In recent months, Francisco Gómez says that he’s become aware of an eye in the sky that has the power to keep tabs on him when he drives to and from his home in Ward 5.
“They’re hidden in plain sight,” he says, referring to the easy-to-miss cameras that occupy a vantage point some 20 feet above the ground on many light poles across D.C. “When people are moving through their lives in a normal fashion, there’s no avoiding these cameras.”
It’s true that Gómez, and everyone else driving in D.C., is being watched and tracked by the Metropolitan Police Department’s 67 Flock automated license-plate readers. The cameras scan an average of 400,000 tags on a daily basis, storing tag numbers and other identifying characteristics of passing vehicles in a police database for up to three months — longer than many jurisdictions that also use the technology.
Whether that’s a positive thing depends on who you ask.
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D.C. police officials say the cameras are a critical investigative tool that have helped solve crimes, including a pair of homicides in 2025, and that they have safeguards in place to limit access to the data collected. Additionally, they point out that D.C. has used some variety of license-plate reader for at least 15 years, without much public concern or controversy.
But critics like Gómez — who recently helped found DeFlock DC, which is demanding that the city’s Metropolitan Police Department pull down the cameras — say Flock technology is significantly more powerful than similar technology used in the past, creating a “vehicle fingerprint” that allows officers to track cars in real time and search for tag numbers across state lines.
That has raised fears about how police could use the cameras. There’s been plenty of recent reporting on cases of abuse in other jurisdictions, where officers have misused the technology to spy on their ex-girlfriends or to track a woman suspected of self-administering an abortion.
It’s not clear whether any such abuse has happened with the District’s Flock license-plate readers, which have been in use since early 2025. That’s in part because MPD has never released any information on how its trove of Flock-generated tag data has been used, and it denied an open records request from NOTUS for the data.
At the start of 2026, after inquiries by D.C. Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large), MPD stopped allowing other police departments to access its license-plate reader data directly. It now requires them to specifically request data from D.C., part of an effort to ensure the city’s information is used for legitimate criminal investigations. MPD also instituted a new license-plate reader policy in April that requires an annual audit of the data for possible policy violations.
But for the entire year prior, MPD had allowed thousands of officers across the country nearly unfettered access to its database. And to this day, the department has declined to detail who has used the city’s data — and why.
“My feelings on this have evolved,” Henderson tells NOTUS. “In those initial conversations I had with MPD it definitely seemed like Flock had been rolled out without many guardrails or protocols to ensure that the technology was being used appropriately. But I do think over time MPD has made changes that certainly make me feel more comfortable than in other jurisdictions where they don’t have anything in place at all.”
For Gómez, though, no amount of protection will make a difference. To him, the Flock cameras are just one more part in a growing system of surveillance.
“There’s a real chilling effect that happens when you’re monitored at all times,” he said. “Tracking people used to require a warrant and have checks and balances of a judge, but once that wall breaks down you see erosion of free speech and free association and freedom of religion. All of that is extremely concerning.”
Flock Safety did not return a request for comment on the growing backlash to its products. In an automatic reply to an email from NOTUS, the media team wrote that its staff was “currently touching grass and taking a break.”
“Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences,” the email said.
A powerful tool to fight crime
Georgia-based Flock Safety was founded less than a decade ago with the intention of using technology to better help jurisdictions fight crime. It’s now one of the biggest players in the space, valued at more than $8 billion and used in some 6,000 communities across 49 states. More than 100,000 of its signature solar-powered license-plate readers are in use throughout the country.
In D.C., the Metropolitan Police Department signed a $336,000 one-year contract for 67 Flock cameras in December 2024; the contract was later extended through the end of 2026 for another $201,000. (The federal government operates its own Flock cameras on federal land around the city.)
When a car drives past a Flock camera, the technology captures its license plate and other identifying information about it. Because every vehicle is scanned, law enforcement can later query the Flock database to determine when a car was in a certain place.
The tech has proved useful for the District: In May 2025, D.C. officers were able to use MPD’s network of Flock cameras to track and eventually stop three D.C. teenagers who had escaped from a juvenile facility in Pennsylvania and returned to the city in a stolen car, which was then used in a nonfatal shooting. Later in the year, license-plate readers were used to make an arrest in the fatal shooting of Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, a congressional intern working in D.C.
“The expansion of the District’s LPR network has directly contributed to significant public safety gains, helping our investigators identify vehicles connected to serious crimes and locate individuals with outstanding warrants,” said an MPD spokesman, who declined to be identified by his name, in an email.
Because many police departments across the country have adopted the cameras, and because Flock makes it easy for jurisdictions to share information with each other, the cameras have also helped police track suspects across state lines — making it a much more powerful tool for D.C. police than past license-plate reader technology.
