A cop’s case for Flock 

A car is a difficult thing to steal. It is large, cherished by its owner, difficult to hide and required by law to have identifying metal plates that everyone can see. A good thief changes the plates, and an excellent thief steals a common car in a boring color and hopes to blend in among the crowd. But eventually, no matter what techniques they use, they must drive that car on the road, and roads are public places.汽车很难被盗。它体积庞大，受车主珍视，难以隐藏，且法律规定必须悬挂所有人都能看到的身份识别金属牌照。高明的窃贼会更换牌照，而顶尖的窃贼则会偷走一辆颜色普通、毫不起眼的汽车，并希望混入车流中。但无论使用什么手段，他们最终都必须把车开上路，而道路是公共场所。

But until recently, finding a stolen car and catching its thief depended on a diligent police officer looking at the right road at the right moment and managing to copy down a license plate number going past at speed, and then remembering he had seen it on the morning briefing’s stolen car hot sheet. America has four million miles of public roads, and almost 50 percent of the country’s police departments employ fewer than ten full-time officers. The odds were in the thief’s favor. 然而直到最近，寻找被盗车辆并抓获窃贼，还依赖于警员在正确的时间出现在正确的路段，设法记下飞驰而过的车牌号，并记得在晨间简报的失窃车辆名单上见过它。美国有四百万英里的公共道路，而近 50% 的警察局雇佣的专职警员不足十人。胜算往往在窃贼一边。

With not much to go on, police officers were forced to operate on vague descriptions and partial plates. While I pulled over a car that happened to be the same color as the suspect’s vehicle, and spent time checking names and licenses; the criminal was usually somewhere else. Imprecision allowed thieves to escape while intruding on the lives of millions of innocent motorists. That is, until the arrival of systems like Flock. 由于线索匮乏，警员们被迫依靠模糊的描述和残缺的车牌进行工作。当我拦下一辆恰好与嫌疑车辆颜色相同的车，并花时间核对姓名和驾照时，罪犯通常已经在别处了。这种不精确性既让窃贼得以逃脱，又侵扰了数百万无辜驾车者的生活。这种情况一直持续到 Flock 等系统的出现。

Bare ALPR纯粹的 ALPR

Flock Safety, a startup based in Atlanta, Georgia, was founded in 2017 to give police departments better eyes. Its product is a small solar-powered automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera attached to a pole on the roadside. As a car passes, the device takes a photograph of the vehicle, notes identifying features like color and make, and reads its license plate. The license plate is instantly checked against the FBI’s national database of stolen cars or wanted persons. If there’s a match, it sends an alert to police officers in the area, who may be eating their lunch instead of watching the road. As a police officer in the southeastern United States, I have often used Flock to catch wanted criminals.Flock Safety 是一家总部位于佐治亚州亚特兰大的初创公司，成立于 2017 年，旨在为警察部门提供更敏锐的“眼睛”。其产品是一种安装在路边电线杆上的小型太阳能自动车牌识别（ALPR）摄像头。当车辆经过时，该设备会拍摄车辆照片，记录下颜色和品牌等识别特征，并读取车牌。车牌会立即与联邦调查局（FBI）的全国被盗车辆或通缉人员数据库进行比对。如果匹配成功，它会向该地区的警员发送警报，而这些警员此时可能正在吃午饭，而不是盯着道路。作为美国东南部的一名警员，我经常使用 Flock 来抓捕被通缉的罪犯。

