For law enforcement
DeFlock Tampa, and Aaron Pickern who runs this site, respect law enforcement officers. We mean that in the ordinary sense: the person who takes a call, writes a report, and has to look a parent in the eye. We understand that most of you who have used Flock, Axon, Vigilant, or a school-zone feed used it the way you were trained and the way a supervisor said to. That is not the same as endorsing the tool.
We do not support any further use of this kind of system. Statutes and policy memos can be argued in a room. The moral point is simpler. A searchable log of every car that passes a pole, held by a contractor and reachable with a password, will keep opening a rift of trust with the public no matter how many safeguards a vendor adds. If you have a choice about whether to query it, expand it, or recommend the next contract, we ask you to step away from it.
This page is not legal advice. It does not ask anyone to leak, to refuse a lawful order in the street, or to touch a camera. It is a briefing. Lodge statement: National FOP, 21 Aug 2026. Product facts: ALPRs · Flock · neighbor lines: Q&A.
Public group: DeFlock Tampa on Facebook.
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On 21 August 2026 the National Fraternal Order of Police published a statement titled Who the Flock Do You Think You Are? National President Patrick Yoes was answering Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley, who had said the public would see "a dramatic increase in officers being arrested or fired for abusing Flock."
Yoes did not ask cities to pull the cameras. He said intentional misuse should be handled. He also said Flock sold the product as a tool to help police, then, under public criticism, started treating the officers who use it as the problem. "You cannot sell police a tool to fight crime and then portray those same officers as the problem when public criticism follows."
That is the same line this page takes. The badge is not the product. A vendor that needs public trust and officer trust does not get either by hanging the profession for the reach of its own network.
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None of this requires you to be a lawyer. It requires you to know what you are logging into.
The pole is local. The search surface is not. Flock's own policy says a hit is a plate image, a vehicle image, traits such as make and color, time, and camera location, stored in a vendor cloud (AWS Gov). The company says the customer owns the data. Ownership on paper is not the same as a system only your desk sergeant can open. Sharing is a setting. Other agencies can be given a path to search what your poles collect.
Those are the sales examples. The same login can run a search that is not tied to a plate, a name, or a crime if the agency enables Flock's AI layer (OS Investigate, formerly Nightshift). WIRED reconstructed that capability on 19 Aug 2026. Flock did not dispute it. Flock says the tool is separate from the LPR product and in limited testing. Even without that tool, hotlists include NCIC and "other database or hot list." Which lists your agency turned on is a policy fact, not a slogan. Ask your admin which ones are live.
Think of one drive-by as one file. Flock's current company default is a 7-day rolling hard delete of an unsaved scan. The CEO said on 13 Aug 2026 that existing customers keep the window they already approved. A later drive-by is a new file. Saved hits, Evidence Mode, and search logs sit on another clock. Florida agencies quote a maximum of three years for ALPR records. Your agency's number is in the contract, not on the booth card.
The basic LPR product is not sold as face recognition. It still records enough to pick a minivan by color, marks, and where it was last week. That is identification of a household's movements. Not-face is not the same as not-identifying.
Florida law already bars ALPRs from issuing a traffic ticket. That limit does not stop search, share, or retain. School-zone RedSpeed is the ticket machine. It still sends HD video to a vendor cloud. A 2024 RedSpeed pitch offered to stream that video into Flock. Staff later said that layer is off. A brand name on the pole does not change the class of system. School zones.
Logs that nobody reads are not oversight. The Washington Post has reported officers using ALPR and Flock systems on intimate partners. Senators told the FTC that stolen customer logins showed up in infostealer data while MFA was still optional for some agencies. Flock later said MFA became mandatory. Illinois's secretary of state found Flock let CBP reach that state's cameras against state law. Those are not hypotheticals. They are why a password on a nationwide plate network is a public-trust problem even when you personally never misuse it.
Pasco is replacing some roadside Flock units with Axon because it is already in the evidence cloud and cheaper. Axon Fleet 3 and Outpost are still plate readers. Switching vendors is not turning the network off. Axon.
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A contractor can add MFA, a 7-day default, a case-code box, and a promise that sharing is off. Those are settings. Settings get flipped. Logins get borrowed. A later product adds movement search. The architecture stays the same: every car that passes the pole becomes a file someone else can query.
DeFlock Tampa's position is that a system like this does not have a place in the United States. Not as a neighborhood pole. Not as a school-zone add-on. Not as a cheaper box on an evidence cloud you already pay for. We can respect the officer who used it under orders and still say the next query, the next expansion, and the next contract are a mistake.
If you sit in a briefing where the vendor calls this safety, ask the same questions the public is asking: how many days, who else can search, which hotlists, who reads the logs. If you can recommend that the agency pause, do that. If you cannot, you still do not have to sell it to a neighbor as a harmless camera.
Longer civic Q&A: qa.html. This site does not ask anyone to touch, block, or approach a camera.