The Indicator from Planet Money - How much safer do Flock cameras make us?

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Flock cameras promise to reduce crimes like car theft. But these automated license plate readers come with a trade-off: a wide-reaching surveillance network. Today on the show, does Flock actually make communities safer?Fact checking by Sierra Juarez.Your Next Listen — Stuck In China’s PanopticonConnect with The Indicator — Sign up for The Indicator’s weekly newsletter! — Buy the Planet Money book — Find our socials, YouTube and more! — For sponsor-free episodes, subscribe to NPR+ See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. If you drive in the U.S., there's a good chance that a flock camera has taken a photo of your license plate. And if you watch the news, you've probably heard about flock or seen some viral clips of concerned citizens. Like this man who dressed like Darth Vader at a San Diego City Council meeting last month. The emperor is a fan of flock, and we must continue utilizing flock technologies. Less than a decade ago, flock started by selling cameras to a couple of neighborhoods. Today, the Atlanta-based company has over 120,000 of them across the United States. Flock itself is worth over $8 billion.

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey. And I'm Waylon Wong. Flock cameras can help police departments find stolen vehicles and violent criminals. Officers can tap into a network that tracks bad apples across counties and states. But they've also been misused to stock ex-partners, track protests, find people. who are doing stuff that's legal. Today in the show, we break down the economics of flock. What are police departments getting for their money?

And do flock cameras actually make communities safer? Stoplight and speeding cameras have been around for decades. They may have led to an unwanted letter in your mailbox a time or two. These cameras are known as automated license plate readers. These are the little cameras mounted on stoplights or white boxes along the highway. For a long time, these cameras were controlled. by individual police departments. If the cops wanted to find you, they had just a few cameras they could check around a city.

Flock cameras are different, and that was a big selling point. Its system is easy to search. This is unlike another national database, the FBI's next generation identification system. If you've ever been fingerprinted for a job or arrest, you're in the system. If someone wants to use the fingerprint database, there's a higher gate to get into the system. Depending on the state, flock can have fewer restrictions. Some police use it to track activities that are legal in some states and illegal in others. Jason Kebler is the co-founder of 404 Media.

He's broken stories on high-profile cases of police misusing the flock system. Well, it is interesting because flock initially pitched itself to homeowners associations and to local police as being a way to recover stolen vehicles. This is explicitly what they are for. Block cameras aren't just tracking and recording specific infractions. They're recording all the time and keeping track of where vehicles go. Flock's default is storing this data for a week, but some police departments have stored it for up to a year. So they're different from the older generation of automated license plate readers,

because they're not just recording traffic violations like running a red light. They're recording all the time. They can keep track of a driver's whereabouts, even if they aren't suspected of a crime. But these cameras have been used to solve crimes like murders and car thefts. And car thefts are really tough to solve. Stolen vehicles rarely have a witness. Cops and victims often don't have suspects. It can seemingly be a random crime.

The only way you're going to be able to clear one of these crimes with an arrest, typically, is that you find somebody in that stolen vehicle. Scott Morkas was a police officer for two decades. Now he teaches criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. And a lot of that comes down to chance, right? A lot that comes down to, is there a police officer driving by right when that stolen vehicle is occupied by somebody who stole it? Scott wanted to find out how effective flock cameras are at stopping auto thefts and other crimes, primarily from an economic lens. He remembers getting a lot of sales pitches from different companies as a police executive.

You will have vendor after vendor coming to you, trying to sell you what their product is, making all the promises under the sun. You might buy it, you might not, but if you need to buy it, you find out that it doesn't even deliver on 50%, For example, each flock camera costs around $3,000 per year for a police department to operate. Fargo, North Dakota spends about $130,000 per year on its flock system. So Scott and his co-author set out to study crime rates before and after flock cameras went live. This is how much security you get, on average, for giving up more privacy. And we do want to note that Scott says he didn't receive any funding from flock to do the study. Scott looked across a couple hundred jurisdictions that brought in flock cameras.