But ALPR is not new. Originally developed in 1976 by the British Home Office, it was deployed as a prototype on toll roads and tunnels, leading to the first ALPR-enabled arrest in 1981 when a stolen car being driven by its thief was found. The first large-scale trial of the technology was ‘Project Laser’ in 2004, when the project’s cameras read more than five million British plates, resulting in 3,071 arrests. Just a year later, ALPR was used to locate a man who murdered a female police officer. At the time, Chief Superintendent Geoff Dodd of the West Yorkshire Police described it as ‘the best investigative tool we have had since the introduction of DNA analysis’.但 ALPR 并非新鲜事物。它最初由英国内政部于 1976 年开发，作为原型部署在收费公路和隧道中，并在 1981 年促成了首次使用 ALPR 技术的逮捕行动，当时发现了一辆由窃贼驾驶的被盗汽车。该技术的首次大规模试验是 2004 年的“激光计划”（Project Laser），当时该项目的摄像头读取了超过 500 万个英国车牌，导致 3,071 人被捕。仅一年后，ALPR 就被用于定位一名谋杀女警的凶手。当时，西约克郡警察局的总警司杰夫·多德（Geoff Dodd）将其描述为“自 DNA 分析技术引入以来我们拥有的最好的调查工具”。

Criminals have learned to fear the technology. In London, where I spent five years as a police officer before moving to America, ALPR is so thoroughly embedded in criminal life that rappers discuss it in their lyrics. ‘Bare A[L]PR, bro,’ the artist Central Cee raps, ‘beg you don’t smoke weed in the car’.罪犯们已经学会了畏惧这项技术。在伦敦，我在搬到美国之前曾做过五年警察，ALPR 在犯罪圈中已根深蒂固，以至于说唱歌手会在歌词中讨论它。艺术家 Central Cee 在歌词中唱道：“到处都是 ALPR，兄弟，求你别在车里抽大麻。”

For much of the technology’s history, however, it has needed expensive installations or cameras attached to police vehicles, affordable to only the largest departments. Alerts were often neither instant nor accurate. Flock’s idea was to sell a more accurate ALPR camera for an annual subscription of just $3,000, an affordable price given that the typical US police department has an annual budget of $1 million. It worked, and today almost 30 percent of police agencies in the United States subscribe to the service. 然而，在该技术发展的很长一段时间里，它需要昂贵的安装费用或安装在警车上的摄像头，只有最大的部门才负担得起。警报往往既不即时也不准确。Flock 的理念是以每年仅 3,000 美元的订阅费销售更精确的 ALPR 摄像头，考虑到美国典型警察局每年 100 万美元的预算，这是一个负担得起的价格。它奏效了，如今美国近 30% 的警察机构订阅了该服务。

It is easiest to imagine the Flock camera, or any ALPR device, as a roadside barcode scanner. I can use a ‘lookup’ tool for either a plate or vehicle description that could be connected to a specific investigation. For instance if a victim of a sexual assault told me the suspect was driving a white Toyota Tacoma with a roof rack, I could while still on scene conduct a lookup in the area filtered for similar vehicles with roof racks and see results from within a particular timeframe. For each search, I am required to record a case number and a reason that is then published in a monthly audit sent to and validated by department administrators. 将 Flock 摄像头或任何 ALPR 设备想象成路边的条形码扫描仪是最容易理解的。我可以使用“查询”工具来查找与特定调查相关的车牌或车辆描述。例如，如果一名性侵受害者告诉我嫌疑人驾驶着一辆带有车顶行李架的白色丰田 Tacoma，我可以在现场通过筛选该地区带有行李架的类似车辆进行查询，并查看特定时间范围内的结果。对于每次搜索，我都必须记录案件编号和原因，这些信息随后会发布在每月发送给部门管理人员并由其验证的审计报告中。

I have used Flock myself, for instance, to locate a vehicle involved in a hit and run when all there was to go on was a model and color. Using that and an approximate time window, I was able to find an image from when a car entered my jurisdiction, and when it left, with the visible addition of a significant dent from the collision. 我自己也曾使用过 Flock，例如，在只有车型和颜色线索的情况下，定位一辆涉及肇事逃逸的车辆。利用这些信息和一个大致的时间窗口，我能够找到该车进入我管辖区时的图像，以及它离开时的图像，当时车身上明显多了一处碰撞造成的凹痕。

