In late September 2026, the New York Police Department said it was reviewing hundreds of searches its officers ran on Flock Safety’s national license plate reader network. Flock’s cameras use AI to read plates and describe vehicles. Its network lets participating agencies search scans from cameras across the country.
The NYPD has never had a contract with Flock. A department spokesman said it shares no data with the company. The department has said a limited number of authorized personnel can reach a national commercial plate reader repository. It runs its own plate reader system and has a contract with a different vendor, Vigilant Solutions.
The count came from outside the department. Two advocacy groups, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and LatinoJustice PRLDEF, analyzed search records compiled by the Have I Been Flocked database. They counted 1,710 NYPD searches of Flock between March 2023 and December 2025. One of the groups said 418 searches carried no officer name.
Accounts of the stated reasons differ. The New York Daily News reported 614 searches with no stated purpose or only codes and shorthand. The Washington Examiner reported nearly 1,000 with no meaningful explanation or vague entries such as “investigation” and “inquiry.” Neither report explains the gap. We did not find the groups’ analysis published separately, so the figures rest on that reporting.
The NYPD said nearly all the searches are believed to involve suspects who fled the city. It has not said how many searches it has reviewed or what it found. As of mid-October we found no published results. The two groups filed a public records request for audit logs, agreements, training materials, and search policies. They also asked whether officers reached the system through another agency’s contract.
The procurement controls covered the contract. The searches went around it.
Why it matters
Procurement review is where many agencies apply their AI controls: approval, contract terms, a vendor assessment. Shared networks do not always pass through that gate. Access can come through a partner agency, a free trial, or a national lookup feature. None of those requires a purchase.
A search log is only useful if it names the person and the reason. A search with no officer name cannot be reviewed against anyone. A reason field that accepts “inquiry” cannot be reviewed against anything.
The NYPD case is not a finding of misuse. The department says there is no indication officers broke its rules, and the review is not done. The lesson is about visibility. The scale of use was counted by outside groups from public records, not reported by the department.
Questions for your agency
- Which plate reader and other AI-enabled networks can your staff query, including through partner agencies or vendor trials?
- Do those systems appear in your AI inventory and your surveillance technology policies?
- Does every search record a named user and a case number?
- Who reviews those logs, and how often?
- If a vendor offered free access tomorrow, who would have to approve it?
An inventory that lists only what you bought will miss what your people can reach.
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