u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ

I've spent the last several days going through Temple's Flock audit records and the numbers are honestly hard to wrap my head around.

According to Temple PD, they conducted 364 searches in the last 30 days.

The audit records for the same period appear to contain nearly one million search records.

So here's the obvious question:

Who conducted the other 99.9% of the searches?

Because it sure wasn't Temple PD.

The logs show searches from agencies all over the country. Not Bell County. Not Central Texas. The entire country.

A few that jumped out at me:

• Waukesha WI PD repeatedly searching Temple-connected networks for a copper theft investigation.
• Liberty IN PD conducting searches related to narcotics investigations.
• Berrien County MI SO searching for a vehicle connected to an indecent exposure investigation.
• Garden City MI PD searching for a shooting suspect vehicle.
• Miami County OH SO repeatedly searching for a local theft investigation.
• Indiana State Police searching for a vehicle that allegedly fled from a local agency.
• Kansas City KS PD conducting searches related to a domestic violence investigation.
• Saline County KS SO investigating a hit-and-run crash.

Maybe every one of those searches was legitimate.

That's not really the point.

The point is that Temple is supposed to be responsible for the data being collected here, according to their own policy.

So how exactly is Temple supposed to verify that nearly a million searches are all being used appropriately and for only law enforcement purposes?

Seriously.

• Who is reviewing them?
• Who is checking whether the justification entered was accurate?
• Who is following up on searches performed by agencies hundreds or thousands of miles away?

The answer appears to be nobody.

And then you start looking at the reasons people are entering.

Some are what you'd expect:

• Stolen vehicles
• Wanted persons
• Burglaries
• Assaults

But there are also things like:

• "Other - investigation"
• "Traffic infraction"
• "Traffic infraction - inv"
• "Traffic infraction - test/training"
• "City planning/traffic analysis"

Temple PD explicitly says that they don't collect the data for traffic purposes. "Law Enforcment Only" would also preclude "city planning/traffic analysis"

But they're vague enough that an audit log doesn't really tell you much.

"Other - investigation" tells you basically nothing.

Now add hotlists into the mix.

A manual search is at least a conscious action by a person. It leaves a record showing somebody searched for something. Hotlists are different.

A hotlist can sit there for months. Sometimes indefinitely. Every time the vehicle is seen, an alert gets generated automatically. No new search required.

If Temple can't realistically review nearly a million manual searches, how are they supposed to oversee all of the automated monitoring happening in the background?

That's the part nobody seems willing to talk about.

At some point "we only share with law enforcement, only for law enforcement purposes" stops being a safeguard and starts being a promise that you can't keep.

Because when your own police department used the system 364 times and everyone else appears to have used it nearly a million times, you're not really exercising oversight anymore. You're trusting thousands of outside users to police themselves.

And we've already seen where this conversation goes elsewhere.

City of Pflugerville recently ended its Flock contract after audit records became a major issue in public debate. Residents there started asking the same question Temple residents should be asking now:

Who is actually using this system, and who is making sure they're supposed to be?

Sources:

The network audit records were provided by City of Temple. This is a direct link to download the CSV for August (It's big): https://cityoftempletx.nextrequest.com/documents/69666632/download .

The records of the searches that Temple PD has run are from their Flock Transparency Portal. It obviously changes day to day, as it is generally a 30 day rolling window: https://transparency.flocksafety.com/temple-tx-pd

Yep, that Cochran Law Firm. Trying to think of some new taglines they can use:

• "If the drone took a dive, call Cochran and survive."
• "If the drone hit your rig, the settlement might get big."
• "If the police couldn't steer, the attorneys are here."
• "If the drone hit your Mack, put Cochran on the attack."
• "The truck was hauling freight. The drone couldn't navigate."

Temple PD released this reel with some success stories for ALPR-based warrantless surveillance:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1681449730283698 and they got eviscerated in the comments because people are educating themselves on their civil liberties. Make sure you stop by to tell them how you feel about it.

Edit: They are hiding critical comments. You can count the minutes until they disable comments altogether, like they do on the City Council broadcasts.

No one is disputing that warrantless surveillance would help solve some crimes. Cameras in your home or GPS trackers on every car would do the same thing.

