What Flock publishes about its customers, and what it leaves out

A portal is a rolling 30-day window with no history: the vendor keeps none, the aggregator shows only today, and the agency publishes nothing older than a month. So this project takes a dated snapshot and keeps it, and nothing is ever overwritten. What follows is the first diff. Counters that measure the moving window - searches, hits, vehicles - are deliberately NOT reported as growth, because two readings a month apart are two photographs and not two months of data. Everything below is structural: a rule changed, a list changed, a switch flipped.

• Chester SC removed a line from its prohibited usesnow: Traffic enforcement, harassment or intimidation, usage based…
• Waukee IA removed a line from its prohibited usesnow: Immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, usage based so…
• Fort Smith AR retention30 → 7 days
• Lexington SC retention30 → 7 days
• Lexington SC search auditswitched off
• Cabot AR sharing list1,685 → 0 organizations
• Damascus VA sharing list154 → 11 organizations
• Fort Smith AR sharing list62 → 0 organizations
• Indianola IA sharing list55 → 0 organizations
• Agencies whose camera count moved9 (7 up)

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A transparency portal is voluntary. What this map shows is every agency that chose to switch one on, which is why a blank state is not a state without cameras - it is a state where nobody has published. The count these pages add up to is roughly a twentieth of the cameras Flock says it operates, and that gap is the finding: the public record of this network is a small, self-selected sample of it.

• Portals published1,439
• States with at least one45 of 50
• Cameras those portals publish37,250
• Portals publishing no camera count100
• Largest single portal CA: 1,771 cameras

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They sit in the same directory as police departments, at the same kind of address, with the same template. The admin account publishes a 90-day retention where the customer default is 30. This matters because of what the record already holds about the vendor searching customer data: Flock staff ran searches of a California city's cameras for sales demonstrations without the department's permission, and used a synagogue's cameras in a demo elsewhere. An account named Flock Safety Sales is not evidence of either. It is the reason the question is worth asking out loud.

• Flock PD30-day retention, 0 searches
• Flock Safety Admins90-day retention
• Flock Safety Salesno retention published

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Flock labels federal customers itself, with a bracketed prefix, so this is the vendor's own marking on the agency's own page. Read nationally the pattern is plain: sharing lists are not local arrangements, and a department in one state routinely names recipients in five others. This is the mechanism behind the single most-cited fact in this dossier - that one search can reach thousands of networks - seen from the other end.

• Portals publishing a sharing list872
• Lists naming an out-of-state agency388
• Lists naming a federal agency254
• US Postal Inspection Serviceon 219 lists
• Wright Patterson OH Air Force Baseon 165 lists
• Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)on 160 lists
• Natchez Trace Parkway MS - National Park Serviceon 101 lists
• Agency names the aggregator had split on a comma, rejoined here532

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Las Cruces is the only New Mexico agency with a Flock transparency portal - checked twice, against the aggregator's index and against 70 candidate addresses on Flock's own host, every one of which returned the host's not-found shell. The Las Cruces portal itself names twenty New Mexico agencies that may search its data, including the State Police and four sheriff's offices. Nineteen of those twenty publish nothing.

• New Mexico portals1
• New Mexico agencies named on the Las Cruces sharing list20
• Of those, publishing a portal0
• Texas portals91
• Arizona portals22

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Retention is not fixed by Flock's terms; it is a number on each agency's order form, which is why it varies. A department that keeps data for a year has made a choice, and so has one that keeps it a week. New Mexico's single portal sits on the default.

• Dallas TX365 days
• Goodyear AZ185 days
• Page AZ7 days
• Baytown TX7 days
• Flagstaff AZ14 days
• Argyle TX15 days
• Las Cruces NM30 days

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Flock's template lists five prohibitions: immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment or intimidation, use based solely on a protected class, and personal use. Comparing 114 portals shows which agencies edited the list. Las Cruces is one of the ones that dropped traffic enforcement; several Texas agencies replaced the list with their own policy text, and the largest cities in two states publish none.

• Page AZno list published
• Tucson AZno list published
• Athens TXno list published
• Austin TXno list published
• Dallas TXno list published
• Hutto TXno list published
• Casa Grande AZno traffic-enforcement line
• Las Cruces NMno traffic-enforcement line
• Bellaire TXno traffic-enforcement line
• Jersey Village TXno traffic-enforcement line
• Buckeye AZno immigration line
• Oro Valley AZno immigration line
• Bee Cave TXno immigration line

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Every name on a sharing list is an agency that may search that department's cameras. The lists are not reciprocal and not local: Texas portals routinely name agencies in Oklahoma, Kansas, Louisiana and Georgia, and some name federal task forces. Las Cruces, by comparison, names twenty organizations, all in New Mexico.

• Baytown TX3,080 organizations
• Texarkana TX1,777 organizations
• Round Rock TX1,437 organizations
• Aubrey TX1,381 organizations
• Richmond TX1,260 organizations
• Median across the three states459 organizations
• Las Cruces NM20 organizations, all in New Mexico

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The same template can show a camera count, searches, vehicles detected, hotlist hits, a sharing list and a downloadable audit of every search. What an agency leaves out is a decision, and reading 114 portals side by side is the only way to tell a vendor default from that decision. The audit log is the instrument that would let anyone outside a department check a search reason; four in five agencies here do not publish it.

