Regulation 2026-08-20

For years the company said its cameras could not identify people. Its new tool lets an officer search for you by how you drive.

Flock Safety, whose licence-plate cameras log vehicle movements in more than 6,000 American communities, has been testing an AI tool that finds people without a plate number, a name or a crime to investigate. The software was called Nightshift and is now sold as OS Investigate. An officer can draw a box on a map and search inside it using a physical description alone, or ask the system to surface a driver's associates by finding the cars that repeatedly pass the same cameras at the same times, or identify potential witnesses by how often a vehicle crosses a neighbourhood. Because the tool also reaches into police case files, 911 dispatch logs and commercial identity records, a plate can be turned into a name, a home address and a list of relatives. It ships with 69 pre-written prompts and lets officers write their own. Flock has told city councils and the public for years that its technology cannot recognise, identify or track individuals.

Why it mattersThe defence Flock has offered every town that questioned it was a technical one: these are plate readers, not face recognition, so they cannot identify a person. OS Investigate does not break that claim so much as route around it. A pattern of movement is an identifier — where a car sleeps, where it goes at seven in the morning, whose car it travels beside — and a model reading a database of them is doing the thing the company promised it could not. The custom prompt box is the part civil liberties lawyers keep pointing at. Chad Marlow of the ACLU notes that asking a model 'do you see any criminal patterns' and telling it 'find me criminal patterns' are different instructions that will produce different answers, and only one of them is a question. Nothing here requires a warrant, and the search is invisible to the person searched.

✓ Verified · 4 sources

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2026-08-20

For years the company said its cameras could not identify people. Its new tool lets an officer search for you by how you drive.

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