What Flock cannot do is search for individuals or show who is driving a particular vehicle that it scans. An ALPR camera does not care about the person driving a car, or its passengers, and even if an officer gets an alert that a vehicle is known to be driven by a wanted felon they must themselves establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it. Flock 无法做到的是搜索个人或显示扫描车辆的驾驶者是谁。ALPR 摄像头不关心驾驶汽车的人或乘客，即使警员收到警报称某辆车已知由被通缉的重罪犯驾驶，他们也必须在拥有拦截车辆的合理根据之前，亲自确定驾驶座上的人是谁。

Stolen cars provide the clearest evidence such a scanner works. American police solve only 8.2 percent of reported vehicle thefts with an arrest. A recent working paper suggests that agencies that adopted the devices saw a 15.9 percent relative increase in car thefts caught, which would raise the national rate to 9.5 percent. But that is just stolen cars. 被盗车辆提供了此类扫描仪有效的最明确证据。美国警方仅能破获 8.2% 的报案车辆盗窃案。一份最近的工作论文显示，采用该设备的机构在抓获车辆盗窃案方面实现了 15.9% 的相对增长，这将使全国破案率提高到 9.5%。但这仅仅是针对被盗车辆。

Vehicle crime takes many forms. It is often the means by which a robber or a murderer arrives at and departs from their crimes. Criminals’ vehicles carry drugs and guns, and smuggle cash. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, vehicles were involved in 53 percent of shootings during the two years before the city expanded its ALPR network. After the expansion, Atlantic City saw monthly averages of motor vehicle thefts drop by 20 percent, property crimes by 34 percent and fatal shootings by almost 40 percent. Seventy-two alert-caused traffic stops located forty stolen vehicles and nine stolen plates.车辆犯罪有多种形式。它通常是抢劫犯或杀人犯往返犯罪现场的工具。罪犯的车辆携带毒品和枪支，并走私现金。在新泽西州大西洋城，在城市扩大 ALPR 网络之前的两年里，车辆涉及了 53% 的枪击事件。扩大网络后，大西洋城的月均机动车盗窃案下降了 20%，财产犯罪下降了 34%，致命枪击事件下降了近 40%。由警报引发的 72 次交通拦截查获了 40 辆被盗车辆和 9 块被盗车牌。

Flock itself conducted a study claiming that 10 percent of all reported crime in the United States is solved using evidence obtained from their cameras. Not bad for a few thousand dollars a year.Flock 自己进行的一项研究声称，美国 10% 的已报案犯罪是通过其摄像头获取的证据解决的。每年几千美元的投入，这成绩相当不错。

On several occasions, Flock alerts have allowed me to arrest those suspected of serious violent crimes. Local officers knew who they were and had circulated information about what cars they drove to neighboring agencies. Besides automatically cross-referencing from national databases, officers can create their own ‘hotlists’ of license plates that will create alerts, even if they are not on FBI-maintained lists. 在好几次情况下，Flock 的警报使我能够逮捕那些涉嫌严重暴力犯罪的人。当地警员知道他们是谁，并已将他们驾驶的车辆信息传达给邻近机构。除了自动与国家数据库交叉比对，警员还可以创建自己的“热点名单”（hotlists），即使这些车牌不在联邦调查局维护的名单上，也会触发警报。

These could be hotlists to build intelligence on drug supply or gangs, or plates belonging to drivers in the city with suspended licenses. These officer-created hotlists can be shared locally or nationally, but still require an officer to verify the information and establish lawful reasons to investigate the cars involved. Without those alerts, some of the criminals I arrested would have remained free for longer. 这些热点名单可以用于建立关于毒品供应或帮派的情报，或者列出城市中驾照被吊销的驾驶员的车牌。这些由警员创建的热点名单可以在本地或全国范围内共享，但仍然需要警员核实信息并确立调查相关车辆的合法理由。如果没有这些警报，我逮捕的一些罪犯本可能会逍遥法外更久。

Good Flock, Bad Flock好的 Flock，坏的 Flock

And yet, the past month has seen this simple piece of crime-fighting technology become the most reviled piece of street furniture in America. Flock cameras have been sawn from their poles, hammered into shards by teenagers, and rammed by vehicles. Cities have canceled contracts even where their own audits found no evidence that their officers had misused the system. Opposition stretches from Bernie Sanders all the way to the former WWE wrestler Kane, who now serves as the Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, and who describes Flock as ‘unconstitutional’.然而，过去一个月里，这种简单的打击犯罪技术却成了美国最受诟病的街头设施。Flock 摄像头被从电线杆上锯断，被青少年砸成碎片，并被车辆撞毁。即使在审计显示警员没有滥用该系统的城市，政府也取消了合同。反对者的范围从伯尼·桑德斯（Bernie Sanders）一直延伸到前 WWE 摔角手凯恩（Kane），他现在担任田纳西州诺克斯县的共和党县长，并将 Flock 描述为“违宪”。

More than 150 cities and towns have now deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled contracts with the company. Over the space of a few weeks a startup previously known to just police officers and neighborhood associations has joined data centers, Covid vaccines, 5G towers, pasteurized milk and fracking in the pantheon of American moral panics.目前已有超过 150 个城市和城镇停用了 Flock 摄像头或取消了合同。在短短几周内，这家此前仅为警察和社区协会所知的初创公司，已与数据中心、新冠疫苗、5G 塔、巴氏杀菌乳和水力压裂法一起，跻身于美国道德恐慌的殿堂。

Opponents of Flock tend to believe that it is abused by policemen with impunity, that it can track individuals as well as cars, and that it violates American constitutional protections. None of those things are true. Flock 的反对者往往认为警察会肆无忌惮地滥用它，认为它既能追踪车辆也能追踪个人，并且它违反了美国的宪法保护。这些说法都不是事实。

Obviously a camera capable of finding a stolen car is also capable of finding a car driven by somebody’s ex-wife and so like any software, Flock has been abused. There are stories of police officers who have used it to stalk girlfriends, and there are also innocent motorists who have been stopped by police after Flock cameras misread plates or received old information from national databases. A common issue from my experience is stolen front license plates being entered into a database and the innocent owners of the rear license plate being held on suspicion of car theft.显然，一个能找到被盗车辆的摄像头同样能找到某人前妻驾驶的车辆，所以像任何软件一样，Flock 也曾被滥用。有报道称警员利用它跟踪女友，也有无辜的驾车者在 Flock 摄像头误读车牌或接收到国家数据库的旧信息后被警察拦下。根据我的经验，一个常见的问题是，被盗的前车牌被录入数据库，导致后车牌的无辜车主因涉嫌车辆盗窃而被扣留。

But Flock comes with protections. As mentioned earlier, each search in Flock must be accompanied by a recorded reason. Similarly entering a plate into a hotlist must have a case number assigned. Results were originally retained for thirty days, but recent changes by Flock mean that recorded plates are now kept for only seven days. Suspicious searches are picked up by algorithms or found in department audits, with the service blocking users until senior officers evaluate and resolve flags. The Institute for Justice, a think tank that is critical of ALPR, studied misuse of Flock in April of this year and found 51 incidents across the United States since 2024, noting that ‘Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired’. Another incorrect belief is that Flock does more than scan vehicles, with some suggesting it scans and tracks passing phones or devices – but it does no such thing. 但 Flock 附带了保护措施。如前所述，Flock 中的每次搜索都必须附带记录在案的理由。同样，将车牌录入热点名单必须指定案件编号。结果最初保留 30 天，但 Flock 最近的更改意味着记录的车牌现在仅保留 7 天。可疑搜索会被算法识别或在部门审计中发现，服务会锁定用户，直到高级警员评估并解决标记问题。作为 ALPR 批评者的智库“正义研究所”（Institute for Justice）在今年 4 月研究了 Flock 的滥用情况，发现自 2024 年以来美国各地发生了 51 起事件，并指出“几乎所有这些警员都受到了刑事指控并丢了工作，要么辞职，要么被解雇”。另一个错误的观念是 Flock 的功能不仅限于扫描车辆，有些人认为它会扫描并追踪过往的手机或设备——但它根本没有这种功能。

