Records obtained by WBTV show Houston Police Department officers searched the Flock network that includes cameras at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte more than 183,000 times from March through May 2026.
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With Flock cameras continuing to fuel frustration and debate across Texas, a report out of North Carolina is raising a new question for Houston: Why is HPD searching a Flock camera network more than 1,000 miles away?
Records obtained by WBTV show Houston Police Department officers searched the Flock network that includes cameras at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte more than 183,000 times from March through May 2026. HPD was the biggest out-of-state agency searching the UNC Charlotte network during those three months, according to the North Carolina station.
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And those searches weren’t necessarily limited to Charlotte. WBTV found that when Houston officers searched a license plate through Flock, the queries often included more than 6,000 camera networks across the country.
Chron reached out to HPD for a statement but did not hear back in time for publication. However, HPD told WBTV: “The use of automated license plate recognition systems by Houston Police Department personnel is regularly reviewed. The department has identified usage that is being investigated further.”
Legal experts weigh in
David Kwok, a University of Houston Law Center professor who teaches and writes about white-collar crime, whistleblowers, public policy and law, and the social sciences, said the situation highlights a larger question about how far Flock’s surveillance network reaches.
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“Flock is a national organization. They are a private entity, and they have contracts with so many different localities,” Kwok told Chron. “If you have access to this national database of information, that’s a lot of information.”
As for the legal question of whether Houston police can investigate people in another state, the answer is yes—at least potentially, Kwok said. If Houston police are investigating a crime that occurred in Houston, the fact that a suspect left the city or state doesn’t automatically end the investigation.
“Just because someone has now left the jurisdiction, that’s not an obstacle,” Kwok said. “I mean, that’s a practical but not a legal obstacle, if you will, for investigation.”
“Flock is a national organization. They are a private entity, and they have contracts with so many different localities,” UH Law Professor David Kwok, who teaches and writes about white-collar crime, whistleblowers, public policy and law, and the social science told Chron.
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But Flock makes the question more complicated because police aren’t necessarily requesting records from another police department. They’re accessing data held by a private company through a network shared among law enforcement agencies.
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Kwok compared it to requesting telephone records or information held by an email provider: The company’s servers being somewhere else doesn’t necessarily determine whether police can seek the information. Instead, the rules governing access can depend on the relationship between the company and the police department, he said.
How does Flock fit into all this?
Flock says its system isn’t simply one giant database where every customer automatically has unrestricted access. During a recent Conroe City Council presentation, a Flock representative said each customer gets its own system and that sharing is turned off by default. Local law enforcement agencies decide whether to share their data, who can access it and how broadly.
UNC Charlotte told WBTV its cameras participate in a shared law enforcement network of about 1,600 agencies. When an agency searches for a specific license plate, the university’s cameras may be included in that query, returning the location, date and time of a detection if the plate was captured.
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Currently, there have been no accusations of misuse of the UNC Charlotte Flock network.
Why this matters in Texas
The questions are particularly relevant in Houston and Harris County, where Flock cameras have already become a contentious issue.
Harris County officials recently estimated that roughly 4,600 Flock devices in the county have unclear ownership or access, although the county said the figure is not a verified inventory. Commissioners formed a working group to examine access and data-use policies rather than imposing a countywide pause.
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Other Texas communities are taking different approaches. Conroe recently renewed its Flock contract while tightening access to its system, while Harris County Precinct 4 has decommissioned 61 cameras over privacy, data-access and potential-misuse concerns.
For Kwok, the problem is less about automatically assuming HPD did something improper and more about the lack of information surrounding the searches.
“I think this is a broad concern over here, but the simple facts, it depends on what crimes they’re investigating,” Kwok said. “Without knowing what crime they’re investigating, or whom they’re investigating, it’s really difficult to answer these questions.”
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