Flock tells a police chief the number on his public transparency portal is the lowest of three counts the company tracks

The vehicle count Flock Safety publishes on an agency's public transparency portal is the smallest of three figures the company measures. Mike Heyne of Flock Safety laid this out in an April 8, 2026 email to Oshkosh, Wisconsin police leadership, sent under the subject line "Flock - Vehicle Reads Clarification."

Heyne described three numbers.

Total Vehicle Volume, found in Flock's Insights dashboard, counts every detection event. A plate passing a camera four times in one day registers as four reads. Heyne called it the raw activity number and said it reflects how hard the cameras are working. It is always the highest of the three.

Total Unique Vehicle Volume, also in Insights, counts each distinct plate once per day and then adds those daily totals across 30 days. A vehicle seen on 20 separate days in a month contributes 20 to that number.

Unique Vehicles Detected in the Last 30 Days is the figure that appears on the public transparency portal. Each plate is counted once across the entire 30-day window, no matter how many times or on how many days it appears. A commuter who drives through the network every day of the month counts as one.

Heyne told the department the portal number "will always be significantly lower" than the Insights figures, and attributed the gap to a high-volume network reading thousands of plates multiple times per day.

The transparency portal is the version of this data the public sees. The two larger counts sit in a dashboard available to the agency and to Flock.

Heyne also told Oshkosh that Flock sells a separate paid product called Traffic Analytics, which would supply these figures going forward. He wrote that he did not believe this use case justified the cost. Ongoing access to the fuller numbers is a purchase.

Source: Oshkosh, Wisconsin police emails to and from Flock Safety, obtained through a public records request and posted to DocumentCloud. Email at p199.