Flock Safety, a company that has long stated its technology cannot identify or track individuals, has released a new AI tool that does both. Police can now use the system to identify drivers and follow vehicles based solely on their movement patterns.
How the tool works
The software, called OS Investigate, connects to a network logging drivers in over 6,000 communities. It identifies potential witnesses by how frequently their cars pass through a specific area. It also surfaces a driver’s associates by tracking vehicles that pass cameras together.
Because the system accesses police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, license plates can be converted into names, home addresses, and relatives. Officers can search for people in a mapped area using only a physical description.
The software ships with 69 prewritten prompts. Officers can select, review, or edit these before submitting them to the AI. They can also input their own prompts.
WIRED found the suggested prompts in a cache of more than 450 files on Flock’s website. These files describe 45 tools available to the AI. They grant access to plate scans, camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases containing Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and relatives.
Flock states it is testing the product with a small group of law enforcement partners. It describes the tool as still in development. Capabilities may not reflect what the company eventually sells. The release arrives as the company faces bipartisan political pressure, a growing record of officers caught misusing its platform, and vandalism that has left cameras sawed off and lenses painted over in cities across the country.
Privacy and legal concerns
Privacy and legal experts say Flock’s tools already raise serious constitutional concerns by giving police broad, often warrantless access to a vast record of people’s movement. The prompts examined by WIRED go further. They turn a tool for finding a known vehicle into one that casts suspicion on drivers based on where and how often they drive, regardless of whether they are wanted for a crime.
Flock built its business on a simple transaction. A camera photographs a passing car, converts the plate to text, and checks it against a list of vehicles police are looking for. Cars that are not on the list are recorded and otherwise ignored. OS Investigate’s pre-loaded prompts describe an inversion of that arrangement. An officer no longer needs a plate, a name, or a crime to begin. They supply a place, a stretch of time, and a pattern of behavior, and the system is designed to hand back the people who fit.
All 69 prompts are offered to officers as a menu of canned searches. Selecting one pastes it into a chat box. The officer can review or edit it before clicking again to submit.
One prompt Flock pre-loaded reads: “Find me witnesses based on vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days] during [daily timeframe]. *(will not include whitelisted vehicles).” An officer fills in the blanks and submits it. The output is a list of plates, which other tools in the product then convert into names and home addresses.
Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests. It then says to map where those people live, retrieve calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top 3 individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.
A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth. It returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.
Nineteen of the prompts describe hunting for patterns rather than looking up a record. Fourteen call for no plate, no name, and no description. The officer simply supplies a location, a window of time, and a behavior.
One group of requests asks for vehicles that visited three or more retail locations in a city in three days, or multiple banks in a week, or multiple gas stations between midnight and 5 am. None of the five names a target or an incident.
The tool behind those searches carries a filter that strips out buses, semi trucks, work vans, and trailers. A delivery driver visiting five shops would come off the list, while an ordinary driver making the same rounds remains.
The same type of search also applies to travel between cities. It flags vehicles that left one city for another and returned within a week, made repeat roundtrips over 14 days, or passed through three areas in sequence.
Company response
Flock did not respond to a list of questions about the product. It did not dispute the capabilities described in the reporting. Instead, a spokesperson, Paris Lewbel, characterized OS Investigate as a separate product from Flock’s license-plate reader technology. He said it is designed to help investigators work across information their agencies already have access to. He added that the tool’s capabilities and workflows may change significantly before a broader release.
Amid mounting controversy over how police use and abuse its cameras, Flock’s long-held position has been that its technology records plates and not the drivers behind them. Its public trust pages tell customers that its technology is built for specific, case-based investigations and “not for watching people.” Experts who reviewed the AI tool for WIRED say those assurances are hard to square with what they found in the code.
“I think that most people imagine that license plate readers are checking license plates and they’re looking if a vehicle is wanted. And if it’s not wanted, the police will move along,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But we’re increasingly seeing the aggressive deployment of AI by Flock. And in some ways, like China, very little space between what can be done and what is being done.”
Real-world impact
One example takes a single plate and asks the system to plot the journeys of that car and its “top 3 associates.” The code describes explicitly how the ranking works. It counts how often other plates appear at the same cameras within a two-minute window of the target by default. It reports back any car that shows up next to it three or more times within a “confidence threshold” defaulting to 0.75. An officer supplies one vehicle and the software finds up to 20.
“I don’t know how else to say this, but this sounds completely insane,” says Noel Pichardo. He was briefed on Flock’s technology during a pilot program while serving as a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, police officer. He reviewed the prompts for WIRED. “I don’t know how anyone can argue against the idea that Flock literally tracks people.”
Pichardo spoke out against the technology before Rhode Island state lawmakers in 2024. This was weeks after he served a 30-day suspension for criticizing Flock and department leadership in a local newspaper. The state police chiefs’ association publicly rebuked him days later. Investigations and discipline followed, which he believes were retaliatory. He resigned as the department moved to fire him.
A detective at a California law enforcement agency, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, sees in OS Investigate a tool his department would use. Flock has closed many vehicle theft cases for them, he says, and officers have worked with similar technology for years. “I was not aware of this AI product, but it doesn’t change the way I think about it,” he says. “We’ll use whatever tool is available to solve crime. It isn’t controversial.”
The detective said the witness-finding prompts made him slightly uncomfortable. He added, “As law enforcement, we need to use every tool available, in spite of what the ‘defund’ people say.”
How WIRED verified the claims
WIRED analyzed the software by examining code Flock served from its own login portals. Loading those pages returned a user interface for screens that would ordinarily appear only after a police user signed in. Reporters reconstructed portions of the authenticated applications, their prompts, search fields, tools, and controls, without actual access. The files appeared to contain everything needed to reconstruct the interface from scratch.
Before an officer runs a search, the software can ask for a justification. The code shows that by default an officer has to type a reason for the search. However, the form appears to place no requirements on what that reason says or how long it must be. If a department also requires a case number, the form checks only that it contains at least three characters. WIRED could not determine whether Flock applies additional checks on its servers after the information is submitted.
WIRED shared its findings with Buchodi, a pseudonymous independent security and privacy researcher who has spent more than a decade reverse engineering consumer software and surveillance technologies. Buchodi examined Flock’s code separately and reproduced key parts of the analysis.
References to the tools Flock offers, the data they can apparently reach, and the suggested prompts Flock authored for police are fixed in the code WIRED reviewed. What that code cannot show is how the system behaves in use. It contains no instructions given to the model itself. It does not reveal what Flock’s servers do with a request once submitted, what they send back, or whether they refuse any command.
The company’s growth
Flock has said little about the tool in public. But Garrett Langley, its chief executive, once likened it to a crime analyst who is, in his words, “always awake, always watching out for you.” At a demonstration for police chiefs in Denver last year, Langley described the ability to search every camera in a city for cars tailing an armored truck. He said the system would pull up the registered owners of those vehicles and check their arrest records, in under a minute.
Investigators who try it, he said, get “addicted.”
The company Langley started in Atlanta, where his first camera was a phone in a waterproof box, now logs 20 billion plate scans a month. Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and other venture firms have poured money into the business. It was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round. The company’s original tagline was “the first public safety operating system that eliminates crime.” Langley recently told Vanity Fair that Flock would have solved the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, Savannah Guthrie’s mother, had its cameras been deployed where she vanished.
Flock counts roughly 140,000 monthly active users. At the company’s new Atlanta headquarters, a gold-painted camera covered in signatures commemorates an earlier ritual of marking each additional $1 million in revenue with a new camera. “Now we do more like a million a day,” Langley recently told Vanity Fair.