Every success story they list would have still been possible with the requirement to have a judge-signed warrant.
Every abuse would have been prevented with the requirement for a judge-signed warrant.

It's as simple as that. Police can legally wiretap your phones, track your cell phone, put a GPS tracker on your car, or even enter your home and search for evidence IF they can get a warrant.

When you have multiple cameras in a row in the same road, you are tracking position, speed, direction, patterns of life, etc.

Temple Police Department has 216 Flock Safety cameras around the city. That's one camera for every 456 residents. One of the highest densities in the country. Like it or not, if you are moving around in Temple, you are going to be tracked.

Yesterday morning, 404 Media and WIRED published findings from hackers who ripped apart a single Flock camera, extracted all the data inside, and shared it with reporters. Here's what they found that Temple PD and Flock have been claiming doesn't exist: Flock cameras don't just read license plates. They track people.

https://preview.redd.it/uktwf9ujb3qh1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=adda6368704ace0b08319d3c9f2bb41dda18a2a0

Flock's sales pitch to police departments is that these are license plate readers. That's the package they sell. But the hacked camera's software clearly includes human detection and tracking capabilities. Flock says human tracking isn't part of the base package police pay for. Fine. But the cameras are capable of it and doing it all of the time. The data is being captured and stored outside of the "customer data" that they say the PD owns.

They're saving everything they see. In 21 days, one camera generated 1.6 million images from 50,200 vehicles. That's dozens of photos per car. They're not just capturing the plate — they're capturing the full vehicle, the driver, the passenger, the context, the patches on a person's bag. All of it. Saved in the cloud somewhere. Ready to be repackaged and sold.

They're selling data to cities and other willing buyers. The cameras track speed, direction, dwell time, route patterns. This isn't "did this plate match a stolen car?" This is a comprehensive movement tracking system that has nothing to do with law enforcement or making people safer. Flock has already been trying to sell aggregated data to cities and other buyers.

The Flock cameras are being sold as public safety tools. The hacked data shows that they're something else entirely; they're comprehensive surveillance infrastructure that tracks human movement, saves it indefinitely, and waits for Flock to figure out how to best monetize it.

Temple voters didn't get a vote on this. There was no public forum about plans for hundreds of cameras. No budget line item that stood out. Just a procurement that got approved and a system that's been quietly watching you.

The 404 Media article: https://www.404media.co/hackers-stole-flocks-camera-software-revealing-how-the-company-tracks-cars-and-people-2/

WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-flock-camera-data-shows-how-system-works/

Union Press Release: https://x.com/ScottTaylorTV/status/2098051332649222578/photo/1
News Story: https://therecord.media/dc-police-union-opposes-flock-camera-use-probing-officers

"The DC Council is also taking note. On September 14, Councilmember Brooke Pinto, who is chairwoman of the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, wrote a letter to MPD Interim Chief Jeffery Carroll asking for answers to 10 questions about how the department uses Flock data and why it needs the technology at all."

The Washing DC City Council and the Police union is questioning the value vs the cost for the ALPR cameras, in one of the most sensitive places in the country, with respect to security.

For those keeping score:

Temple has roughly 14.6x more cameras per capita than DC. That's about 1 camera for every 456 people in Temple versus 1 camera for every 6,686 people in DC.

To put it another way: Temple's camera density is about 1,360% higher than DC's on a per-person basis.

TL;DR: Camera counts went up, manual plummeted, long term warrantless surveillance through hotlists EXPLODED.

I spent some time comparing Temple PD's Flock transparency reports from late 2025 and today, and one thing jumped out at me:

The camera growth and plate read growth make sense (mathematically, not constitutionally). The hotlist growth, however, doesn't.

According to Temple PD's own numbers:

• Cameras increased from 67 to 216 (+222%)
• Unique vehicles detected increased from 431,677 to 1,435,479 (+233%)
• Searches dropped from 596 to 415 (-30%)
• Hotlist hits increased from 2,880 to 17,159 (+496%)

The first two numbers line up almost perfectly. Temple population has not changed a huge amount in the last 10 months, so if you triple the number of cameras, you'd expect roughly triple the number of vehicles detected. That's exactly what happened. No big suprises there.

But hotlist hits didn't just grow with the cameras; they grew almost twice as fast.

