Flock announced shorter default data retention, mandatory case codes, and new audit tools. Every one of those is a setting that a company or a police chief can change back on a Tuesday with no public process. None of them is a law. None of them required your consent. Here is Flock’s announcement read line by line against Apex Police Department’s own search log.
On August 13, Flock Safety published a list of changes to its license plate reader system. Shorter default retention. Mandatory case codes. Wider rollout of an audit tool. Offense filtering for sharing. The coverage treated it as reform.
Read it again and count how many of those changes a resident of Apex can enforce. The answer is zero. A safeguard is something residents voted for and can hold their government to. A setting is something a vendor or a police chief adjusts internally and can adjust back. Every item on Flock’s list is a setting.
That is not a rhetorical point. It is the entire problem in Apex. This camera network went up without a resident vote, without an ALPR ordinance, and without a published surveillance impact report. A company revising its own defaults does not fix a consent problem. It demonstrates it.
Buried in the retention section is a claim about how retention periods were set in the first place.
Apex’s retention period is not democratically approved. It was set in a vendor contract. There has been no recorded Council vote authorizing this camera network, no ALPR ordinance, no surveillance impact report, and no public hearing on the decision to join a nationwide sharing network. Flock is describing a democratic process that did not happen here.
That same sentence has a practical consequence people are missing. The seven-day number in every headline is not Apex’s number. Apex’s Flock contract specifies 30 days. Flock says existing customers keep what they have. Unless Apex PD affirmatively opts in and says so in writing, nothing about the storage of your movements in Apex changed on August 13.
A recommendation with an opt-out is not a limit. Any agency that wants months of location history still gets months of location history. It just has to ask. Flock is not the one unlocking the door here, but it built the door and it hands out the keys.
There may also be a price attached. The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that Flock has previously charged customers to extend retention beyond the default, which means the real constraint on a longer window may be a line item rather than a policy. EFF calls the new default the most consequential of the changes, and also the one most easily reversed.
Apex is contracted at 30 days. Flock’s announcement explicitly grandfathers that. And the retention window was never the core problem: a single Apex search reaches thousands of outside networks and roughly a hundred thousand cameras. Storing a dragnet for a shorter time leaves it a dragnet.
Much of the national coverage rendered this as roughly 90 percent of all searches. Flock’s own sentence is narrower than that. It says searches without a full plate. We are flagging the difference because the exact wording is the part that will get checked, and we would rather be precise than loud.
Either version concedes the same thing. Flock set the default at 30 days nine years ago and defended it as a careful balance. It now says a week covers the overwhelming majority of the work. If the investigative value of this data lives in week one, then weeks two, three and four were never producing cases. They were producing inventory.
The ACLU’s reading is that this depends entirely on scope. If Evidence Mode preserves only hit data that police have determined is evidence in a specific active case, it may be a real improvement. If it preserves any data that gets searched, it could indefinitely retain location records on people no officer suspects of anything, which would make the retention problem worse rather than better. Flock has not published the scope. That is attributable to the ACLU, not to us, and it is a question rather than an accusation.
North Carolina does not leave preservation to a vendor’s feature design. Under G.S. 20-183.32, captured plate data may not be preserved more than 90 days, and preservation beyond that requires either a search warrant or a written, sworn statement that specifies the particular camera, the particular plate, the dates, the case and parties, and “specific and articulable facts” connecting the data to an ongoing investigation.
A case code typed into a drop-down is not a sworn statement, and it does not identify a camera, a plate, or a date range. So the question for the town attorney is direct: if Evidence Mode preserves data on the strength of a case code, how does that satisfy G.S. 20-183.32(c)?
According to the ACLU’s breakdown, Flock rolled out a “Proactive Search Term Tool” on June 12, 2025 that was supposed to block impermissible searches. Officers defeated it by entering “investigation” or even “hehehe” as the reason, as reported by the Eugene Register-Guard. Flock replaced the free-text box with a drop-down menu, which hands police a list of approved answers to pick from whether or not the answer is true. Those specifics are the ACLU’s and the Register-Guard’s reporting, not our own records work.
The reason field existed for the entire period covered by Apex PD’s search log. An independent audit of that log, published through public records by HaveIBeenFlocked.com, counts at least 15,335 searches between July 29, 2025 and June 29, 2026. Twenty-eight percent of them recorded no reason at all. Blank is the single most common entry in the log. That is roughly 4,300 searches of a national tracking network with nothing written down.
