Drivers beware: Police are tracking your movements 29%
By J. Dale Shoemaker33%
7/16/2026, 3:00:23 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Confirmation Bias, and Appeal to Authority, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 15.1% saturation with 331 hits. Analysis detected 2,225 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,192 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 34.5% and a BS Rank of 29% (18,347 of 25,732 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 71.30% of the article peer group.
Imagine you live in Kenmore and need to swing by the Walden Galleria Mall in Cheektowaga.
As you drive, a dozen AI-powered license plate reading cameras track your vehicle’s movements.
The make and model of your car, its color, your license plate number — even your bumper stickers — are captured and stored in databases accessible to police locally and around the country.
That drive isn’t an isolated incident.
Nineteen license plate readers will track a driver traveling from downtown to the mall and back home to Buffalo’s West Side.
A trip from Amherst to watch a Sabres game at KeyBank Center involves a half dozen camera captures, and from Clarence to a Bills game in Orchard Park three.
You have no way of opting out.
The cameras are everywhere.
And there are no laws or regulations, save for local policy, governing how law enforcement agencies place license plate readers or cull the data they obtain.
Across Erie and Niagara counties, law enforcement agencies have installed hundreds of license plate readers.
They record vehicles on highways and main thoroughfares; on college campuses; near parks and public housing complexes; and in the parking lots of malls and other shopping centers.
In Buffalo, they tend to be located in low-income neighborhoods.
In the suburbs, they’re most frequently placed near shopping centers and along major roadways.
Many of the license plate readers are leased to local agencies by Flock Safety, a rapidly growing tech company that manufactures one of the most popular brands of license plate readers.
The ones in Buffalo are made by Canadian firm Genetec.
Over the last year and a half, local police agencies have made more than 218,000 searches of data obtained by the Flock license plate readers.
Police say they’re using the technology to find stolen cars, locate missing people and solve crimes.
In Amherst, for example, Captain Gregg Huller said the town has “seen a significant increase in stolen vehicles, and detectives have been actively using Flock to locate stolen vehicles or vehicles associated with the larcenies.
This has been the most common type of search, though we also use it for other types of crimes.”
But an analysis of Flock data by Investigative Post found they’re often not specific about why they’re searching for a particular vehicle.
And in some cases, police used those cameras to track down migrants wanted by the federal government.
“This strikes me as a massive sort of dragnet surveillance system that is recording the location of anybody who happens to pass a Flock camera, 24/7, constantly,” said Jonathan Manes, senior counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center whose research and litigation focuses on issues stemming from government surveillance.
“I think it’s a massive invasion of privacy to be compiling a database of people’s movements.”
Police are using the cameras nearly every minute of every day.
Officers with 20 local agencies, Investigative Post found, searched for a vehicle in the Flock network of cameras more than 218,000 times over a 17-month period from January 2025 through the beginning of June of this year.
That equates to a license plate search every three minutes.
That count doesn’t include Buffalo Police searches of its 116 Genetec license plate readers.
It’s not just local police that search the local cameras.
Thousands of law enforcement agencies have installed more than 6,500 networks of Flock cameras across the country.
Police in Western New York share access to their networks with hundreds of other departments and they, in turn, have access to thousands of networks themselves.
This story is based on an Investigative Post analysis of millions of Flock searches performed by police here and around the country.
Some of the data came via an open records request made by a Scott Conway, a Town of Tonawanda resident concerned about the use of the technology, while other data was obtained via a website that compiles public records requests for Flock data from around the country.
In the Buffalo suburbs, where Flock is used most intensely, residents are beginning to speak out against the constant surveillance.
“It’s a panopticon that is and will continue to be abused,” said Conway, the Town of Tonawanda resident.
“I think that there is nothing inherently wrong with the technology, but I think that strong oversight is required to use it without compromising fundamental civil liberties.”
In an interview, Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel disputed that the company’s cameras can track a vehicle’s movements.
He did not dispute, however, that an officer could trace a driver’s path if their vehicle is captured by multiple Flock cameras.
“The license plate readers work by taking a point time image of a vehicle in public view,” Lewbel said.
“After that picture was taken, you don’t know if the vehicle turned left, if it turned right, if it stops somewhere.”
How police are using Flock
Between January 2025 and June of this year, 20 local police agencies in Erie and Niagara counties conducted more than 218,000 vehicle searches using the Flock surveillance system.
That’s an average of 423 searches per day.
None use the system more than Cheektowaga police, who have queried the Flock system nearly 48,000 times over the past 17 months.
The town has 29 cameras installed and two more on the way.
On its Flock transparency website, the town reports its cameras have captured nearly 545,000 license plates in the last month alone.
Other heavy search users include the Erie County Sheriff’s Office, police in the towns of Hamburg and West Seneca, and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority police.
Officers frequently recorded only a vague reason for their searches.
Common search labels include “UUV,” unauthorized use of a vehicle; “INV,” investigation; and “ATL,” attempt to locate.
Officers also made thousands of searches for larcenies, hit-and-runs, thefts and traffic infractions, but few other details of who or what they were looking for are available in the data.
Lewbel, of Flock, said its up to local officers to input the reason for their search.
In only a limited number of cases did officers include details like the license plate number, a case number or a description of the matter they were investigating.
(License plate numbers were redacted from the data Investigative Post obtained.)
In April and May last year, for example, Cheektowaga officers spent several weeks staking out a “known house for drug users” on Andres Place.
They searched the license plate number of a car parked outside.
Captain Jeffrey Schmidt, a spokesperson for the Cheektowaga police, refused to answer questions from Investigative Post or make police officials available for interviews.
