Flock Safety surveillance data collected in one Atlanta suburb now flows to more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, airports, and government agencies across the United States, according to public records requests. The revelation offers a striking look at how far a single city’s license plate surveillance can travel.
Alpharetta, Georgia, a prosperous suburb of about 67,000 residents, is served by roughly 120 local police officers. The city also operates several dozen cameras sold by Flock Safety, a controversial company that captures license plate data and other information and makes it searchable by law enforcement.
The organizations receiving Alpharetta’s camera data range widely. They include Morehouse College, Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission, Medicare fraud investigators in Illinois, a drug task force focused on east-central Missouri, and the inspector general of a federal agency. In turn, Alpharetta receives Flock data from more than 1,300 entities, from the prosecutor’s office of Whitley County, Indiana, to the Metro Police Authority of Genesee County, Michigan.
A Rapidly Expanding Surveillance Web
Alpharetta’s data-sharing network has grown dramatically over the past year. Since June 2025, the number of entities receiving data from Alpharetta police has increased by roughly 42 percent, while the number of entities sending data to the department has climbed by about 125 percent. Together, these connections form a network that reaches more than 2,300 nodes.
The Alpharetta Police Department, which saw an officer resign over Flock misuse on August 5, also exchanges data with several agencies that have faced their own recent incidents of officers misusing the technology. Those include Georgia’s Bibb County Sheriff’s Department, the Savannah Police Department, and the Dallas Police Department.
Records obtained from other cities around the country show that Alpharetta is far from unusual. Many municipalities operate similarly expansive and complicated data-sharing arrangements, illustrating how pervasive Flock’s surveillance reach has become.
How Private Networks Differ From Public Programs
One of Flock’s main selling points is its network of customers, most of which are law enforcement agencies. The company markets the ability to track a suspect who crosses city, county, or state lines, arguing that a single query can prevent cases from falling through the cracks.
Cross-agency data sharing itself is not new. A police department can share information from its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) with state-run fusion centers, which consolidate law enforcement resources in a region. Departments can also share data with a regional High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program. Alpharetta police agreed to do exactly that in 2025, according to a memorandum of understanding.
The key distinction is oversight. HIDTAs are federally funded public programs, while Flock is a private company managing an interconnected ALPR network with rules and restrictions that vary widely from city to city. When departments fail to closely supervise their settings for requesting and sharing data within Flock’s interface, they can unknowingly become part of a far larger surveillance system than they realize.
The result is a situation like Alpharetta’s, where
