Flock Safety is the largest single ALPR vendor in the United States, and the company that most people mean when they say “those cameras with the solar panel on top.” Understanding how its network is structured explains why a camera in one town can matter to a search happening in a completely different state.

The hardware: Falcon cameras

Flock’s core product is the Falcon, a solar-powered camera mounted on a pole, usually at a neighborhood entrance, intersection, or stretch of road. According to Flock’s own law enforcement materials, the system works in three stages:

  • Detect — the camera photographs every vehicle that passes, uploading images to the cloud.
  • Decode — machine learning software reads the plate and generates what Flock calls a “Vehicle Fingerprint”: a record of make, color, and distinguishing features like bumper stickers, roof racks, or a missing hubcap, generated even when the plate itself is unreadable.
  • Deliver — the system checks each read against “hot lists” and pushes real-time alerts to subscribing agencies.

This is a meaningful step beyond a plate-number-only system. It means a car can potentially be tracked by its appearance even if its plate is swapped, covered, or out of frame.

Who owns the cameras

Flock cameras aren’t only deployed by police. Homeowners associations, apartment complexes, and private businesses buy Falcon subscriptions directly, often to address local crime concerns, and can choose to share their camera’s feed with local police. That mix of public and private ownership is part of what makes the network so large — and part of why oversight is inconsistent, since HOA-purchased cameras usually aren’t subject to the same public-records rules as a police department’s own equipment.

The national lookup network

The feature that draws the most scrutiny is Flock’s opt-in “national lookup” network. When an agency opts in, its officers can search plate data captured by any other agency that has also opted in — regardless of state lines. Reporting compiled by the ACLU indicates that more than three-quarters of Flock’s police customers have opted into shared national lookup, and these cross-agency searches typically don’t require a warrant.

That design is central to a class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco in February 2026. According to Courthouse News Service, the suit alleges that out-of-state and federal agencies — including ICE, CBP, and the FBI — queried San Francisco’s Flock database more than 1.6 million times over roughly seven months, despite California’s SB 54 sanctuary-state restrictions on sharing data for immigration enforcement. Flock has said it intends to defend itself against the claims. The case is ongoing, and it’s a useful illustration of the gap between “an agency’s own use policy” and “what the network technically allows any connected agency to search.”

For more on how this kind of cross-agency access interacts with state privacy statutes, see our state-by-state legal overview.

Retention: the default is 30 days

By Flock’s own published policy, license plate data is deleted on a rolling basis after 30 days by default, enforced through an automated cloud storage lifecycle policy, unless a customer agency has configured a different schedule under its own state law or local policy. That 30-day figure is a default, not a guarantee — individual agencies can request longer retention where their state law allows it. We compare this to other vendors and to state-mandated minimums in How long do police keep ALPR data?

Scale

Flock’s camera count has grown quickly. Public reporting in 2026 put the network somewhere in the range of 80,000 to over 100,000 Falcon cameras nationwide, alongside a growing wave of individual cities canceling or declining to renew contracts over the data-sharing concerns described above. Because deployment is decentralized and largely opt-in at the city and HOA level, no single official source publishes a live national count — which is part of why crowdsourced mapping efforts have emerged. See how OpenStreetMap volunteers are mapping ALPR cameras for how that data gets collected, and check the FlockScanner map for cameras documented near you.

How Flock differs from other vendors

Flock competes with vendors like Rekor, Motorola/Vigilant Solutions, and Genetec, each with different hardware, retention defaults, and network-sharing models. What sets Flock apart isn’t just market share — it’s the scale of its opt-in cross-agency search network, which functions less like a collection of local databases and more like a single, loosely federated national one.