If the only thing that changed was adding cameras, we'd expect the 2,880 hotlist hits from 2025 to increase to somewhere around 9,000. Instead, Temple reported more than 17,000 hotlist hits in a 30-day period.

That suggests something more than additional cameras; it says more vehicles are being watched 24/7.

Another way to look at it:

In late 2025, about 0.67% of detected vehicles generated a hotlist alert.

Today, that number is roughly 1.20%.

A vehicle passing through Temple's Flock network is now almost 80% more likely to generate a hotlist hit than it was nine months earlier.

The cameras explain the growth in detections. They don't explain the growth in alerts.

For the last few years (and especially the last 6 months), we've heard a lot about manual searches. That's partly because manual searches leave a more intuitive kind of evidence with a lot less noise. People can pull logs. You can see who searched. You can ask why they searched. When people abuse them, it's clumsy and it's largely because the perpetrator assumes no one will ever look.

But what if the bigger story isn't the searches anymore?

What if the real growth is happening in the watchlists?

A manual search requires someone to actively look for a vehicle; a hotlist turns that process around.

Now the system looks for the vehicle.

And it keeps looking, and looking, and looking. A hotlist can have an expiration date, but usually doesn't.

Temple's own numbers show searches declining while hotlist alerts are exploding. The ratio went from about 5 hotlist hits per search to more than 41 hotlist hits per search. That's a huge shift. And it's warrantless, long term location tracking.

Here's the problem: The public knows about the search logs and are increasingly doing FOIA/PIA requests to see them. The public isn't asking about the hotlists.

We don't know:

• How many custom watchlists exist.
• Who created them.
• Who approved them.
• What justification was used.
• How long they stay active.
• Whether they are audited.
• How many of those 17,159 hits came from NCIC and Amber Alerts versus locally created lists.

And that's where abuse becomes a legitimate concern.

Imagine an officer creates a custom list with ten plates. Nine are legitimate or even made up. The tenth belongs to an ex-spouse, ex-girlfriend, ex-husband, journalist, political critic, city council opponent, neighbor, or anyone else they have a personal interest in.

Now every participating camera in the network becomes a sensor looking for that vehicle.

The officer doesn't need to keep running obvious searches anymore; the system does it automatically.

Every sighting becomes another alert.

No, it isn't literally a GPS tracker, but from the target's perspective, what's the practical difference? The officer can literally get a ping on their phone whenever that plate is seen.

A nationwide network of cameras is automatically looking for their vehicle and sending alerts whenever it appears, and unlike repeated manual searches, that activity can disappear into the background noise of 17,000 monthly hotlist hits.

To be clear, I'm not claiming Temple PD is doing this.

I'm saying Temple PD hasn't provided enough information for the public to know whether it could happen, whether it has happened, or what safeguards exist to prevent it. Put another way, if it was happening, would they even know?

That's the transparency gap.

The real headline here isn't that searches went down. With all of the headlines about abuses, searches are under a lot more scrutiny.

The real headline is that the system got more than three times larger, the number of vehicles being detected more than tripled, but hotlist activity increased nearly sixfold.

If Flock's growth was only about adding cameras, the hotlist numbers should have roughly followed the camera numbers.

Maybe there are more stolen vehicles being watched. Maybe there are more investigative hotlists. Maybe there are more custom lists.

The public has no way to know, and that's exactly the problem.

Everyone's looking at the search logs.

Who's watching the hostlists?

The Temple Mayor has highlighted a 60.02% reduction in vehicle thefts and suggested that Flock cameras contributed to that result. (Year to date offense report: https://cms9files.revize.com/templetx25/2026\_GroupA\_YTD.pdf?t=202608031528320 )

The problem is that this claim isn't supported by the data alone.

During the same reporting period:

Vehicle thefts fell 60.02%

Stolen property increased roughly 250%

Kidnapping increased roughly 90%

Aggravated assault increased roughly 19%

If we're going to credit Flock for a decline in one category, then the same reasoning could be used to claim that increased surveillance caused kidnappings to rise.

Nobody would consider that a valid conclusion, because it isn't. It's confusing correlation with causation.

