement has to ask about.
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Chris Larsen gave the SFPD $9.4 million for its real-time crime centre and now says opposition to plate readers has grown huge in two years. Cities are switching cameras off, which makes retention the live term.
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Flock's August retention and audit promises sit on top of a suite that can now hunt people by written description, controls WIRED found log an abusive search as it happens rather than stopping it. The risk of a wrong result lands on the officer who typed the words.
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The client bundle enumerates which descriptions get blocked and which get a First Amendment warning, but the thresholds and instructions doing the deciding stay on Flock's servers, which is the part a city is actually buying.
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Product · August 17, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers