A webinar from last year showed police how to use Flock technology to monitor the No Kings protests and other small parades. The company now emphasises solving violent crime, yet its training materials reveal far more invasive capabilities.
Surveillance as a routine
Caity Peak, director of market management at Flock, explained how real time crime centres can manage emergency responses as well as established events. These events include 4th of July fireworks, parades, bike races, Mardi Gras, and protests. The training demonstrates how casually authorities treat always-on surveillance.
Peak described FlockOS as a platform that combines automatic license plate readers, drones, gunshot detectors, 911 data, and various surveillance cameras into a single interface. This allows officers to view multiple data streams during both emergencies and mundane city activities.
“Imagine that you’re an incident commander, and you’re working this No Kings Protest,” Peak said while a dashboard displayed surveillance tools over Denver. “If I’m somebody assigned a traffic post that’s working this No Kings Protest, I really don’t have time to go in […] and look at all these places [for different intelligence]. This is an example of viewing all of that in one place.”
She noted that live video footage helps monitor crowds without officers physically present, reducing the risk of escalating tension. The dashboard displayed traffic information, a response plan, floor plans of nearby buildings, and video feeds from outdoor and indoor cameras.
Peak added that she could detect when traffic was stopped for too long, anticipating road rage and deciding when to send officers to an area.
Teaching police to track activists
404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation previously documented police using Flock cameras to monitor No Kings protests and First Amendment activity. The EFF found that several law enforcement agencies ran Flock searches related to these rallies.
This webinar confirms the practice is not an anomaly. Flock’s current public stance that its cameras are noninvasive and primarily used for serious crime is misleading. The company markets its systems as an operating system for crime solving and predictive policing, training police to use the full suite of tools.
Matt Patin, a former New Orleans Police Department officer and current Flock employee, explained the dashboard could show ALPR data and body camera footage to provide full situational awareness. Peak recalled her time as an officer hoping events would occur near intersections with ALPR cameras.
“We’d have to pick which intersection is going to make sense [for an ALPR camera], where do we see the most traffic, where do we see the most events, and then I hoped that if an event happened in front of a camera, it’s one that’s in an intersection where I chose to put [the ALPR] and not one where I chose not to put an ALPR,” she said.
She added that she would consider which cameras and drones to use for a specific event.
“I want to make sure I have as many tools to make myself dangerous if and when I need it,” she added.
Targeting specific vehicles and people
Peak gave an example of surveilling a car sideshow near Sacramento using drones, surveillance cameras, ALPRs, and social media monitoring. Police knew the event might turn nefarious based on who promoted it.
A list of “THINGS TO LOOK FOR” included mismatched wheels, car club stickers, and covered license plates. Peak then demonstrated Flock’s free-form search, an AI-powered video feature.
“Let’s take Flock’s free-form feature and say ‘hey, any time you see a car tonight with multi-colored wheels passing by any one of these five LPR cameras, I want you to send us an alert’,” she said.
She explained how Flock Nova, the company’s investigative tool, merges LPR information with agency data. This includes person data, IP data, email data, sex offender records, vehicle data, and open source intelligence.
A screenshot showed a “street racing suspect” with the man’s name, address, email, social media accounts, phone number, and affiliations.
“It works like a Google Search,” she said. “I run him through Nova. I can query CAD [computer aided dispatch], RMS [records management system], OSINT, jail records. All these things we have integrated to see that we have contacted him before for sideshows, he has been contacted for spinning cars in an intersection in the last 90 days, he is related to this car club, and now with that information, I have the justification I need to actually tow the car for 90 days instead of just issuing a citation.”
Data sharing after violence
Later in the session, police from New Orleans and Flock representatives discussed the system’s use after the Bourbon Street terror attack on 1 January 2025. The attack killed 14 people.
The city used a “tremendous amount of cameras in a very short time” to map the attacker’s movements. Patin stated that footage running through FlockOS was eventually shared with the Department of Homeland Security, federal fusion centers, and the FBI.
“7 terabytes of information, which was a lot of data, and we were able to share that with our fusion center and our federal partners. Homeland Security, HSI [Homeland Security Investigations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and FBI,” Patin said.
What it means
Police now have a unified system to monitor public gatherings and track individuals across multiple data sources. The training materials confirm that surveillance of protests is a standard procedure taught by the vendor. Data collected during incidents is shared with federal agencies, expanding the reach of local monitoring.
