Public anxiety has recently intensified over technology that reads license plates, but now the NYPD could find itself as part of that controversy. New data has surfaced showing the department may have utilized the controversial Flock Safety database, despite lacking an official public agreement with the vendor.<\/p>\n
Civil rights advocacy organizations LatinoJustice PRLDEF and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) now want answers from the NYPD on why a credible third-party website shows that the department searched the Flock camera database 1,710 times between 2023 and 2025 without a publicly known contract with manufacturing surveillance company Flock Safety.<\/p>\n
License plate readers (LPRs) are high-tech cameras that can quickly snap a license plate number and examine it in a national database. They are often synonymous with the name brand Flock, which garnered sizable grassroots opposition across the country in recent months. Documented police misuse includes multiple instances of an officer stalking an ex-girlfriend with the technology. But the advocates say even when used properly, license plate readers pose serious concerns.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a tool that is incredibly expansive and powerful and there don\u2019t appear to be any appropriate limits or regulations on how people use it,\u201d said LatinoJustice PRLDEF Senior Counsel Andrew Case. \u201cAnd when you have these license plate readers that provide a nationwide search of information\u2026it presents a really serious issue in terms of how the police can find, what the police can do when they find you, and what standards the police use before they look for you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Case and S.T.O.P. Research Director Eleni Manis stumbled upon NYPD entries on the website HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which uses public records requests to document and compile when a license plate number was searched using Flock cameras. They backed the online database\u2019s credibility and successfully cross-referenced some officers with their searches. Most of the entries on HaveIBeenFlocked.com pertaining to the NYPD likely came from records provided by other law enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n
The advocates filed their own public records request to the NYPD this week, asking for materials like audit logs, training guidelines, and any communications or payments made to Flock Safety.<\/p>\n
Both civil rights groups involved have long served as a vanguard against police overreach and racial injustice in New York City. LatinoJustice PRLDEF, formerly known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, took on police brutality and misconduct issues for decades (and once boasted Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as a board member), while the privacy-focused S.T.O.P. played a key role in the city passing the POST Act to limit NYPD mass surveillance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe outstanding question is, was the NYPD knowingly using Flock?\u201d said Manis. \u201cIs it surprised that some officers have been using Flock? It\u2019s just completely unclear what the NYPD relationship with Flock is and we had assumed, until we saw this data, that it simply wasn\u2019t using Flock.\u201d<\/p>\n
The NYPD does employ similar technology through one of Flock\u2019s primary competitors, Leonardo US Cyber and Security Solutions, LLC. However, Flock cameras face uniquely intense scrutiny and public outcry over privacy concerns compared to similar license plate readers from other vendors. To be clear, the alleged NYPD searches recorded by HaveIBeenFlocked.com predate this backlash, which heated up this summer. So the issue may be as much about public image and transparency as privacy and surveillance.<\/p>\n
Regardless, questions of whether the NYPD can access the Flock license plate database and why it would potentially need to, given the NYPD\u2019s contract to access hundreds of Leonardo\u2019s ELSAG cameras, remain. Like with other surveillance tools, the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act limits how the NYPD can deploy approved license plate readers. According to policy guidelines updated this past February, license plate readers can only be used in public areas and can only capture \u201cimages of license plates that are readily observable to any member of the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
An NYPD spokesperson says the department is currently looking into this inquiry and denied any contract with Flock Safety, which did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
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