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After LAPD suspended the network, Ring walked away, and a journalist was pulled over on a false plate hit, Garrett Langley told The Verge 'we got this one wrong' and put audit logs on every search.
Garrett Langley told The Verge in August that the company had let its customers down. "We got this one wrong," he said, referring to a year of scandals in which police used Flock's 120,000 networked license-plate cameras to stalk exes, track journalists, and send armed officers to the wrong door. The product changes Flock just announced are the more interesting admission: the company is no longer saying its responsibility ends when a camera is sold.
The two changes are mandatory Audit Assistance and mandatory case codes. Audit Assistance, which Flock had offered as an optional add-on, watches for "abnormal search behavior" and locks out suspicious users until an administrator reviews the activity. Case codes, now required for every search, force officers to attach a reason to each query. Emergency overrides, for things like missing-child alerts, are automatically flagged for review. Together, the two features put Flock in the audit seat on its own database.
Audit Assistance is the more interesting of the two changes. The feature treats abnormal search behavior the way a fraud system treats unusual card swipes: lock the user out, route the activity to a human reviewer, and require an administrator to clear the account before it returns to service. Case codes, by contrast, are a paper trail. They tell an auditor what a search was for, but they do not stop the search from happening.
The two features are arriving after a year in which the same network produced a stack of bad headlines. In July, a Tennessee candidate for Congress was charged with four counts of felony vandalism for allegedly shooting ALPR cameras in Blount County over the course of a week. The Los Angeles Police Department suspended its use of Flock's cameras "for now." Amazon-owned Ring canceled a partnership with Flock after online backlash earlier in the year. Dozens of cities have either turned cameras off or let contracts lapse.
The new rules take direct aim at a specific failure mode. Flock's cameras use AI to read plates, makes, models, colors, and other features, then share those reads across a single national network. A single query can pull a vehicle's location history across thousands of jurisdictions, the same capability that lets a Florida officer track a car that left Texas two weeks ago. When the network is searchable as one database, the question of who polices the queries stops being a local personnel problem and becomes a vendor problem.
That is the lever civil-liberties advocates and contract negotiators are now pulling. Joel Feder, a reporter, was tracked in Minnesota by Flock cameras operating in jurisdictions whose use was later suspended by LAPD. The cameras flagged his vehicle on "stolen plates" that were not stolen. Police were dispatched to his location, and Flock told The Verge the cameras worked "correctly." If the cameras worked correctly and the result was an armed response to a false match, then the system worked against the public, and the vendor is the one holding the audit log.
Langley's mea culpa and the new product rules are not the same thing. A CEO interview is a posture shift. Required case codes and automatic lockouts are a product change. Flock's own blog frames the changes as the company getting its house in order, which is the right framing for customers and investors, but it understates what is being conceded: a vendor of an AI-policing product now treats itself as responsible for the downstream use of that product.
If the new rules hold, the contract negotiations in 2027 will look different. A vendor that has put itself in the audit seat is a vendor that cities can sue when the audit misses something, the same way a bank that runs a fraud system is on the hook when the fraud system is asleep. A Tennessee candidate is sitting in a jail cell on four felony counts for what he says was a political act against the cameras. The cameras are still in the ground. What changes is which entity has to explain, in court and in the press, what those cameras saw and why.
Wikipedia's entry on Flock Safety describes the company as the largest operator of automated license-plate reader cameras in the United States, which is the category level at which the new rules will be measured. The cameras will still be there in the morning. The test is whether Flock will staff the equivalent of a fraud-detection team for the searches themselves, and whether cities will write those obligations into the next round of contracts.