Flock Safety’s announcement that officers must now enter a case number and pass through mandatory automated auditing before searching its nationwide license-plate database is a defensive move dressed as a policy upgrade, and the mechanism reveals why: both requirements depend entirely on officers self-reporting information that Flock does not verify. The company is converting features it launched as optional last year into requirements, but a system built on unverified text fields is only as strong as the incentive to lie into them, and recent evidence suggests that incentive is weak.
The ACLU’s own review of Flock’s existing reason-prompt found officers typing “investigation” as boilerplate or, at one Oregon department, “hehehe” twenty times — and nothing in today’s changes stops a case-number field from being gamed the same way. Flock’s answer is an expanded automatic-auditing tool meant to flag suspicious searches after the fact, but the company has not disclosed its accuracy or opened it to outside researchers, so the fix for an unverifiable input is another unverifiable output.
Flock’s move from optional to mandatory safeguards changes the default setting on a system whose core vulnerability — self-reported justification with no verification — remains untouched.
The New Bedford Light’s reporting on Officer Emily Pacheco, accused this month of running an ex-girlfriend’s plate through Flock dozens of times before the department suspended its own system pending review, is the kind of case this policy is designed to prevent — and also the kind that shows how far behind the safeguards are running. Reason’s account of a Roseville, California department finding 71 percent of its Flock alerts incorrect adds a second, distinct problem the announcement doesn’t touch at all: accuracy. Flock’s cited 96 percent per-character read rate compounds across a six- or seven-character plate into an error rate high enough to produce wrongful stops, and no case-number requirement fixes a camera that misreads the plate in the first place.
None of this changes the commercial calculus driving the announcement. NPR counted at least 30 city cancellations as of February 2026 against Flock’s claimed base of 5,000 contracted agencies — a rounding error the company can absorb, which is likely why CEO Garrett Langley frames the backlash as “misinformation” rather than a structural design flaw. What would change the read: independent, published accuracy figures for the new auditing tool, and whether departments that adopt the seven-day retention recommendation actually enforce it rather than defaulting back to 30.
Flock has come to the table because this incredible, unprecedented nationwide uprising against their company has scared them. But at the same time, they are just absolutely unwilling to make the actual changes they need to make in order to legitimately respond to these concerns. So this is the best that the company is willing to do.