“The importance of a shared regional LPR network for the District cannot be overstated,” Jeffery Carroll, MPD’s interim chief, wrote in a February letter to Henderson.
Flock also touts the crimes it says the license-plate readers have helped solve; the company’s website says that more than 10,000 missing people have been located nationally since 2025, and 42% of its customers were able to recover more than half of the stolen vehicles in their respective jurisdictions. Charles Fain Lehman, a scholar at the conservative Manhattan Institute, has created a website called the Flock Crime Prevention Tracker that aggregates news coverage of where Flock has been used to solve crimes.
‘It’s a database of your life’
But critics of the technology say it can be easily abused or used for purposes far afield of local police departments’ stated missions.
The Washington Post recently reported on dozens of cases in which officers used Flock data improperly, including to spy on or stalk wives, girlfriends, exes or romantic prospects. After the Post’s story came out, Flock changed its policies to boost oversight of police officers’ use of its databases and to impose stricter limits on how long it would keep data from scanned tags. (The default was reduced to seven days from 30, though individual jurisdictions can opt to set their own.)
In other cases, local law enforcement has used the Flock lookup tool to aid federal immigration authorities, according to reports from 404 Media and others. For a time, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had direct access to the lookup system through a program that Flock has since paused.
The MPD spokesperson declined to answer questions from NOTUS about whether D.C.’s Flock data had ever been used by federal immigration enforcement, which ramped up in 2025, after President Donald Trump declared a crime emergency in the city and deployed the National Guard.
The department also has not responded to public records requests asking for Flock audit logs, which show who has searched the city’s license-plate data and why. A NOTUS reporter’s January request for that data has gone unanswered for months, in violation of a D.C. law requiring that city agencies turn over documents within 15 business days or cite legal reasons why they won’t.
“I am supremely curious what happened in 2025, especially given what was happening with regard to the federal surges that were taking place here in D.C.,” says Henderson. “Hopefully MPD will be able to be a little more forthright about what happened and what changes took place.”
Nationally, activists and community members are pushing back on Flock. There have been efforts to map the locations of more than 135,000 license-plate readers nationwide (largely from Flock), and an app exists to help drivers find routes that avoid Flock cameras. Activists and journalists have pushed to acquire logs of Flock database searches through open-records requests, which have since been used to create an online tool that people can use to check if their license plate has been scanned by a Flock camera.
Locally, some residents in Virginia have started fighting the use of the technology, including in Alexandria, Prince William County and Fairfax County.
“This gets sold as a crime database. It is not. It’s a database of you living your life. It is your movements, your patterns when you’re living your life. That’s government overreach,” said Steven Keener, the director of the Center for Crime, Equity and Justice Research and Policy at Christopher Newport University, during an anti-Flock event in Fairfax County last weekend.
In D.C., members of the DeFlock DC group have opted for more low-tech tactics to raise awareness: Over the summer they put signs reading, “Smile! You’re being spied on,” on every light pole with a Flock camera on it. In mid-August, the group hosted its first public meeting at the MLK Memorial Library; more than three-dozen people attended.
Even some advocates of using Flock concede that some of the worries about its power and possible abuse can’t be ignored. This week, the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued a statement hailing the technology’s potential for fighting crime, while recognizing the need for “strong safeguards” to protect individual rights and maintain public confidence.
‘We have to figure out what the balance is’
In January, in his first month as interim chief, Carroll directed MPD to cease participation in Flock’s National Lookup Tool, which had previously allowed participating departments across the country to search the city’s data.
Now, MPD requires other police agencies to enter into a memorandum of agreement before receiving access to D.C.’s Flock data. Such agreements require compliance with D.C. laws, including a local law that prohibits the city from aiding interstate investigations into abortions, Carroll wrote in his letter to Henderson. D.C. also grants other requests for information from its cameras, including requests from federal agencies, on a case-by-case basis, provided there’s a legitimate law enforcement purpose, Carroll said.
In April, MPD also began requiring yearly audits of the data to ensure the rules were being followed. Henderson says lawmakers should continue exploring these types of limits on the technology, while recognizing that license-plate readers can be helpful for improving public safety.
“I think we have to figure out what the balance is, and I think that’s the conversation that we should be having as policymakers,” she says.
But despite the policy updates, some information about the city’s Flock use remains elusive. Asked whether the department had initiated an audit of the data and whether it would commit to publicly releasing the Flock audit log records, the MPD spokesperson declined to answer.
“At this time, we have provided all the information we have available on this matter,” he wrote in an email on Monday.
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