Police Use Flock's FreeForm Feature to Search for People by Appearance, Not Just License Plates
License plate readers are designed to help police track vehicles, but at least one major vendor—Flock Safety—is being used by law enforcement to search for people based on their physical appearance rather than just their vehicles.
According to documentation reviewed by 404 Media, police departments have utilized Flock's "FreeForm" search feature to look for individuals wearing specific clothing, having visible tattoos, or matching other physical descriptions. Some searches have included the target's race as a parameter.
How FreeForm Works
Unlike traditional license plate reader systems that match vehicles against a specific list (such as stolen cars or wanted suspects), FreeForm allows officers to search across all captured data using descriptive criteria. An officer could, for example, query the system for all vehicles passing through a camera location where the driver had a visible tattoo or wore a particular sports team shirt.
This approach significantly expands the scope of surveillance beyond vehicle-focused investigations. It effectively creates a searchable database of people captured by camera feeds, not just their vehicles.
Privacy and Civil Liberties Concerns
The practice has drawn criticism from privacy advocates who argue it represents a significant expansion of mass surveillance capabilities. Including race in search parameters raises additional concerns about potential profiling and the erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
Civil liberties organizations have long warned that license plate readers, when combined with searchable databases and expanded criteria, can enable surveillance that tracks individuals' movements, associations, and activities without individualized suspicion.
Industry Context
Flock Safety has become a major provider of license plate reading technology to police departments across the United States. The company markets its systems primarily as tools for solving crimes involving vehicles, but the FreeForm feature suggests capabilities that extend into broader person-based surveillance.
The documented use cases highlight an ongoing tension between law enforcement's desire for investigative tools and concerns about maintaining civil liberties in an era of increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology.