Flock's New Police AI Can Track People by Driving Patterns, Not Just Plates
WIRED reverse-engineered Flock Safety's new AI tool and found it can identify drivers, map who they travel with, and search by description alone.
What happened: Flock Safety, whose license-plate cameras operate in more than 6,000 US communities, has built an AI system called OS Investigate that goes well beyond reading plates. WIRED reconstructed the tool from code exposed on Flock's own login pages and found it can identify drivers, map who they travel with, and pull names, addresses and relatives from commercial databases. The system ships with 69 ready-made prompts letting officers search by movement patterns, physical description, or arrest history, without a known plate or suspect. Flock says the product is still being tested with a small group of departments and that its capabilities may change before wider release.
Why it matters: Flock has long told the public its cameras "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals," a claim central to how it has defended the technology from surveillance concerns. The new tool undercuts that message: it can flag "witnesses" just by counting how often their car passes through a neighborhood, or search for someone using only a description like height, race and tattoos. This arrives as a Washington Post analysis found roughly 50 officers misused plate-reader systems, several to stalk women, and as courts are only starting to weigh what warrantless access to movement data means under the Fourth Amendment.
How it works, plainly: Officers pick from a menu of prewritten prompts, or write their own, in a chat box. The AI can chain together plate scans, camera metadata, arrest records, dispatch logs, ballistics results and commercial data holding Social Security numbers and phone numbers. Some prompts hunt for patterns, cars that hit multiple banks in a week or make repeat round trips between cities, with no plate or name needed. Officers must type a "reason" for each search, but the code sets no minimum on what that reason says, and a case-number field only checks that it has at least three characters.
The pushback: Flock disputes none of WIRED's findings on the record but calls OS Investigate a separate, still-developing product. Elsewhere on its platform, the company recently added safeguards like flagging unusual searches and requiring case numbers, but MIT Technology Review found those numbers aren't verified, so officers can enter fake ones. Some cities have already canceled Flock contracts, several states are weighing limits on plate readers, and civil liberties groups argue that only new laws, not company promises, will meaningfully rein in what the system can do.