NYPD says a few officers got trial access to Flock's license plate database after records showed 1,710 searches

The NYPD says a handful of its officers were given trial access to Flock Safety's nationwide license plate reader database in 2023, after privacy advocates found records of 1,710 NYPD searches of the system even though the department says it has never had a contract with the company.

What the records show

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a Brooklyn-based privacy group, and LatinoJustice PRLDEF pulled the searches from "Have I Been Flocked?", a national database built from Flock audit logs obtained through public records requests. The logs show NYPD officers ran 1,710 searches between March 2023 and December 2025, the most recent data available, the groups said.

In nearly a thousand of those searches, the reason field was blank, boilerplate such as "investigation" or "wanted person," gibberish such as "234234," or only the plate that was searched, according to S.T.O.P. Other entries listed only a general offense, such as homicide or burglary, or the requesting agency, including 131 requests from the Queens District Attorney's Office.

"There's so little information in the NYPD searches that it's impossible to tell" whether officers had a proper reason, S.T.O.P. research director Eleni Manis told Brooklyn Paper. The records do not show that any particular search was improper, the paper noted. Andrew Case, a supervising attorney at LatinoJustice, said the sparse logs also give little sign that supervisors reviewed what officers did.

The NYPD's explanation

Publicly, the NYPD had said only that a "limited number of authorized NYPD personnel" can access a national commercial license plate reader repository, according to S.T.O.P.

A department spokesperson told Brooklyn Paper this week that in 2023 a Flock representative offered a handful of officers trial access to the database, which they used to look for possible hit-and-run vehicles, stolen cars and other incidents in other jurisdictions. Officers could search Flock's data, but the company never had access to NYPD data, the spokesperson said. The department said it does not share data from its own license plate readers with any third-party vendor, and that its own system is used to find stolen and wanted vehicles and cars tied to Amber and Silver alerts, missing persons and other crimes.

What the groups want

On Sept. 17, S.T.O.P. and LatinoJustice filed a Freedom of Information Law request for the NYPD's Flock audit logs, any contracts or agreements to use Flock through another agency, training materials and rules, the names of officers licensed to use the system and any payments to the company. Case told Brooklyn Paper the NYPD said it would respond by Feb. 5, 2027.

Manis said the groups first went through the data to see whether police in New York State were searching Flock on behalf of ICE, and found the NYPD searches along the way, Brooklyn Paper reported.

Flock says every law enforcement search must have a documented purpose and is logged. The company began requiring a standardized offense type for every search in December 2025 and will require a case number by the end of this year, according to a Flock letter obtained by the Washington Examiner, as reported by Newsmax.