He and his co-author found that motor vehicle theft fell about 11% in areas that use flock cameras, and locating suspects for vehicle thefts rose about 16%. Scott says he wasn't that surprised the decrease in car thefts turned out to be modest. I think when we're talking about coverage within any given jurisdiction, you know, relatively speaking, we're talking about a small amount of the total surface area for roads. In other words, flock cameras, are a patchwork. They aren't covering every inch of road space. They aren't catching every car thief. They are tools, not magic bullets. The other reason I wasn't surprised that effects

being found weren't bigger is because I think crime is an extremely complicated phenomenon. People commit or don't commit crimes for a lot of reasons. The presence of cameras is one of them. Another potential reason, many cars have become harder to steal. Traditional hot wiring or bypassing a key to start a car doesn't work on most modern vehicles. This study looked at years' worth of data. Still, Flock issued a celebratory press release on Scott's paper after it came out this August. Car thefts down, arrests up. Scott says that's not exactly what they found. I think we're very clear in our paper to give the caveats and the qualifications that our analysis deserves. And so if anybody is interested in those, they should go read the working paper.

Don't threaten me with a good time, Scott. We did indeed read the working paper. Good content, a little wordy in parts. Like any good econ research paper, of course. Anyway, it's complicated. For example, Flock cameras don't help police find stolen cars faster all the time. We established that Flock has this network of cameras. They're always on and they're scanning everything.

That doesn't make police faster at finding stolen cars. Yeah, I'll be honest with you. That's one. that kind of like took me back too. But Scott says a few data points should not determine if a community uses flock cameras. There are stories of these cameras solving crimes and of the system being a problem. Obviously, the negative experiences are just as impactful and just as important as one of these quote-unquote positive experiences, right? And I think if you read the paper, like, we're very,

like, we're down the middle. Jason Kebler with 404 media says he's concerned about the technology being used for a lot more than car thefts these days. It's been used to track undocumented immigrants. It's been used to track protesters. It's been used to track people who went and bought weed in a legal state and then returned to a state where it is not legal. It's been used to track a woman who had an abortion. Last year, according to 4-4 media, police in Texas used the Flack Network to track a woman suspected of having an abortion.

The woman's abusive partner did not like that she did this. Jason says he went to the police who used Flack to search the woman's plate in states where abortion was both legal, as well as Texas, where it generally is not. They search 80,000 cameras across the United States. They ultimately didn't find her using this technology. She eventually kind of heard that this was happening and went to the police and told the police that she was being abused. We reached out to Flock for comment on this use of their system. A company spokesperson said that the case report explicitly stated the woman could not be charged with a crime. But Flock is under scrutiny for more than just a few cases of misuse. Multiple cities have

canceled or paused Flock contracts. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to pause funding and grants for Flock safety cameras late last month. We asked Flock how many cities have discontinued using its technology but did not receive a response by our deadline. A company spokesperson previously told the outlet Ars Technica that so far in 26, more cities have signed up for Flock than have dropped their renewals. And the system doesn't perfectly catch criminals when a suspect is tagged. There was a woman who was arrested in Florida because cops were looking for a black SUV related to a deadly hit and run accident. This woman happened to be driving a similar looking car near the crime. She spent 13 days in jail. Her car was not involved in this. It was a totally

different vehicle. Automated policing can lead to important arrests. And Scott's research shows that implementing flock cameras are associated with fewer vehicle thefts. But these systems are still prone to mistakes and misuse. It's not just what flock cameras can capture, but how that information is stored and shared. If you like the indicator but want a little more, then sign up for our newsletter. It's a look at some of the stories we're chatting about behind the scenes, but don't always get to on the show. The email delivers every Friday, sign up at npr.org slash indicator newsletter, or click the link in the show notes.

This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim and engineered by Cina LaFredo and Robert Rodriguez. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Julia Ritchie edited this episode. Kate Kincanon is the show's editor. The Indicator is a production of NPR.