• Apache Junction AZ5 of 5 figures blank
• Tucson AZ5 of 5 figures blank
• Austin TX5 of 5 figures blank
• Laredo TX5 of 5 figures blank
• El Mirage AZ4 of 5 figures blank
• Portals publishing a search audit38 of 114
• Las Cruces NM1 of 5 blank; no search audit

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A portal reporting nothing is either a system nobody used, a counter the agency switched off, or a page that stopped updating. The portal itself does not say which, and the distinction matters to a council asked to renew.

• Flagstaff AZ32 cameras, 0 searches, 0 vehicles
• South Tucson AZ10 cameras, 0 searches, 0 vehicles
• Aransas Pass TX10 cameras, 0 searches, 0 vehicles
• Coastal Bend College TX10 cameras, 0 searches, 19,476 vehicles
• Lockney TX0 cameras, 0 searches, 0 vehicles
• Morgan's Point TX4 cameras, 0 searches, 23,236 vehicles
• San Marcos TX3 cameras, 0 searches, 0 vehicles
• Westlake TX0 cameras, 0 searches, 0 vehicles

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The search audit is the only instrument on any of these pages that says why a search happened. Read together, the 38 published logs in these three states show what a search is: not one camera, but a question put to hundreds of networks at once. Fifty-eight in a hundred reach a hundred networks or more. They also show how little of that is legible - twelve of the 38 agencies publish no reason column at all, and not one of the 38 publishes a reason and a case number together, which is the pair a department's own policy usually requires an officer to enter.

• Searches published20,049
• Median networks reached by one search576
• Widest single search6,402 networks
• Agencies publishing a reason column26 of 38
• Agencies publishing a case number2 of 38
• Agencies publishing both0 of 38
• Searches with a reason left blank1,919 of 16,616
• New Mexico agencies publishing any audit0

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The same department's transparency portal lists immigration enforcement first among its prohibited uses. This is one row out of 20,049, and it is the only one in three states whose stated reason names a category its own portal forbids - which is both how rare it is in what agencies publish, and exactly what a published audit is for. The reason as typed does not say what the assistance was: federal immigration agents also investigate crimes that have nothing to do with immigration status, and this project has not read the case. It is a question for that department, and the record to ask about is dated.

• midland tx pd, 2026-09-01reason: "assist ICE agents" · 284 networks

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Every published Flock search audit in the country was read for this, not just the three states above: 940,550 searches, one request at a time. The headline is how ORDINARY the reasons are - investigation, stolen vehicle, warrant, missing person - and how rare the categories that statutes name. Thirteen searches in nearly a million give an immigration reason, across seven agencies in six states, and five of those seven agencies' own portals list immigration enforcement as a prohibited use. Two searches name a protest. That is what a published audit is for: none of it would be visible if these agencies had not published, and none of it is visible in New Mexico, where no agency publishes an audit at all. Four more rows matched the filter and were thrown out by hand as false positives - literal ice from a truck, Caltrans, a drug transaction - and they are listed in the file rather than quietly dropped.

• Searches read940,550
• Agencies publishing an audit, in 43 states653
• Searches naming immigration13, at 7 agencies
• Of those agencies, ones whose own portal forbids it5 of 7
• Searches naming a protest2
• Reasons left blank233,214 of 879,252
• Reasons of three characters or fewer86,438
• Agencies publishing a reason AND a case number49 of 653 nationally, 0 of 38 in these three states

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A sharing list names the agencies that may search that department's cameras, so it is also a roster of who runs Flock. Texas and Arizona portals name New Mexico agencies by name - and eight of them are not on the Las Cruces list and publish no portal of their own. Add them to the twenty Las Cruces does name and at least twenty-eight New Mexico agencies are in the network, of which exactly one publishes anything. This is what reading portals across a state line is for: the disclosure a state will not make about itself, its neighbours make for it.

• Lea County NM SOnamed on 12 portals in TX or AZ
• Hobbs NM PDnamed on 11 portals in TX or AZ
• Socorro County NM SOnamed on 11 portals in TX or AZ
• Otero County NM SOnamed on 9 portals in TX or AZ
• Eddy County NM SOnamed on 6 portals in TX or AZ
• Grants NM PDnamed on 1 portal in TX or AZ
• Santa Fe County NM SOnamed on 1 portal in TX or AZ
• NM - Edgewood PDnamed on 1 portal in TX or AZ
• On the Las Cruces sharing list as well20 more

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The Las Cruces list is twenty organizations, all inside New Mexico, and this project has said so repeatedly. Reading the other two states shows what that looks like elsewhere: the FBI is named on nine sharing lists here, the Postal Inspection Service on nineteen, and a scattering of park police, an Air Force base and two HIDTA task forces. These are the vendor's own labels on the agency's own page, not an inference.

• US Postal Inspection Serviceon 19 sharing lists
• Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)on 9 sharing lists
• Natchez Trace Parkway MS - National Park Serviceon 6 sharing lists
• Wright Patterson OH Air Force Baseon 6 sharing lists
• Cowlitz Indian Tribal WA PDon 6 sharing lists
• ATF Louisville KY [inactive]on 4 sharing lists
• Indiana Dunes National Park IN PDon 2 sharing lists
• Las Cruces NMno federal agency named

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