An ICE detainer search of St. Louis Park's Flock cameras reached 25,263 networks

Two searches of St. Louis Park Police Department's Flock Safety cameras, run in October 2025 by the North Missouri Drug Task Force through Brookfield MO PD, each reached 25,263 networks. A normal nationwide lookup at the time reached roughly 6,000.

A network is one Flock customer's set of cameras. St. Louis Park Police count as a single network. Most networks hold several cameras. Crowdsourced tracking by DeFlock puts the national total above 100,000 Flock cameras, installed by police departments, homeowners associations, and private businesses. Records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and reported by 404 Media show one Texas sheriff's office able to query Flock cameras at 173 Lowe's locations and dozens of Home Depot stores.

At 25,263, the October searches reached roughly 19,000 networks the task force had no sharing agreement with. Accessing data without permission is ordinarily called a data breach.

The recorded reason for both searches was "ICE detainer." Both were logged as lookup searches, tracking a vehicle across a six-hour window in one and a full week in the other. A lookup of that scope returns where a vehicle was seen across every network in range, including cameras owned by retailers, homeowners associations, and police departments with no connection to the searching agency.

Comparable lookup searches in the same audit file reached roughly a quarter as many networks. Dallas TX PD registered 6,313. Warren MI PD, 5,993. Lowndes County GA SO, 5,880. Those searches ran in January 2025.

Flock attached a statement to both Brookfield rows:

"An issue was identified that caused the system to initiate unprocessed search activity on a larger set of cameras than intended by the user. No footage or data from these devices was accessed or viewed. The underlying bug has been fixed, and additional safeguards have been implemented to prevent recurrence."

The moderation field is blank on other rows in the file.

Flock requires administrators to opt in to Statewide Lookup or National Lookup before their cameras join those pools. Senator Ron Wyden's letter to the FTC describes Flock as contracting with over 5,000 police departments, 1,000 businesses, and numerous homeowners associations across 49 states. By Flock's own account, the October searches went past whatever pool the searcher selected and into a set roughly four times larger.

This calls into question whether shared-by-default networks can provide sufficient safeguards for surveillance technology such as ALPR and police records.

Source: St. Louis Park Police Department Flock network audit, obtained through a Minnesota Government Data Practices Act request. Rows 3183 and 3184. Full flagged-search file. Portal-level Flock data aggregated at Eyes On Flock.