Crime trends are influenced by economics, demographics, policing priorities, offender behavior, reporting practices, and dozens of other factors. Pointing at one statistic that went down and crediting a surveillance system is not evidence.

There's another number worth looking at.

According to Temple's own arrest reporting, total offenses are down about 2%, yet arrests are down about 17%.

(2026 YTD Arrest Report: https://cms9files.revize.com/templetx25/YTD\_2026\_Arrests.pdf?t=202608031527480 )

If crime is only slightly lower but arrests are falling much faster, it's reasonable to ask whether police are actually solving and prosecuting a greater percentage of crimes.

More importantly, even if Flock occasionally helps an investigation, that's not the real debate.

The debate is whether investigative benefits justify creating a system that continuously records the movements of thousands of innocent people who are not suspected of any crime.

A growing number of governments have concluded that the answer is no. Across Texas and the United States, cities, counties, and school districts have canceled contracts, declined proposals, suspended deployments, or refused renewals after reviewing the privacy implications of Flock and similar ALPR systems. Communities cited concerns ranging from broad data sharing and retention practices to the potential for mass location tracking.

The burden should be on government to prove that expanding surveillance is necessary, effective, and consistent with constitutional rights.

A single category of crime declining after cameras were installed does not meet that burden.

That's not how evidence works, and it shouldn't be how public policy is made.

Source: Ian Camacho/Temple Daily Telegram: https://www.tdtnews.com/news/central_texas_news/article_f0f0f221-8af1-4b4a-99e6-9fb18e6a2e41.html

84% of Temple's Flock Safety cameras were paid for with a state grant. That's 164 of the 195 cameras now installed- and the legislators who approved that grant say they never intended the money to be used for warrantless license plate surveillance.

In a recent City Council meeting, Mayor Tim Davis got into a heated exchange with an impassioned citizen who raised the constitutionality question. His response: the cameras wouldn't have been installed if they were unconstitutional. (https://www.youtube.com/live/i4H4zCVBbY4?t=3574)

That would apparently come as news to the legislators who actually passed the funding. Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) voted for the bill that created the fee funding the cameras, but told reporters that he had no idea it would buy ALPR cameras. He actually filed bills in 2024 and 2025 to require a warrant before police could access license plate reader data. "In a million years, I never could have even contemplated that this would be used to fund what is effectively warrantless surveillance," Harrison said. "Otherwise, I can't imagine it would have gotten unanimous support. I sure as hell wouldn't have voted for it if I knew some bureaucrat was going to redirect the money to Flock cameras."

State Sen. Carol Alvarado (D-Houston) and Rep. Jeff Leach, the bill's author, both said surveillance cameras were never discussed when the bill was considered. "I did not have that in mind when we passed the bill," Alvarado said. "When I think of combating crime, I'm thinking ... more boots on the ground, hiring more officers to tackle the crime or some type of undercover work."

The funding bill passed unanimously. The people who voted for it say they would not have, had they known where the money was going. Meanwhile, Temple residents have been getting their plates scanned without warrants for years.

Source: Ian Camacho/Temple Daily Telegram: https://www.tdtnews.com/news/central_texas_news/article_f0f0f221-8af1-4b4a-99e6-9fb18e6a2e41.html

I've been looking into the mayor's recent claim that vehicle theft is down 60% because of (or at least partially attributable to) Flock cameras (https://www.youtube.com/live/i4H4zCVBbY4?t=3574) , and I wanted to share what the actual Temple PD annual reports show. Not my opinion, just the numbers.

The data breakdown (population-adjusted, per 1,000 residents):

Vehicle Theft Rate per 1,000 Residents

Year Rate vs. 2020

2020- 3.97/1000 (baseline)

2021- 2.25/1000 (–43%)

2022 (Flock deployed) 1.57/1000 (–60%)

2023- 3.20 /1000 (+104%)

2024- 3.62/1000 (+131%)

2025- 2.18 /1000 (-45%)

The 60% drop is real, but here's the timing issue: it happened between 2020 and 2022, before and during the initial deployment of roughly 20 cameras. The network didn't expand to 190+ cameras until after that drop already happened.

Then:

- 2023 and 2024, the first two full years after the network was scaled up, vehicle theft got worse, not better. Rates were 104% and 131% higher than the 2022 low.

- 2025 shows improvement again, but one year of improvement doesn't prove causation, especially after two years of worsening.

- If you average the post-deployment years against pre-deployment, the average rate actually went up 15.5%, not down.

Other things worth noting:

- Temple's population grew 19.8% from 2020 to 2025. Raw numbers alone can be misleading, so this analysis uses rates per 1,000 residents to account for growth.

- Temple switched from UCR to NIBRS reporting in 2024, which records more offense detail and can make crime appear higher because more conduct is counted.

- The annual reports don't break out Flock-specific data: no hit counts, no stolen vehicle recoveries attributed to Flock, no clearance rate changes. There's simply no way to directly tie any trend to the cameras from the published documents.

- Nationally, crime has been declining across the board, with violent crime falling to its lowest level since 1969. But Temple's violent crime rate has been essentially flat, moving from 3.38 to 3.10 per 1,000.

The annual reports this is all based on:

- [2020](https://cms9files.revize.com/templetx/Police/Annual%20Reports/PDAnnualReport20\_FINAL.pdf)

- [2021](https://cms9files.revize.com/templetx/Police/Annual%20Reports/PDAnnualReport\_2021%20%282%29.pdf)

- [2022](https://cms9files.revize.com/templetx/Police/Annual%20Reports/PDAnnualReport2022\_PRINT.pdf)

- [2023](https://cms9files.revize.com/templetx/PDAnnualReport2023\_v4%20%281%29%20%281%29%20%281%29.pdf)

- [2024](https://cms9files.revize.com/templetx/PDAnnualReport2024\_print.pdf)

- [2025](https://cms9files.revize.com/templetx25/PDAnnualReport2025.pdf)

Full analysis with charts and methodology: https://deflocktemple.com/resources/TempleCrimeTrends

I'm not saying the cameras are useless. They clearly helped in at least 16 documented cases over three years. But the question is whether the citywide data supports the claim that Flock caused a 60% drop in vehicle theft. The timing doesn't line up, and the reports don't contain the specific Flock data needed to make that case.

Would love to hear from people who actually work with these reports or have access to Flock-specific solve data. What would it take to evaluate this properly?

Source: Ian Camacho/Temple Daily Telegram: https://www.tdtnews.com/news/central_texas_news/article_f0f0f221-8af1-4b4a-99e6-9fb18e6a2e41.html

I think a lot of people misunderstand the constitutional issue with Flock cameras.

The debate always gets framed as "you don't have privacy in public."

That's true up to a point. If an officer sees my car driving down Adams, that's not a Fourth Amendment violation. If a camera sees my car driving down 31st, that's probably not a Fourth Amendment violation either.

The problem starts when the government creates a searchable database of where everyone has been and can go back later and search it without a warrant.

Temple's own ALPR policy says:

"Reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not required before using an ALPR."

(Temple PD ALPR Policy: https://deflocktemple.com/resources/TemplePDALPRPolicy.pdf )

Think about that for a second.

A Temple officer doesn't need probable cause. They don't need reasonable suspicion. They don't need a warrant signed by a judge.

They can search location data collected by 191 cameras in Temple and a nationwide network of more than 100,000 connected cameras.

To me, that's where this starts looking a lot less like a camera and a lot more like a GPS tracker.

A camera sees a car drive by.

A Flock search can answer questions like:

Where has a vehicle been during the last 30 days?

What church does it regularly visit?

What doctor's office?

What political events?

What friends or family does it repeatedly spend time around?

That's not observation anymore. That's investigation.

The Fourth Amendment wasn't just about privacy. It was about preventing the government from searching people's lives for evidence without first convincing a judge there was a good reason to do so.

That's why I think GPS cases and cell phone location cases are a lot more relevant than people realize.

The government has repeatedly argued that individual location observations in public aren't protected. But when you start collecting those observations, storing them, and searching them later to reconstruct someone's movements, you're talking about something entirely different.

That's exactly why the Supreme Court was concerned about historical location tracking in cases like Carpenter v. US ( https://eyesoffindiana.org/articles/carpenter-alpr-regulation-indiana ) and Katz v US (https://usconstitution.net/reasonable-expectation-of-privacy-and-the-katz-test/).