He instead pointed a reporter to the department’s policy governing use of license plate readers.
That policy states Cheektowaga may use such cameras for “identifying stolen or wanted vehicles, stolen license plates and missing persons.”
“It may also be used to gather information related to active warrants, homeland security, electronic surveillance, suspect interdiction and stolen property recovery,” the policy states.
State and local police conducted 107 searches of local Flock networks to assist ICE, Border Patrol or Homeland Security.
That includes 30 searches by Buffalo police and a dozen each by Cheektowaga and Lancaster.
The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, state police and the New York State Crime Analysis Center also used local cameras to assist federal immigration agents.
A Buffalo Police spokesperson noted that assisting federal agencies on criminal matters does not violate Mayor Sean Ryan’s ban on city employees assisting with civil immigration enforcement.
Police elsewhere also searched local cameras for immigrants.
In April, for example, 60 police agencies — most from Texas and Florida — conducted more than 600 nationwide searches for migrants that included cameras located in Cheektowaga.
NFTA police use their Flock system to assist the FBI and other unnamed federal agencies.
The data shows 1,700 searches related to FBI investigations and another 500 to assist “federal investigations” generally.
Those searches mainly concerned activity at the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport, Chief Brian Patterson said, where the NFTA has a “limited” number of Flock cameras .
A half-dozen are located along the access roads leading to and from parking lots, according to open-source data.
Patterson declined to elaborate on what kinds of cases his officers work with federal agencies on.
“It's another investigative tool that law enforcement agencies use to solve crime and protect citizens,” Patterson said.
“We use that in our transportation spaces to deter terrorism … to make sure we can respond effectively to missing persons … [and] to prevent and deter and apprehend stolen vehicle calls for service.”
Lewbel said any collaboration between police and federal agencies is made at the local level, not by Flock.
Searches of the Flock system by the sheriff’s office, Hamburg police and West Seneca police involved broad categories, such as “investigation,” as well as more specific queries like hit-and-runs, traffic infractions and various kinds of thefts.
The sheriff’s office also uses Flock for narcotics investigations.
That accounted for more than 22 percent of the agency’s searches.
Buffalo police use 116 Genetec license plate readers, though department spokesperson Timothy Richards said the cameras don’t integrate with the Flock system.
That’s 12 more readers than the department had when Investigative Post first reported on the technology three years ago.
The data, however, shows Buffalo police made 3,800 Flock searches over the past 17 months.
Many searches involved gun crimes or shootings.
Richards said two specialized officers access Flock “when creating intelligence reports and tracking dangerous suspects of violent crimes.”
He said the city doesn’t pay to use Flock.
In Amherst, use of license plate readers is poised to expand.
The town is in the process of switching its cameras from Flock to Axon, the company better known for supplying police bodycams.
Before ending its $60,000 per year contract with Flock, officers had 17 cameras installed and logged nearly 8,800 searches over the past 18 months.
The town in February agreed to purchase 24 Axon cameras for $300,000.
“Over the last several years, we have seen a significant increase in stolen vehicles, and detectives have been actively using Flock to locate stolen vehicles or vehicles associated with the larcenies,” explained Amherst Police Captain Gregg Huller.
“This has been the most common type of search, though we also use it for other types of crimes.”
Surveillance state, or crucial police tool?
Investigative Post sought interviews with the 20 police departments named in the Flock data.
Only three granted interviews, while police officials in three other departments answered questions via email.
The other 14 departments did not respond to phone calls and emails or refused to comment.
Police who spoke to Investigative Post argued license plate readers are an important investigatory tool that they use routinely to find missing vehicles and persons and to solve crimes.
Hamburg Chief Peter Dienes told Investigative Post his department has four Flock cameras installed at an annual cost of $12,000.
“We use them as an investigative tool to determine which vehicles may have been at the scene of a crime,” Dienes said in an email.
“Since implementation, they have been very valuable in identifying numerous stolen vehicles entering our town, and they have been used to solve crimes that without the cameras may not have been solved, as well as locating missing persons.”
Town of Tonawanda Captain Joseph Milosich similarly described the Flock cameras as “a very nice tool for investigations and follow-up.”
“If people have a better idea of what the cameras actually do, how they’re used, our policy that governs them, [and] how strictly the program is audited, that might relieve a little bit of the concerns that they’re feeling,” he said.
Critics and some residents disagree.
In several suburbs like Amherst and Cheektowaga, residents have been showing up to town meetings to criticize police use of the technology.
And experts Investigative Post spoke with say use of the cameras may amount to unlawful surveillance.
“Absolutely it’s mass surveillance,” said Cris van Pelt, a researcher and journalist who created the website Have I Been Flocked to compile data on police use of Flock nationwide.
“It has a huge potential for abuse and very, very little oversight.”
Lewbel, of Flock, contended the company is mindful of driver’s privacy.
“We believe at Flock that privacy and safety should coexist,” he said.
“We think the conversation about privacy is important.”
Anthony O’Rourke, a University at Buffalo law professor, said use of the technology could run afoul of the U.S.
Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
He pointed to a recent Supreme Court ruling that found mass data collection by police constitutes an unlawful search.
“Even if it has some modest investigative value, one has to ask about the costs that are incurred,” O’Rourke said.
“And whether police officers have … other constitutional and legal ways of obtaining the information that they need to reduce crime.”
Those are questions local leaders are beginning to ask.
Among them are Stephen Nowicki, a Cheektowaga town board member who’s opposed to his town’s use of Flock.
“Ultimately,” he said, “my position on this comes down to: I don’t want our police nor any police in this country to have unfettered access to surveilling the public.”
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