404 Media45%
How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars 84%
By Joseph Cox58%
7/16/2026, 1:56:48 PM
Keywords: Flock
BS Summary: This article contains 10 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Biased Writer Voice, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 48.1% saturation with 90 hits. Analysis detected 547 faulty-reasoning hits from 187 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 76.3% and a BS Rank of 84% (3,220 of 19,669 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 83.60% of the article peer group.
Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media.
Sometimes searches reference a target’s race or signs of their political affiliation.
The searches highlight that while most people associate Flock cameras with scanning license plates and tracking vehicles, some of the cameras are also capable of following the movements of particular people or groups of people.
Flock’s nationwide network of cameras lets police officers in one state search for a vehicle across many other states at once; the people searches do a similar thing, typically on a smaller scale, sometimes querying many hundreds of cameras at once.
These are called “FreeForm” searches, and allow cops to use Flock’s system as though they would use a search engine, with Flock’s AI and image recognition interpreting what footage and which people are relevant to a police officer’s search.
Analysis
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