Flock supporters often say, "If you're not doing anything wrong, why worry?" Our own mayor said "I would bet that the same people complaining are the same people who are breaking the law." ( https://www.tdtnews.com/news/central\_texas\_news/article\_08cac9b8-d6e5-4103-8b0f-e868a3934e57.html )

My response is simple:

The 4th Amendment wasn't written to protect people who have something to hide.

It was written to limit what the government can do without a warrant.

A Temple police officer was reportedly allowed to resign after an internal investigation found unauthorized use of the city's Flock license plate reader system. According to KWTX, the misuse was serious enough that the officer resigned following the discovery. Meanwhile, the Temple Daily Telegram recently published the press release defending the system and repeating the familiar sales pitch that these cameras make communities safer.

What jumped out to me was this quote from the press release from the TDT article:

"The system enhances the safety of both officers and the community by allowing quick identification and resolution of potentially dangerous situations."

To me, that's the quiet part said out loud.

Notice what's mentioned first: officer safety. The entire premise of Flock is that police should have the ability to track and search the movements of ordinary people, 24 hours a day, just in case it might help them later. We're told to give up privacy because it supposedly makes everyone safer.

But where is the evidence?

Temple has expanded from roughly 20 Flock cameras to more than 190 cameras. Yet public crime data doesn't show a clear crime reduction after deployment. The analysis of the crime trends shows violent crime rates essentially flat and vehicle theft trends mixed at best after the rollout. source

Even nationally, the evidence is questionable. Atlanta, which has become one of the most heavily surveilled cities in America with thousands of Flock cameras and tens of thousands of integrated surveillance feeds, has not seen corresponding improvements in crime clearance rates according to reporting based on FBI data. If mass surveillance is the answer, why isn't the most surveilled city in the country dramatically outperforming everyone else?

And now we have exactly the problem privacy advocates warned about from the beginning: misuse by authorized users.

When a police officer allegedly abuses access to a surveillance system that tracks citizens' movements, why is resignation considered sufficient accountability?

At a minimum, the public deserves an explanation of why criminal charges were apparently not pursued. Depending on the facts developed by investigators, potential statutes that seem relevant include:

Abuse of Official Capacity (Texas Penal Code §39.02)

Official Oppression / Misconduct related offenses under Chapter 39

Breach of Computer Security (Texas Penal Code §33.02)

I'm not saying any specific charge is guaranteed to apply. That's up to prosecutors and the facts. But if an ordinary citizen improperly accessed a government database, would they simply be allowed to quit and walk away?

The larger issue is that every misuse incident demonstrates a basic truth about surveillance systems:

They don't just watch criminals. They watch everyone.

The more cameras that are installed, the more opportunities there are for abuse. No audit policy, training memo, or promise from a vendor changes that reality.

If you think public officials should be held accountable when surveillance systems are abused, contact the Temple City Council and ask:

-Why was resignation considered an adequate consequence?

-Was the case referred for criminal review?

-How many unauthorized Flock searches have been discovered since the program began?

-What independent audits are being performed?

-Why should Temple continue expanding a program that has not demonstrated a clear public safety benefit?

Temple residents deserve transparency, accountability, and evidence-based policing, not "trust us" surveillance.

What do y'all think? Should the city continue this program, or is this misuse incident proof that it has gone too far?

https://www.tdtnews.com/news/central_texas_news/article_098b249d-2a30-4d0d-a182-e556053d0d27.html

https://www.kwtx.com/2026/08/21/temple-police-department-officer-resigns-after-unauthorized-use-flock-camera-discovered/

Answer: no, not really.

Reminder - If you live in Temple, you are in one of the most heavily surveiled parts of the country and your taxes are paying to have your location shared nationwide while officers are being fired all over the country for misuse.

Temple Crime Statistics - Deflock Temple

FBI study finds that Flock has almost no impact on crime in Atlanta, the surveillance capital of America.

Temple (population 100k) has more cameras than Los Angeles (3.8 million population). We are in one of the most heavily surveiled places in the country, and they are expanding it every day, with no evidence that it has a measurable impact on crime. Would you rather have your every move tracked, or should that money be spent on things like working trash trucks, rebuilding Sammons, or even more human police officers?