WIRED investigation: Flock Safety's AI person-search tools let police run broad description-based surveillance, with weak guardrails against misuse

WIRED analysed the client-side code of Flock Safety's police search software and found that its AI tools, including a text-to-image search called FreeForm and a tool called Smart Sort, let officers search camera networks using written descriptions of people. The system scores queries against sensitive categories such as race, religion and political or cultural expression, but as of publication it only flags most of these rather than blocking them, and departments could still run searches without entering a case number or reason.

This is a live, deployed surveillance system used by police departments, not a prototype, so weak guardrails translate directly into operational risk. The story ties the design gaps to documented misuse: at least 50 US officers charged with or accused of misusing license plate readers (46 involving Flock), a Texas deputy who ran an 83,000-camera search tied to a woman who had an abortion, and Illinois finding that federal immigration agents accessed state camera data unlawfully through Flock. That combination of a permissive search tool and a track record of abuse is what elevates this above a routine privacy story.

Much of Flock's server-side moderation and enforcement logic could not be verified from client-side code alone, so claims about how well or poorly the screening actually works are partly inferential rather than directly measured. The framing leans on abuse anecdotes to carry the story's urgency, which is fair given the documented cases but should not be read as proof that most searches are misused.

1. 01Whether Flock Safety changes FreeForm/Smart Sort to block rather than merely flag searches touching race, religion or political/cultural expression, and whether it requires a case number before publication of any follow-up
2. 02State or federal legislative or regulatory action following Illinois's finding that Flock let federal immigration agents access state camera data unlawfully, including whether other states audit their own Flock deployments
3. 03Whether the count of officers charged with or accused of misusing license plate reader systems (currently at least 50, 46 tied to Flock) grows, and whether any cases specifically implicate the AI search tools rather than plate lookups