The Architecture of Access

A police chief in Braselton, Georgia searched his ex-girlfriend's license plate roughly 600 times. He had access to Flock Safety's camera network, the same network deployed in over 6,000 communities across the country, and he used it the way a jealous man uses a phone he shouldn't have. He was arrested in November 2025. He was dead by April 2026, before the case reached trial.

That story ran in the Washington Post. It named names. Marci Bakely. Michael Steffman. Five other officers in five other states, doing the same thing to different women with different cameras.

That's not the whole story. It's the visible third of it.

The Other Two-Thirds

While local police departments were failing to stop their own officers from misusing Flock, federal immigration agents were getting into the same network through the back.

Not through a contract. Flock has said publicly, more than once, that it doesn't work with ICE. That's true, and it's also not the point. Investigators in Illinois pulled public records and found more than 4,000 searches run on behalf of federal immigration enforcement between June 2024 and May 2025, in a state where using the data that way is against the law. Researchers in Washington state found federal agencies had some form of access to at least 18 of 31 surveyed local agencies' camera networks, including eight departments that had explicitly opened a direct pipe to Border Patrol. In Richmond, Virginia, an ATF analyst got into the city's Flock system to help an immigration investigation. The employee who let that happen doesn't work there anymore.

Flock has names for how this happens. Front door: an agency deliberately shares its network with another agency, including a federal one. Back door: the logs show access nobody remembers authorizing. Side door: a local officer runs the search himself, on a federal agent's behalf, sometimes typing "ICE" or "immigration" directly into the box that asks what the search is for.

Three doors. None of them require breaking in.

Why the Company Isn't Lying, and It Doesn't Matter

Flock's defense holds up under a lawyer's reading. No formal contract with ICE. Federal sharing is off by default. As of January 2026, any agency can flip a single toggle and turn all federal access off entirely.

All of that is true, and none of it required Flock to build a system where those settings default to open. The company's own account starts with a first camera bolted to an Android phone in a rainproof box, built to catch a string of car break-ins in one Atlanta neighborhood. Seven years later, it's a $7.5 billion company doing 20 billion scans a month, funded three separate times by Andreessen Horowitz, an investor known for rarely doubling down on anything.

The thing an investor prices into that valuation isn't restraint. It's reach. More cameras. More connected agencies. More searchable ground. Every setting that defaults to sharing instead of asking makes the network bigger and the product better, in the only sense that shows up on a term sheet. Every setting that defaults to restriction shrinks it.

"We're not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions. What we can do is make sure that they know if you use this tool, you will be held accountable." — Flock CEO Garrett Langley. That's not a design principle. That's a business model wearing one.

What People Are Missing

The clearance-rate numbers get repeated a lot. One additional camera per officer, a 9.1 percent bump in cases closed. Ten percent of reported crime in America, solved with an assist from Flock. Those numbers come from a study Flock commissioned, using data Flock supplied, about a product Flock sells. The academics who ran it are real. The funding source isn't neutral. Independent researchers looking at surveillance cameras generally have found mixed results on whether they reduce crime at all, and Flock's own promotional materials are the loudest voice in a room where the other side hasn't been paid to show up.

The second thing people miss is bigger. The Steffman story and the ICE story get told as two different news items, one about a stalker with a badge, one about immigration enforcement. They're not two stories. They're one design choice, worn two ways. A system that grants broad access by default and asks agencies to opt into restricting it will get misused by the people closest to it, whether their motive is personal or institutional. The chief who stalked his ex and the federal agent who used a side door aren't different problems. They're the same unlocked door, walked through by two different kinds of people.

The Game

Flock doesn't need anyone to misuse its product. It needs the network to keep growing, and growth runs on access, not restriction. The company's entire commercial logic points toward more sharing, not less, because a bigger network is a more valuable network regardless of who's searching it or why. The audit logs that catch abusers after the fact aren't a flaw in that model. They're proof it works exactly as designed, and they double as the company's best marketing line every time someone asks whether the system can be trusted.

Nobody has to be a bad actor for this to happen. The 50 officers the Post found are the exception that makes the rule visible. The rule is the architecture.

What to Watch

The federal-sharing toggle Flock rolled out in January 2026. It's off by default now, but it's optional, and optional settings get skipped. Whether your local department has flipped it is a public-records request away.

State legislation in Illinois, Washington, and California, the three places with laws on the books and leaks anyway. A law that gets ignored is worth less than the paper it's printed on, and all three states are currently finding that out in real time.

City council votes. At least 30 localities have dropped or deactivated Flock contracts since the start of 2025, most of that movement in the last few months of the count. That number moves in both directions. Watch which way your city is moving.

Whether Flock ever makes case-number tagging mandatory instead of optional. The ACLU has been asking for this specific change for a while. As of now, it's still a setting an agency can skip.

The Move

Find out if your city, county, or HOA uses Flock. The DeFlock map and the Have I Been Flocked audit tool both let you check without filing anything.

If they do, don't stop at "does it share with ICE." Ask about the front door, the back door, and the side door. Those are Flock's own words for the three ways in, and a clean answer to the contract question doesn't cover the other two.

Watch the toggle, not the statement. A company's stated policy is a sentence. A default setting is a fact.