Flock Safety and the Leadership Test No Police Chief Can Outsource

Earlier this week, I sat down with Mark Strassmann of CBS Evening News for a story on Flock Safety and the growing role license plate readers are playing in modern policing. It's a timely conversation, and not a comfortable one. Over the past several months we've all seen the headlines: officers fired, some criminally charged, for misusing ALPR databases to track ex-partners, run plates without cause, or search outside their jurisdiction. Privacy advocates are raising real concerns, and in some cities the debate has escalated into fears of a “surveillance state.”

Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously, not dismissed. I said that to CBS, and I meant it.

I also told them about something that happened in my own city a few months ago. A suspect went on a shooting spree that included a crime here. A privately owned Flock camera tied into our network gave us the lead we needed to identify his vehicle and connect him to two other shootings outside our jurisdiction. It told us where he was headed. Officers stopped him more than eighty miles south of Atlanta and took him into custody less than two hours after we first located that vehicle. That's an arrest that likely prevented someone else from getting shot.

Both of those things are true at the same time. This technology has saved lives. It has also been abused by people wearing a badge. That's not a contradiction to explain away. It's the leadership problem sitting on every chief's desk right now, whether their department has ten cameras or ten thousand, and this piece is my attempt to lay out how I think about it, what the research actually says, and what a working framework for handling it looks like.

I've watched this same pattern play out with plenty of tools before this one. Body cameras went through it. Predictive analytics went through it. National Crime Information Center (NCIC) databases went through it. Every time a new capability shows up in policing, the conversation splits fast into two camps that don't talk to each other, one insisting the tool is indispensable and the other insisting it should be banned outright. Both camps are usually reacting to the same underlying fear, which is that the agency deploying the tool hasn't shown its work. Chiefs who can't answer basic questions about retention, access, and consequences invite that fear, and reasonably so. This piece isn't a defense of Flock Safety specifically, or of any single vendor. It's about the leadership work that has to sit underneath whatever platform your agency chooses, because the platform will change again in a few years and the leadership work won't.

What the Critics Get Right

If you're a chief who's tempted to treat the pushback on ALPR as noise, I'd push back on that instinct. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented how thin the legal guardrails around this technology remain in most states, and the ACLU has spent years building the case that plate data, pooled and retained without limits, amounts to a location-tracking system on anyone who drives. Their investigation found more than eighty local police departments had configured their sharing settings to give U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to ALPR data, in some cases in direct tension with local sanctuary policies. A more recent survey out of Iowa, done jointly by the University of Iowa's Technology Law Clinic and the ACLU of Iowa, looked at forty-eight communities and found the same pattern showing up again and again: inconsistent policy, inconsistent retention, and in some cases plate-reading errors serious enough to trigger wrongful stops.

The Congressional Research Service reached a similar conclusion from a different angle. Its 2026 report on law enforcement and ALPR technology found there is no uniform federal framework governing how agencies use this technology. Some grant programs, like JAG and COPS funding, come with strings attached. Most agencies are otherwise left to write their own rules, or don't write any at all.

None of that means the technology should be abandoned. It means the burden of proof sits with agency leadership, not with the vendor and not with Congress. If your department can't clearly answer how long you keep this data, who can access it, and what happens when someone misuses it, that gap is exactly where the next headline comes from.

What the Research Actually Shows

The flip side deserves equal honesty. PERF's evaluation in Mesa, Arizona, one of the few rigorous, randomized studies done on this technology, found real effectiveness in identifying vehicles connected to crime. The Department of Justice's own research arm has funded multiple studies on how license plate readers function in the field and their measurable impact on investigative outcomes. What my department experienced with that shooting suspect isn't an outlier. It's consistent with what the data shows agencies experience when this technology is used the way it's designed to be used, tied into policy, training, and human verification rather than deployed as a standalone gadget.

I wrote about this dynamic back in March on my LinkedIn, before Flock Safety was leading national news cycles. The core idea holds up: technology has to be treated as a strategy, not a purchase. Cameras, license plate readers, and audio detection tools don't create value sitting in isolation. They create value when a department has built the operational structure around them, the training that makes officers competent using them, and the governance that makes leadership accountable for how they're used. Agencies that skip straight to acquisition and skip the strategy are the ones that end up explaining themselves to a reporter, or to a city council, after something has already gone wrong.

