Perfect World

Flock ALPR / The portals / The reasons

66,007 distinct reasons · 646,038 searches

What officers typed in the box

Most Flock portals that publish a search audit include the reason an officer entered before running a plate. Every one of those strings from every published audit in the country is searchable here: 646,038 searches, 66,007 distinct reasons, from 504 agencies in 43 states. New Mexico is not among them: no agency there publishes an audit at all.

This searches the vocabulary, not the individual searches - a reason, how many searches used it, how many agencies, and which states. Reasons are lowercased so “INV” and “inv” count once. A single word matches the start of a word, so “deport” finds “deportation” but “ice” does not find “police” - a mistake this project made once while checking its own filter. Put a space in the query and it matches that phrase anywhere.

6 distinct reasons contain “ice”, used in 10 searches

Sorted by how many searches used the reason. A reason used once, by one agency, is kept - the single strange entry is the point of a search box.

Reason, as typedSearchesAgenciesStates
fled from ice41TN
icebreaker21KS
ice from truck damage vehicle11NJ
assist ice agents11TX
ice hold11TN
wanted by homeland ice11GA

Reasons come from each agency’s own published search audit, obtained through EyesOnFlock (CC BY-SA 4.0) - a secondary reading of pages the agencies publish themselves. What a reason string cannot tell you is what the search was really for: a search run for one purpose with “investigation” typed in the box looks like every other investigation here. What the whole corpus shows.