There have been recent incidents of privacy breaches that have caught national attention. Last week, a police officer in Kentucky was charged after using the Flock system to track his ex-girlfriend – who filed a protection order – over 2,000 times.
He was caught using Flock’s newly mandatory, AI-powered audit tool that flags suspicious use.
Others are concerned about Flock being a way for police to avoid warrants, which are usually required to search a person’s property or tap their phone. In 2025, a detective in Johnson County, Texas, searched over 80,000 images to locate a woman suspected of having an abortion. He did not have a warrant.
CCTV cameras, licence plate readers, and surveillance are not new. But the scale of Flock’s network and the integration of AI in modern surveillance tech is a recent development and it’s turned Flock into a household name. Americans who otherwise ignored the cameras in their cities have started to notice, and tune in to the capabilities of the technology around them.
With AI, unlike older licence-plate readers, law enforcement can search surveillance footage with a string of words like “Caucasian man, blue shirt” – not just a licence-plate image.
One thing Flock does not use is facial recognition. But that doesn’t mean police departments are avoiding that tech. Critics say it violates human rights, is susceptible to misidentifying innocent people, and can be biased against minorities.
The BBC has received documents revealing that Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which covers Houston, uses other facial recognition technology, Clearview AI. The tool includes a database of over 70 billion images, many of which were scraped from public internet sources including social media. The documents, including purchase orders and a License Agreement, show that the county’s Clearview AI contract currently runs through to March 2027.
Several European countries have issued the company with data protection fines, including a £7.5m penalty from the UK’s Information Commissioner.
Harris County Sheriff’s Office use of this facial recognition technology has not been reported before. The office did not respond to requests for comment.