Equity Belongs in This Conversation, Not Off to the Side

There's a piece of this debate that gets less attention than it deserves, and I wrote about it back in March too. Traditional patrol deployment relies heavily on habit and historical pattern, which sounds neutral until you realize historical pattern can quietly concentrate enforcement in the same neighborhoods year after year, regardless of what's actually happening there right now. A camera network used well does something different. It directs attention to where verified activity is occurring in the moment, not where officers have always driven on a Tuesday night.

Done right, that's a fairness argument, not just an efficiency one. It reduces contacts that were never going to lead anywhere. It grounds enforcement in behavior instead of assumption. Chiefs who only talk about ALPR in terms of clearance rates and response times are leaving out one of the strongest, most defensible arguments they have, and it's one that resonates with the exact residents who are most skeptical of this technology in the first place. If you're building the public-facing case for this technology, don't skip this part. It's not a talking point. It's a real reason data-driven deployment can serve communities better than the patrol models it's replacing, and it deserves to sit right alongside the privacy conversation, not after it.

The Governance Gap Nobody Is Going to Fill for You

Because there's no uniform federal standard, and because state law varies widely on retention and access, every chief is, in practice, the one writing the rules for their own agency. That's not a burden to resent. It's the actual job.

A workable governance structure for this kind of technology needs to answer a short list of questions in writing, not in a vague values statement but in language specific enough that a line officer, a city attorney, and a reporter would all read it the same way. How long is data retained, and what triggers an exception to that retention period. Who is authorized to search the system, and what documentation does a search require before it happens, not after. What happens the first time someone violates the policy, and does that answer change depending on rank. Is there a routine audit process, who conducts it, and what percentage of activity actually gets reviewed rather than just logged. Can the technology be paired with things like facial recognition, and if the answer is no, is that written down somewhere your community can actually read.

Agencies looking for a starting point don't have to build this from nothing. The AAMVA Law Enforcement Committee's License Plate Reader Program Best Practices Guide and the joint DOJ Bureau of Justice Assistance and DHS License Plate Reader Policy Development Template, built for fusion centers and intelligence units, both offer real structure agencies can adapt. Neither one is a substitute for a chief actually thinking through how the answers apply to their own city, but both save you from starting with a blank page.

Teaching the Public Before They Have to Ask

Writing the internal policy is half the job. The other half is a muscle most agencies never build: explaining, in plain language, to the people who elected your city council and pay your budget, what this technology does, what it doesn't do, and how you're keeping it in check.

I built that kind of document for my own department earlier this year, a plain-language briefing for city leadership and the community that lays out how our Flock Safety platform works, what oversight looks like, and answers the questions residents were most likely to ask before they had to ask them. I'm not going to walk through the specifics of that document here, but I want to walk through the framework behind it, because I think every chief running this kind of technology needs some version of it.

Start with the plain background. What hardware and software are actually deployed, and where. Most residents picturing “surveillance cameras” have no idea whether that means a fixed pole camera, a mobile unit, or a private business's system your department can request access to. Say it plainly.

Then state your current policy in terms a non-lawyer can follow. How long is data kept. Who can access it. What's the process when another agency asks to share it. Don't bury this in legal language borrowed from your policy manual. Rewrite it for a reader who has never seen one.

Then show your oversight, not just claim it. Name who conducts audits, how often, and what percentage of activity gets reviewed. If you have vendor security certifications, list them. If you've had a real security review, say who did it and what they found.

Then anticipate the actual questions your community is going to ask, because by now these questions are fairly predictable no matter where you serve. Does this track people? Does it capture faces? Does it record conversations? Who owns the data? Why do you share it with other agencies? Do you share it with ICE? Can anyone outside law enforcement search it? Answer every one of them directly, in writing, before a city council meeting forces you to answer them live and under pressure.

