Flock Safety built a fictitious police department and gave it access to live municipal camera networks. The company then used that access to run AI-powered searches for people displaying Stars of David, political bumper stickers, and protest signs, while the residents being scanned had no idea.
Audit logs obtained through public records requests and reviewed by 404 Media show that accounts operating under the name “Flock City PD” searched real cameras in Dunwoody, Georgia and Bryan, Texas, among other jurisdictions.
What “Flock City PD” Actually Was
The account variants included “Flock City PD – Law Enforcement Demo,” “Flock Intelligence,” and “Flock Safety – Commercial Sales Demo,” all operated by the company itself.
A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media: “Flock City PD is a demo and testing organization name used for law enforcement demonstrations and for our development engineers to conduct testing. Those searches were part of testing and validating FreeForm search moderation and related safeguards. These were not investigative searches conducted by a customer agency.”
The company’s explanation positions Flock City PD as a quality-control exercise, not an investigative tool. The audit logs tell a more complicated story.
What It Searched For
Flock’s FreeForm feature lets users type natural language prompts to surface matching footage from connected cameras, moving well beyond traditional license plate reading.
FreeForm allows searches for human appearance, clothing, behavior, and vehicle markings. According to 404 Media’s review of the logs, “Flock City PD” queries included “person wearing a mask,” “large group with signs,” “person in scrubs,” and “crowd.”
The politically and religiously sensitive searches are harder to explain away. The logs show queries for “coexist bumper sticker,” “vehicle with trump bumper sticker,” “don’t tread on me flag,” “Star of David,” “religious cars,” and “car that a pretty girl would drive,” all run through FreeForm against cameras in real cities.
Moderation Claims vs. What the Logs Show
The gap between Flock’s published moderation policy and the logs’ actual outcomes sits at the center of the civil-liberties concern.
In an April blog post, Flock wrote that searches for bumper stickers indicating religious affiliations “need to be trained in the real world using real-life examples,” citing queries like “Cross bumper sticker,” “Star of David,” and “Japanese flag,” and stated: “These searches, if performed, should not return results.” Some were blocked. Many were not.
According to 404 Media’s reporting, searches including “vehicle with trump bumper sticker,” “coexist bumper sticker,” “don’t tread on me flag,” and “large group with signs” were either allowed outright or executed after a warning the user could simply bypass.
The Dunwoody Connection
Dunwoody resident Jason Hunyar documented Flock’s access through public records requests and has argued the moderation claims confirm, rather than resolve, the core problem.
Earlier 404 Media reporting found that Flock employees accessed Dunwoody cameras in a children’s gymnastics room, a school, a playground, a pool, and the Marcus Jewish Community Center, all as part of live sales pitches to other police agencies. The newly revealed Flock City PD searches ran through that same network.
Hunyar’s argument cuts to the structural issue: Flock’s own moderation policy confirms the network captures sensitive information. The only barrier between that data and a targeted search is a for-profit corporation’s internal rules.
What Changed
Flock says the demo environment is now isolated from live law enforcement networks, and a recent training webinar shows the account logged into dedicated demo feeds rather than municipal ones.
Dunwoody’s mayor confirmed that Flock agreed to end use of the city’s camera data for commercial demos following a private meeting with the CEO, according to the Dunwoody Brookhaven Ledger.
That architecture change addresses one part of the problem. It does not settle the broader question of accountability: when a private vendor manages the infrastructure and sets the moderation thresholds, the rules are only as stable as that vendor’s discretion. Much like the concerns raised when governments are caught secretly tracking users through third-party tools, the accountability gap here ultimately falls on whoever signed the contract.
Municipal contracts may need to start requiring something the current model lacks. Enforceable technical limits on what any account, including Flock’s own, can search for on a city’s cameras are a different matter than corporate policy alone.
