CA Cops Are Using Flock Cameras To Spy On A Small WI Village
Elm Grove, a small village near Milwaukee, has installed six Flock cameras to monitor its main streets, but these cameras are part of a broader surveillance network used nationwide. Flock Group, Inc. provides automated licence plate readers (ALPRs) that capture various data, including vehicle details, pedestrian movements, and even interior vehicle images, which are stored in a massive database. While elm Grove’s local officers rarely search their cameras, other law enforcement agencies frequently conduct cross-jurisdictional searches-over a million times monthly-using data from this network. Major agencies like California Highway Patrol and the FBI lead in nationwide searches, often for routine investigations but also for more unusual queries, sometimes involving bizarre or trivial reasons. This pervasive searching raises concerns about oversight and privacy, especially since searches are often conducted without warrants, despite legal protections requiring probable cause. The debate over the constitutionality of such surveillance is ongoing, with lawsuits challenging the use of Flock’s technology without proper warrants, emphasizing the need for policies that respect americans’ reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements.
Elm Grove is a quiet village of about 6,500 in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, 15 minutes from downtown Milwaukee. Like many municipalities, officials in Elm Grove recently caught Flock fever, installing six cameras that constantly surveil the village’s main streets.
Flock Group, Inc. is a tech company that has sold more than 120,000 cameras to governments, schools, hospitals, shopping malls, and neighborhood associations. Marketed as ALPRs — automated license plate readers — they capture far more than plates: passing vehicles, pedestrians, backyards, and sometimes even the inside of vehicles.
Flock uploads the images and videos from its nationwide network of cameras into a massive location-history database. Flock’s AI tools create a “vehicle fingerprint” for each vehicle — every scratch, dent, bumper sticker, trailer, roof rack, or other noticeable feature is logged. Flock can document where you’ve been in the past month, where you are today, and even predict where you’re going in the future and who you’ll travel with. As with most emerging AI tech, the sky’s the limit.
What’s notable about Elm Grove’s six cameras is not that they exist, but that the cameras are searched more than a million times most months. But Elm Grove officers aren’t doing the bulk of that searching. Audit logs obtained through public records requests by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty show that Elm Grove’s officers only search their own cameras a few dozen times a month for minor local crimes, like traffic infractions.
The million searches come from other departments. Once an agency searches outside its jurisdiction, the searching is reciprocal. For example, if an Elm Grove officer runs a national search, then any of several thousand agencies can run a nationwide search that includes Elm Grove’s camera network. And now it happens all the time.
Records called “network audit logs,” maintained by every Flock customer, tell the story of these nationwide searches. Based on Elm Grove’s own records — and records from five other Waukesha County agencies — Gavin Newsom’s California Highway Patrol is by far the most frequent nationwide searcher of Flock cameras. CHP runs about 50,000 nationwide searches a month, querying images and videos collected from thousands of agencies.
CHP isn’t the only heavy nationwide searcher. The FBI runs around 20,000 searches a month. Other frequent users include Louisville Metro PD, the Hillsborough County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the Michigan State Police — each running queries 13,000 to 16,000 times a month.
What are they searching for? Most of CHP’s nationwide searches involve traffic infractions, theft, or hit-and-runs — somewhat understandable, but that does not explain why CHP is searching Elm Grove cameras for crimes on the Pacific Coast Highway, for example. Other agencies typically give vague reasons for their nationwide searches. Wisconsin cameras are pinged more than 50,000 times a month for searches labeled as “other,” “investigation,” or “not applicable.” That’s not much of an insight into whether police are properly using the Flock database.
On the other hand, some searches are downright bizarre. In July 2026 alone, agencies ran these nationwide searches covering Elm Grove’s six cameras:
- Indianapolis Police ran 70 nationwide searches to monitor who attended the funeral of rapper “Lil E.”
- Hanover County, N.C., Police ran 385 nationwide searches for a “K9 investigation.”
- Lexington, Ohio, Police ran 225 nationwide searches to catch someone “attempting to sell homemade fireworks.”
- Panama City Police ran four nationwide searches to find “stolen funeral home gurneys.”
- Lucas County, Ohio, Police ran over 500 searches for an “illegal casino.”
The problem is not that police investigate unusual things — cemetery burglaries, Outlaw motorcycle funerals, or a “concerned boyfriend” (all real queries from the records) — it is that they use this nationwide surveillance network with little or no oversight. Harrison County, Texas, for example, probably had no good reason to run 28 nationwide searches of thousands of law enforcement agencies’ cameras all to find a stolen lawn mower, yet they ran those searches anyway (the mower wasn’t in Elm Grove).
This is what Flock loves: frequent and pervasive searching. CEO Garrett Langley says the word he hears most from police is “addicted.” He’s right. Flock is a precise nationwide surveillance tool. With a click, police can track anyone nationwide, see up to 30 days of past movements, and predict future ones. Most department policies, if they exist, allow searches for “official use” or “law enforcement purposes,” hardly the type of guardrails to protect the public from a surveillance state.
But the Constitution requires more. In June 2026, the Supreme Court held that police access to Google’s Location History is a Fourth Amendment “search” requiring a warrant. Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their physical movements, even when their movements are recorded on public streets or in databases kept by private companies, like Verizon, Google, Apple, or now Flock. When a company builds a virtual panopticon, police should need a warrant to search it.
This debate will hopefully be resolved in the courts. The Institute for Justice is litigating two major cases: one about the Flock system in Norfolk, Virginia, and another about San Jose, California The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty just sued a dozen Waukesha County agencies for searching the Flock database without a warrant.
Police may use powerful technology to solve crimes and often do so effectively. But when they use cell-site data, app-location data, GPS tracking, or other tools to track Americans’ movements, they generally need a warrant or a recognized exception, such as an emergency. The same rule should apply to Flock, which is more powerful, precise, and thorough than many of those other technologies. As AI transforms American life, we should be wary of an all-seeing police surveillance state. Requiring warrants for Flock searches is an important marker to lay down.
Dan Lennington is Vice President and Deputy Counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
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