That document does something a policy manual alone never will. It gives your elected officials language they can use when a constituent asks them about it, which means you've armed your city council instead of leaving them exposed. And it gives your community a reason to trust the answer, because you gave it before you were cornered into giving it.

If you want structural guidance for how to organize a document like this, the IACP Center for Police Research and Policy's model policy and concepts paper on automated license plate readers is a strong reference point, both for the internal policy language and for thinking through what belongs in the public-facing version.

Timing matters as much as content. Don't wait for a council member to raise this in a public meeting, and don't wait for a local reporter to file a records request before your community hears your own explanation of what you're doing. Put the document out on your own terms, brief your elected officials on it directly, and give them the language before they need it, not after a headline forces them to improvise an answer in front of cameras. A council member who's already read your plain-language explanation is a much better ally in a tense moment than one who's hearing about your ALPR program for the first time from a constituent's angry email.

Accountability Isn't Optional

None of this works if accountability is soft. When an officer violates policy, the answer isn't to pretend it didn't happen, and it isn't to abandon a tool that works. The answer is real consequences, up to and including termination, and criminal referral when the conduct warrants it. Agencies that won't hold their own people to that standard don't get to keep the public's confidence. They shouldn't.

I think about this in the same terms I laid out in March, that governance and accountability have to evolve alongside capability, not trail behind it. That's not just a compliance function sitting in a policy binder. It's a leadership responsibility, and it belongs to the chief, not to the vendor and not to the officer at the console. Recent thinking on AI and police leadership makes the same case for the technologies coming next: human review, real oversight structures, and community involvement in shaping the guardrails aren't optional add-ons. They're what separates a tool that earns public trust from one that erodes it.

The public gives police extraordinary authority. We enter homes. We conduct traffic stops. We're trusted, when necessary, to use deadly force to protect life. That level of trust comes with an obligation to use every database and every tool ethically, within policy, and within the law. No exceptions.

Adoption matters here too, and it's a piece leaders sometimes overlook. A policy nobody actually applies is worthless, and training that happens once at rollout and never again doesn't hold up two years later when the original class of users has scattered across shifts and half of them have moved on to other assignments. Set the expectation that using these tools within policy is a core part of the job, not an optional extra, and revisit that training on a real cadence, not just when a new system gets rolled out. Then measure what's actually happening, not just what the technology claims to deliver. Track how it affects officer activity, investigative outcomes, and community interactions, and be willing to report that out honestly, wins and misuses both. Agencies that only talk about the technology when something goes wrong have already lost the credibility they need in that moment.

The Agencies That Earn the Right to Keep These Tools

The future of technology in policing won't be decided by who has the most cameras. It'll be decided by which agencies can prove they've earned the right to use them, through policy that's actually written down, training that's actually delivered, audits that actually happen, and accountability that actually gets enforced when someone falls short.

That's not a technology problem. It never was. It's a leadership problem, and it's one every chief and command staff member is going to have to answer for, whether the answer comes from you on your own timeline or from a reporter on theirs.

Where I Can Help

This is the exact work I do with chiefs and command staff outside my own department. Some of it happens through executive coaching, sitting with a leader who's trying to hold their ground on a decision like this while their department, their city council, and sometimes the national press are all watching at once. Balancing real public safety gains against real privacy concerns isn't a one-time policy decision. It's a leadership skill you have to keep exercising, under pressure, in public, and I help leaders build the clarity and confidence to do that without losing their footing.

The rest happens through advisory and consulting engagements, helping agencies build the actual guardrails: governance frameworks, audit structures, accountability measures, and the kind of plain-language communication resources that let elected officials and communities understand what's being deployed and why, before it becomes a controversy instead of a conversation.

If your department is having this exact conversation right now, whether it's about Flock Safety, another ALPR platform, or the next technology decision after this one, I'd welcome the chance to talk it through. You can schedule a consultation directly or reach out at info@brgleadershipgroup.com.

— Brandon

Brandon Gurley is a sitting Chief of Police in Georgia and the founder of BRG Leadership, where he provides executive coaching and advisory consulting to law enforcement leaders navigating high-stakes decisions, organizational change, and public trust.