Police departments across the United States have been caught entering nonsensical or joking justifications — including “LMAO,” “IDK,” “hehe,” and “asdfg” — into search logs for Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) network, according to public records reviewed by journalists and transparency researchers. The entries were found in audit trails that officers are required to fill out each time they query the system, a step meant to document a legitimate law enforcement reason for the search.
Flock Safety cameras, now installed in thousands of communities nationwide, capture license plates and vehicle details and store them in a searchable database that officers can query across jurisdictions. Because the network links data from many agencies, Flock built in a self-reporting requirement: before running a search, an officer must type a reason, ostensibly tied to a case number or investigation.
What the Records Show
Records obtained through public information requests reveal that some officers treated the reason field as an afterthought rather than an accountability measure. Instead of case numbers or investigative context, entries included one-word jokes, keyboard mashes, and vague phrases offering no indication of why a person’s vehicle or movements were being tracked. Because the field is a free-text box rather than a structured or verified entry, nothing stops an officer from typing whatever they choose and still executing the search.
The pattern echoes findings from a separate records review in Illinois, where police were found to have searched Flock’s camera network more than 1,200 times citing “loitering” as justification, a catch-all reason that similarly sidesteps meaningful oversight. Taken together, the two sets of records suggest that the audit fields built into Flock’s system function more as a formality than a genuine check on how often and why officers access sensitive location data.
How the Flock Network Operates
Flock Safety has expanded rapidly since its founding, marketing its camera network to city councils, homeowners associations, and police departments as a tool for solving crimes ranging from stolen vehicles to missing persons cases. A defining feature of the system is data sharing: agencies that join the network can search cameras belonging to other participating jurisdictions, sometimes across state lines, dramatically widening the pool of footage and plate data any single officer can access.
That interconnected design is central to Flock’s appeal to law enforcement, but it also multiplies the number of people who can query a given camera’s data and makes centralized oversight more difficult. Each department is generally responsible for auditing its own officers’ searches, and enforcement of misuse varies widely from one jurisdiction to the next.
Privacy and Oversight Concerns
Civil liberties organizations have long argued that ALPR networks pose risks distinct from traditional police databases because they can passively track the movements of ordinary drivers who are never suspected of a crime. The newly surfaced logs add a concrete example to that argument: if a search reason can be a joke or a string of random characters and still return results, the audit system does little to prevent officers from browsing the database out of curiosity, personal interest, or worse.
Advocacy groups that track police surveillance technology have said for years that self-reported justification fields are only as reliable as the discipline enforced around them, and that without independent audits or automatic flags for vague entries, misuse can go undetected indefinitely.
Some departments have policies requiring supervisors to periodically review search logs, but those reviews are not standardized nationally, and Flock itself does not verify the substance of the reasons entered before a search is executed. That leaves oversight almost entirely in the hands of individual police agencies, many of which lack the staffing or protocols to catch abuse in real time.
Company and Department Response
Flock Safety has said in the past that it provides departments with tools to audit search activity and that misuse should be addressed by individual agencies’ internal policies. The company has generally framed its role as a technology provider rather than an enforcer of how officers use the system day to day.
Departments named in various records requests have offered similarly consistent responses when confronted with flippant search reasons, typically stating that such entries violate internal policy and that any officers responsible would face review. It remains unclear how many, if any, officers have faced discipline specifically tied to the joking or nonsensical entries uncovered so far.
Why It Matters
The controversy lands amid a broader national conversation about surveillance technology’s expansion into daily policing, from license plate networks to facial recognition and beyond. As camera networks like Flock’s grow larger and more interconnected, the gap between the volume of searches conducted and the rigor of oversight applied to them becomes more consequential.
- Search logs with nonsensical justifications raise questions about whether officers are being held accountable for how they use surveillance tools.
- The free-text reason field offers no built-in mechanism to block vague or joking entries before a search proceeds.
- Oversight of Flock’s network is decentralized, relying on individual departments rather than uniform national standards.
Transparency advocates and some lawmakers have called for standardized auditing requirements and independent review of ALPR search logs, though no federal legislation currently mandates such oversight. Until then, records requests from journalists and privacy groups remain one of the only ways the public can learn how, and why, police are searching a database that captures the movements of millions of drivers who have never been charged with a crime.
