On September 17, audit logs obtained by 404 Media (reporter Jason Koebler, source Jason Hunyar, Dunwoody resident) showed that Flock Safety operated internal accounts named “Flock City PD — Law Enforcement Demo,” “Flock Intelligence,” and “Flock Safety — Commercial Sales Demo” that ran real — not simulated — searches against ALPR and video cameras installed in Dunwoody, Georgia and Bryan, Texas, during sales demos with police agencies.

The search criteria included 9 categories explicitly protected by the First Amendment: “coexist bumper sticker,” “Star of David” (vehicle and person), “person wearing a mask,” “crowd,” “vehicle with a political sticker,” “man holding rifle,” “person in scrubs,” “don’t tread on me flag,” “car that a pretty girl would drive,” “vehicle with trump bumper sticker.” All searches were “FreeForm” — Flock’s AI image recognition algorithm decided what was returned. Flock’s moderation layer blocked 2 (“vehicle a pretty girl would drive” and “Star of David” on a person); allowed 3 (“crowd,” “person wearing scrubs,” “large group with signs”); and showed a warning to 5 (the political and religious vehicle criteria), but Flock confirms in its own blog that the warning can be bypassed: “this search will be sent to a superior for auditing if the user chooses to proceed.”

Flock told 404 Media the searches were done “to show police what NOT to search for” and that “the Flock City PD demo environment is now isolated, and law enforcement agencies cannot form a sharing relationship with it.” But a training webinar seen by 404 Media shows a Flock employee logged into Flock City PD with cameras explicitly named “Flock Warehouse — LPR Demo Cameras,” “Circle K — Demo,” “Tennessee Demo Cameras,” “Scottsdale AZ Demo Video Cameras,” and “ALPR Demo” — real cameras from real customers.

Resident Jason Hunyar sums up the problem better than any RFP can: “Flock’s claims that they impose restrictions on what users can search for in their database provides the opposite assurance… they admit that their dynamic surveillance network does in fact capture this sensitive information, and that the gate to that information is controlled solely by the policies of a for-profit corporation.”

( this is the sixth piece in the Flock cluster — alongside the federal pre-warrant PITT case, EFF concealment in court filings, the Sinclair/Manhattan Institute pro-vendor op-ed, the field workers calling 911 on their own software, the LMAO audit-log dropdown, and the architectural questions Hawley will ask on September 23 )

The question no procurement officer in Mexico or Brazil has put in writing yet: if the vendor that sold you “license-plate-reading cameras” can also run searches against your citizens using First Amendment criteria from an internal account you don’t audit, what exactly did you audit when you signed the contract? And if the moderation layer that decides what passes and what doesn’t is operated by the vendor — not your police, not your municipality — then your RFP didn’t procure a security system: it procured a corporate policy decision about what your city is allowed to search for.

P.D. Before Wednesday September 23 — the day Hawley convenes the CEOs of Flock, Axon, Motorola and Verkada before the U.S. Senate — open your RFP and look for three lines: (1) Who operates the moderation layer of the searches? (2) Can the vendor run internal accounts against your cameras? (3) Does your contract oblige the vendor to publish audit logs of its own demo accounts? If any of the three answers isn’t in writing, today’s a good day to ask for them.

📰 Source: 404 Media (Jason Koebler, Jason Hunyar), Sep 17, 2026; Flock Safety blog “Understanding Flock’s Testing and Development Program”; 404 Media follow-up April 2025 on access to Dunwoody children’s gymnastics room.

Sources

[1] 404 Media — ‘Flock City PD’: The Fake Flock-Owned ‘Police Department’ That Searched Real Cameras for Real People — https://www.404media.co/flock-city-pd-the-fake-flock-owned-police-department-that-searched-real-cameras-for-real-people/ [2] Flock Safety blog — Understanding Flock’s Testing and Development Program — https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/understanding-flocks-testing-and-development-program [3] 404 Media — City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children’s Gymnastics Room as a Sales Pitch Demo — https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-in-childrens-gymnastics-room-as-a-sales-pitch-demo-renews-contract-anyway/