So this was never a missing feature. It was an available field that went unused thousands of times, with no apparent consequence. Making the same box mandatory does not make the entry in it true, and Flock wrote an emergency bypass into the requirement. The deadline is also “by the end of the year,” which means as of today nothing has changed.
Flock’s evidence that the tool works is that identification of misuse went up, and that recent officer arrests followed reviews. Up from what? As the ACLU puts it, without knowing how many officers are actually misusing the system you cannot tell whether the tool catches 95 percent of them or 5 percent. Arrests prove abuse exists. They do not measure detection.
These figures come from other people’s investigations and we cite them as theirs. The Washington Post reported on August 2 that at least 50 officers have been charged with or accused of misusing Flock and similar systems, and that in 26 of those cases investigators or prosecutors said the officers were tracking wives, girlfriends, exes, an ex’s new partner, or women they wanted to meet. One woman learned her officer ex had looked her up roughly 600 times. The Institute for Justice has published a public tracker of more than 100 documented ALPR abuse incidents, which it updates as new cases surface. Flock announced its changes eleven days after that Post investigation.
EFF makes the structural point better than we can: enhanced audit tools address a problem that the product itself created.
Human-reported is the operative phrase. The numerator counts only errors somebody took the trouble to report to Flock. A wrongful stop that ends at the roadside with an apology and no complaint never enters it. The denominator is alerts, not stops, not searches, and not people pulled over. Flock has not published the underlying method, and the independent security review it commissioned from Bishop Fox is not due out until September.
The framing also quietly moves the risk. If an alert is only a lead, then every consequence of a bad read lands on the officer at the car window and the driver inside it, not on the vendor that generated it.
A false positive rate. Apex PD told Council it had roughly 1,700 hotlist hits and offered ten example cases with no incident numbers and no arrest reports. Nobody outside the department can check what fraction of those hits were wrong.
EFF asked the question that ends this argument: what is stopping Flock from reversing course on any of this if its law enforcement customers start defecting to another vendor? Nothing. That is what separates a setting from a law.
Everything above is a reading of somebody else’s press release. The numbers below are ours, from Apex Police Department’s own records obtained under public records law. They are the reason this page exists.
Thirty-one Apex operators ran those searches, averaging about 61 per active day, with Sunday the single busiest day of the week and activity recorded in the 2 a.m. hour. Sharing snapshots show 994 organizations with active access in March 2026 and 1,070 in April. The full log analysis, including the source documents, is on our audit log page. The presentation Apex PD actually brought to Council is broken down in our June 9 analysis.
These are answerable in writing, and the answers are either yes with a date or no.
We will be straight about one thing, because it matters and because someone will point it out. Our ask did move. For months we pushed a governance ordinance: delete in ten days, a 99 percent accuracy floor, no mass sharing, a civilian committee with real authority. We built it in good faith on the premise that this system could be made safe if the conditions were strict enough.
We do not believe that anymore, and the reason is on this page. A vendor that can rewrite its own safeguards in a blog post is not a vendor you can bind with conditions. A department that left 28 percent of its searches unexplained was not short of rules, it was short of consequences. Conditions require a system that respects them.
So the ask is now removal and a ban. That is a bigger ask than we started with, and August 11 is why we think it is the right one. When the chamber overflowed, nobody in that room asked for a better-tuned dragnet.
Public forum is open to any resident. Three minutes, no advance sign-up, no expertise required. A company revising a settings page is not a substitute for you speaking on the record.
Every quotation attributed to Flock on this page is taken verbatim from Flock’s own August 13 post, linked below. Where a fact comes from someone else’s reporting or analysis, we say whose it is.
We have not seen how Evidence Mode actually operates, because Flock has not published its scope. We are raising the ACLU’s question about it, not asserting the answer.
We have not confirmed whether Apex PD has adopted the 7-day setting, enabled offense filtering, or turned on Audit Assistance. Those are open questions on this page for exactly that reason.
The national figures on Flock’s size, the June 2025 search-tool history, the officer misuse counts, and the abuse tracker are the work of the ACLU, EFF, the Washington Post, the Register-Guard, and the Institute for Justice. We cite them as theirs. The Apex search log, sharing snapshots, and contract records are ours.
If a fact on this page is wrong, tell us which one and where, and we will correct it and say that we did. Email contact@deflockapex.org.