How an Atlanta Suburb Ended Up Sharing Flock Data With More Than 2,000 Organizations

Alpharetta, a prosperous suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, is home to about 67,000 people, served by about 120 local police officers. It also hosts several dozen cameras sold by Flock Safety, the increasingly controversial surveillance company that collects license plate data and other information and makes it searchable by police. Data captured by those Flock cameras, WIRED has learned via public records requests, is accessible to more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, airports, and government agencies across the United States. These range from Morehouse College to Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission and include Medicare fraud investigators in Illinois, a drug task force focused on east-central Missouri, and the inspector general of a federal agency. In return, Alpharetta receives Flock data from more than 1,300 entities, which span from the prosecutor’s office of Whitley County, Indiana, to the Metro Police Authority of Genesee County, Michigan. The Alpharetta Police Department—which, as reported by WIRED, had an officer resign due to Flock misuse on August 5—also exchanges Flock data with several agencies that have been similarly rocked by recent incidents of officers misusing its technology, including Georgia’s Bibb County Sheriff’s Department, the Savannah Police Department, and the Dallas Police Department. Alpharetta’s data-sharing network has expanded tremendously over the past year. Since June 2025, the number of entities receiving data from Alpharetta police has grown by about 42 percent, and the number of entities sending data to them has grown by about 125 percent. And, according to documents obtained via public records requests from several other cities around the country, Alpharetta is far from alone in having an expansive and complicated data-sharing system, providing a potent example of how pervasive Flock’s surveillance network has become. One of Flock’s central selling points is its network of customers—mostly, though not entirely, law enforcement agencies. If a criminal suspect crosses city, county, or perhaps state lines, Flock tells its customers, a query can prevent them from falling through the cracks. Data sharing across agencies is hardly novel. A police department can, for instance, share data from its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) with state-run fusion centers, which centralize resources from law enforcement agencies in particular regions. They could also share it with a regional High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program. (Alpharetta police agreed to do just that in 2025, according to a memorandum of understanding that WIRED obtained.) Whereas HIDTAs are federally funded public programs, Flock is a private company that manages a sprawling, interconnected ALPR network governed by rules and restrictions that vary wildly from city to city. And if police departments don’t closely supervise their settings for data requests and sharing within Flock’s interface, they can unwittingly become nodes in a much larger surveillance network than they necessarily know or understand. This can lead to situations like that in Alpharetta, where citizens and visitors are embedded in a data-sharing network that has propagated to more than 2,300 nodes. So, how does it happen? Setting Boundaries To understand how cities like Alpharetta can build such expansive data-sharing networks with Flock, it’s important to understand how Flock’s interface actually works. WIRED analyzed a cache of files on Flock’s website that are served by its login pages to anyone who loads them. Some of the code that WIRED analyzed illustrates what a Flock administrator might see in their own Flock interface—specifically, in their settings and sharing preferences. An administrator can automatically share their agency’s Flock data with any organization within a custom radius, within their home state, or within one or more other states. Alternatively, they can individually choose organizations to share data with. Administrators can also limit specific data that other organizations can receive, like live or archived videos. They can also limit which organizations can ask them for data. They could restrict this, for instance, to organizations based in the same state, or within a 50-mile radius. Lieutenant Jason Hiott of the Alpharetta Police Department tells WIRED that per the city’s Flock settings, the department will “automatically approve” requests for its Flock data from law enforcement agencies within 500 miles. If they’re outside that radius, the police department has to individually request access to Alpharetta’s data. Hiott was unable to say what the Alpharetta police department’s default settings were, whether it altered the default settings, or how long the radius has been set to 500 miles—though he did note that the department “does not share any live feeds, analytics, etc. with anyone.” Flock spokesperson Jess Montejano claims that data sharing is turned off by default for new and onboarding customers—so no law enforcement agencies automatically get access to another agency’s data. Flock did not specify whether that has always been the case. Paris Lewbel, another Flock spokesperson, adds that “historically,” its customers have been able to request data from other customers that are within the same state, or within 50 miles—the precursor to actually sharing data. Coast-to-Coast Flock’s network settings allow agencies to set specific limits on what Flock data it shares and receives, but in some cases, police departments have been caught off guard by how expansive the search settings were for their officers. Often, the confusion has been tied to Flock’s Nationwide Lookup tool, which the company introduced in 2023. It allows any Flock customer to query any other Flock customer in the country, as long as they have a specific license plate. (Flock disabled the tool for federal agencies following backlash to the company’s pilot program with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.) In several cases, Flock customers had no idea this tool was enabled. | Got a Tip? | |---| | Are you a current or former police officer, government official, or Flock Safety employee who wants to talk about the company? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporters securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61. | Chris Shook is the city attorney in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, where two officers recently resigned after the police department probed their alleged misuse of Flock’s technology. He tells WIRED that in June, the city’s police department made an unexpected discovery while attempting to complete a public records request: Per the department’s Flock settings, the Nationwide Lookup tool was active. Police leadership, however, had been under the impression that officers could only search cameras within Ohio. Shook says that the police department immediately changed the settings to enable only in-state camera searches. But they had no idea when, or why, nationwide searches may have been enabled. Lacking answers, Shook turned to Flock. According to emails reviewed by WIRED, Flock public affairs manager Caroline Bush could only say that Nationwide Lookup “was enabled at some point before February 2025.” Due to an “event-log limitation” prior to that month, she could not say exactly when. But she added that, upon checking the police department’s audit, she “found nationwide searches as early as 03/2023.” This came as a surprise to Shook. If nationwide search was enabled, he said, there must have been an error, “but we are unsure of how that error could have occurred.” “The most likely explanation is that the setting was enabled during initial account setup or onboarding,” Bush replied. She said Nationwide Lookup “was a common default configuration for agencies at that time, before Flock introduced stronger in-product disclosures and tighter controls around this feature.” In California, the Palo Alto Police Department had a similar experience. In a city council “study session” led by city manager Ed Shikada on June 1, he claimed that Flock activated Nationwide Lookup “for all customers” in mid-2023. But notably, California law forbids sharing ALPR data with federal or out-of-state law enforcement. He says that Flock quietly "disabled" Nationwide Lookup for Palo Alto police in October 2024, and for all California law enforcement by March 2025. However, Shikada said Palo Alto police didn't know Nationwide Lookup had ever been active until December 2025. Flock did not respond to requests for comment regarding its National Lookup tool ahead of publication. Meanwhile, Commander David Hart of Minnesota’s Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office tells WIRED that while his office didn’t have a debacle with the Nationwide Lookup tool, he had to reel in the permissions that were set up when the county started using Flock in early 2024. For the first few months, his officers could send and receive data requests to any Flock customer in the country. But toward the end of 2024, Hart says, he limited outgoing and incoming data requests to in-state agencies. No data requests are approved automatically. (Minnesota’s ALPR statute sets specific standards that agencies must meet before capturing or receiving ALPR data.) Hart tells WIRED that on principle, he doesn’t believe in using Flock casually for wide-ranging searches. “It’s gotten to the point where people want to search more agencies just to be able to search more agencies, without a real reason behind it,” Hart says. When examining Flock audit logs, it’s not always obvious why an officer would want or need to expand the scope of their search. WIRED filed a public records request to the Reynoldsburg Police Department and received 549 pages that log every Flock query its officers made from January 2024 through April 2026. The records show that even from query to query, the number of probed Flock networks can vary significantly. On January 1, 2025, for instance, a Reynoldsburg police officer queried 53 Flock networks. The officer’s “reason” for the search, according to the log, was a potential criminal offense coded “30.” Just 40 minutes later, the same officer cited the same criminal offense code but, for reasons the log does not specify, instead queried 5,392 Flock networks. Similar examples appear regularly throughout the log, though most of the searches WIRED reviewed had probed fewer than 100 networks. Flock users, as illustrated in a recent video on the company’s YouTube channel, can customize the number of networks they want to probe in a single query. A police officer can probe every single camera network their department has access to—or they can limit their search to their state, or simply their own jurisdiction. That decision is left up to the officer. “The particular officer can narrow the networks they want to search, but typically they don't,” Shook tells WIRED. “Typically, they search every network they have access to.” Mixed Company Alpharetta’s Flock data-sharing network shows that it sends data to and receives it from agencies that, along with being geographically distant, are a far cry from the local police departments and county sheriff offices that represent Flock’s prototypical customers. It’s often unclear, outside of a fluke circumstance, what the agencies would gain from exchanging data. For instance, it’s not obvious why the Office of Inspector General for the federal General Services Administration, Region G of the Alabama Drug Enforcement Task Force, or the University of North Texas’ Denton campus police would need to have a mutual exchange of Flock data with the police department of Alpharetta, Georgia. (None of these agencies responded to requests for comment.) WIRED contacted more than a dozen agencies sending or receiving data with the Alpharetta Police that are neither a police department nor a sheriff’s office, and most did not respond to requests for comment. Just one answered specific questions about its use of Flock: Kentucky’s Louisville Regional Airport Authority, a nearly seven-hour drive from Alpharetta. Natalie Ciresi Chaudoin, the airport authority’s director of public relations, tells WIRED that the Louisville Regional Airport Authority has 13 Flock cameras across its properties. She says that the airport shares data from its cameras with 2,240 federal, state, and local agencies across the country and receives data from 1,124 agencies. Chaudoin adds that the airport’s Flock settings are configured to “automatically accept a request for data-sharing with in-state law enforcement agencies, while out-of-state agencies’ requests are manually accepted or declined following their review.” When asked about Alpharetta, Chaudoin says that the airport was “aware that it received data from an agency” in the city. The airport has not shared its data in return. Limiting Factors Twenty-four states, as well as Washington, DC, have statutes covering ALPR use. The regulations they impose differ widely from state to state, with some being quite specific: Since 2023, it’s been illegal for law enforcement in Illinois to use ALPR data in criminal cases related to immigration or abortion. The effects of California’s restrictions are visible in records obtained via public records request from the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which are published publicly on Muckrock, a public records request facilitator. According to the records, the fusion center shares and receives data from fewer than 400 agencies—a fraction of the agencies in Alpharetta’s network—and they’re all based in California. However, that fact alone doesn’t paint the whole picture. According to an audit of searches run on the NCRIC’s Flock network, NCRIC member agencies ran more than 57,000 Flock queries in the single month between November 26 and December 26, 2025. Many of the queries probed thousands of Flock networks, and more than 96 percent of them probed at least 100. In other words, the scope of the NCRIC queries tended to be significantly larger than those of the Reynoldsburg Police Department—the police department in a state with no ALPR statute, where officers had access to the Nationwide Lookup tool until June and from which two officers recently resigned due to allegedly misusing Flock. On August 13, Flock announced a set of changes to how its software works, seemingly in response to a surge in news coverage about police officers misusing the technology. The company said that it is now “recommending a 7-day ALPR data retention period,” a reduction from 30 days. But Flock customers can pay for extended data retention, according to documents obtained via a public records request from St. Petersburg, Florida. Flock also says that law enforcement can’t run a Flock search without entering a criminal case code and that by the end of the year, all customers must activate its Audit Assistance tool, which scans for “defined criteria for abnormal behavior” and “automatically” suspends Flock access if detected. In Alpharetta, according to Lieutenant Hiott, police chief Trent Lindgren learned about the Audit Assistance tool in July and promptly activated it. By July 20, the department had opened an investigation into one of its officers. On August 5, the officer resigned.