NPR. If you drive in the US, there's a good chance that a flock camera has taken a photo of your license plate. And if you watch the news, you've probably heard about Flock or seen some viral clips of concerned citizens. Like this man who dressed like Darth Vader at a San Diego City Council meeting last month. The Emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock Technologies.
Less than a decade ago, Flock started by selling cameras to a couple of neighborhoods. Today, the Atlanta-based company has over 120,000 of them across the United States. Flock itself is worth over $8 billion. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Ricky Mulvie.
This is a big deal in Wong. Flock cameras can help police departments find stolen vehicles and violent criminals. Officers can tap into a network that tracks bad apples across counties and states. But they've also been misused to stock ex-partners, track protests, find people who are doing stuff that's legal. Today on the show, we break down the economics of Flock.
What are police departments getting for their money? And do Flock cameras actually make communities safer? This week on sources and methods President Trump's diesel deal with Russia? Would it help? Would shipping costs and would it even be legal?
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Consider us your mental health accountability buddy, with episodes on everything from navigating social anxiety to unlearning perfectionism. Listen to the LifeKit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Stoplight and speeding cameras have been around for decades. They may have led to an unwanted letter in your mailbox a time or two. These cameras are known as automated license plate readers.
These are the little cameras mounted on stoplights or white boxes along the highway. For a long time, these cameras were controlled by individual police departments. If the cops wanted to find you, they had just a few cameras they could check around a city. Flock cameras are different, and that was a big selling point. Its system is easy to search.
This is unlike in another national database, the FBI's next-generation identification system. If you've ever been fingerprinted for a job or a rest, you're in the system. If someone wants to use the fingerprint database, there's a higher gate to get into the system. Depending on the state, Flock can have fewer restrictions. Some police use it to track activities that are legal in some states and illegal in others.
Jason Kebler is the co-founder of 404 Media. These broken stories on high-profile cases of police misusing the Flock system. Well, it is interesting because Flock initially pitched itself to homeowners associations and to local police as being a way to recover stolen vehicles. This is explicitly what they are for. Flock cameras aren't just tracking and recording specific infractions.
They are recording all the time and keeping track of where vehicles go. Flock's default is storing this data for a week, but some police departments have stored it for up to a year. So they're different from the older generation of automated license plate readers, because they're not just recording traffic violations like running a red light. They're recording all the time. They can keep track of a driver's whereabouts, even if they aren't suspected of a crime.
But these cameras have been used to solve crimes like murders and car thefts. And car thefts are really tough to solve. Stolen vehicles rarely have a witness. Cops and victims often don't have suspects. It can seemingly be a random crime.
The only way you're going to be able to clear one of these crimes within a rest typically is if you find somebody in that stolen vehicle. Scott Morgan was a police officer for two decades. Now he teaches criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. And a lot of that comes down to chance, right? A lot of that comes down to is there a police officer driving by right when that stolen vehicle is occupied by somebody who stolen.
Scott wanted to find out how effective Flock cameras are at stopping auto thefts in other crimes primarily from an economic lens. He remembers getting a lot of sales pitches from different companies as a police executive. You have vendor after vendor coming to you trying to sell you what their product is. Making all the promises under the sun. You might buy it and I not.
If you buy it, you find out that that doesn't even deliver on 50%. For example, each Flock camera costs around $3,000 per year for a police department to operate. Fargo, North Dakota spends about $130,000 per year on its Flock system. So Scott and his co-author set out to study crime rates before and after Flock cameras went live. This is how much security you get on average for giving up more privacy.
And we do want to note that Scott says he didn't receive any funding from Flock to do the study. Scott looked across a couple hundred jurisdictions that brought in Flock cameras. He and his co-author found that motor vehicle theft fell about 11% in areas that use Flock cameras. And locating suspects for vehicle thefts rose about 16%. Scott says he wasn't that surprised the decrease in car thefts turned out to be modest.
I think when we're talking about coverage within any given jurisdiction, you know, relatively speaking, we're talking about small amount of the total surface area for roads. In other words, Flock cameras are a patchwork. They aren't covering every inch of road space. They aren't catching every car thief. They are tools, not magic bullets.
The other reason I wasn't surprised that effects being found were bigger is because I think crime is an extremely complicated phenomenon. People commit or don't commit crimes for a lot of reasons. The presence of cameras is one of them. In other potential reasons, many cars have become harder to steal. Traditional hot wiring or bypassing a key to start a car doesn't work on most modern vehicles.
The study looked at years worth of data. Still, Flock issued a celebratory press release on Scott's paper after it came out this August. Car thefts down or rests up. Scott says that's not exactly what they found. I think we're very clear in our paper to get the caveats and the qualifications that are analysis deserves.
And so if anybody is interested in those, they should go read the working paper. Don't threaten me with that good type of that. We did indeed read the working paper. Good content? A little wordy in words.
Like any good-be-con research paper, of course. Anyway, it's complicated. For example, Flock cameras don't help police find stolen cars faster all the time. We establish that Flock has this network of cameras. They're always on and they're scanning everything.
That doesn't make police faster at finding stolen cars. Yeah, I'll be honest with you. That's one that kind of took me back to it. But Scott says a few data points should not determine if a community uses Flock cameras. There are stories of these cameras solving crimes and of the system being a problem.
Obviously, the negative experiences are just as impactful and just as important as one of these, quote unquote, positive experiences, right? And I think if you read the paper, like, we're very, like, we're down the middle. Jason Keblerk with 404 Media says he's concerned about the technology being used for a lot more than car thefts these days. It's been used to track undocumented immigrants. It's been used to track protesters.
It's been used to track people who went and bought weed in a legal state and then return to a state where it is not legal. It's been used to track a woman who had an abortion. Last year, according to 404 Media, police in Texas used the Flock network to track a woman suspected of having an abortion. The woman's abuse partner did not like that. She did this.
Jason says he went to the police who used Flock to search the woman's plate and states where abortion was both legal, as well as Texas, where it generally is not. They searched 80,000 cameras across the United States. They ultimately didn't find her using this technology. She eventually kind of heard that this was happening and went to the police and told the police that she was being abused. We reached out to Flock for comment on this use of their system.
A company spokesperson said that the case report explicitly stated the woman could not be charged with a crime. But Flock is under scrutiny for more than just a few cases of misuse. Multiple cities have canceled or paused Flock contracts. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to pause funding and grants for Flock safety cameras late last month. We asked Flock how many cities have discontinued using its technology but did not receive a response by her deadline.
A company spokesperson previously told the outlet ours Technica that so far in 2026, more cities have signed up for Flock than have dropped their renewals. And the system doesn't perfectly catch criminals when a suspect is tagged. There was a woman who was arrested in Florida because cops were looking for a Black SUV related to a deadly hit and run accident. This woman happened to be driving a similar looking car near the crime. She spent 13 days in jail.
Her car was not involved in this. She was a totally different vehicle. Automated policing can lead to important arrests. And Scott's research shows that implementing Flock cameras are associated with fewer vehicle thefts. But these systems are still prone to mistakes and misuse.
It's not just what Flock cameras can capture, but how that information is stored and shared. If you like the indicator but want a little more, then sign up for our newsletter. It's a look at some of the stories we're chatting about behind the scenes but don't always get to on the show. The email delivers every Friday. Sign up at npr.org slash indicator newsletter or click the link in the show notes.
This episode was produced by Cooper Kasmikim and engineered by Cinella Fredo and Robert Rodriguez, who was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Julia Ritchie edited this episode. Kaken Cannon is the show's editor. The indicator is a production of NPR. This election season, let the NPR Politics podcast save your time and your sanity.
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