While Flock is a tool that can be audited, there is nothing to stop a corrupt officer simply following a car when they don’t like the look of its driver, or writing down plates of vehicles spotted outside an ex-girlfriend’s house – they would just be harder to catch. And Flock does not proactively alert officers to cars that do not trigger flags on national or local hotlists. There is no reason state legislatures or Congress could not create harsh punishment or penalties for abuse of ALPR, without getting rid of it entirely.虽然 Flock 是一个可以审计的工具，但没有什么能阻止腐败警员在看某位驾驶员不顺眼时简单地跟踪车辆，或者记下在前女友家门外发现的车辆牌照——他们只是会更难被抓到。而且，如果车辆没有触发国家或地方热点名单上的标记，Flock 不会主动向警员发出警报。州立法机构或国会完全可以在不完全废除 ALPR 的情况下，为滥用该技术制定严厉的惩罚或处罚措施。

Another argument against Flock, as espoused by Kane, is that it violates liberties granted by the Fourth Amendment, protecting citizens from unreasonable privacy breaches from law enforcement. But it has been repeatedly established over the last century by courts across the country that cops observing license plates, either with the naked eye or by machine, is not an unreasonable search. After all, your license plate belongs to the government and a highway is a public place.凯恩所支持的另一个反对 Flock 的论点是，它违反了第四修正案所赋予的自由，即保护公民免受执法部门不合理的隐私侵犯。但过去一个世纪以来，全国各地的法院一再认定，警察无论是用肉眼还是通过机器观察车牌，都不属于不合理的搜查。毕竟，你的车牌属于政府，而公路是公共场所。

In 1983, the Supreme Court held unanimously that ‘a person travelling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another’. And in January of 2026, a federal judge in Virginia ruled in a challenge by two civil rights activists against Flock specifically that: ‘An individual scan of a license plate, a vehicle identifier that generally must be displayed under state law, does not invade any privacy interests’.1983 年，最高法院一致裁定，“在公共道路上驾驶汽车的人，对其从一地到另一地的行踪没有合理的隐私预期”。2026 年 1 月，弗吉尼亚州的一名联邦法官在两名民权活动家针对 Flock 提起的诉讼中裁定：“对车牌（一种根据州法律通常必须展示的车辆标识符）进行的单独扫描，并未侵犯任何隐私利益”。

The problem for Flock is that, if it works, it provides no visible benefits outside the crime statistics: a crime prevented because an offender was afraid of being caught by ALPR produces no victim and no police report. But every misuse has a victim who can describe what happened and a mugshot of a corrupt cop, and every false alert can produce a photograph of an innocent motorist in handcuffs. Flock 面临的问题是，如果它有效，除了犯罪统计数据外，它不会产生可见的好处：因为罪犯害怕被 ALPR 抓获而预防的犯罪，没有受害者，也没有警察报告。但每一次滥用都有一个能描述所发生情况的受害者和一张腐败警察的入狱照，每一次错误警报都可能产生一张无辜驾车者被戴上手铐的照片。

Flock did not invent its capabilities and certainly does not have a monopoly on them. There are at least five other companies that offer almost identical products and services to public and private enterprise, some arguably even more invasive. Even some of the cities that have canceled contracts with Flock Safety in recent weeks have signed up to buy similar products from the company’s rivals.Flock 并没有发明其功能，当然也不拥有垄断权。至少有五家其他公司向公共和私营企业提供几乎相同的产品和服务，其中一些甚至可以说更具侵入性。即使是最近几周取消了与 Flock Safety 合同的一些城市，也已经签约购买了该公司竞争对手的类似产品。

It seems unlikely that America will ever ban ALPR at a state level, let alone a national one. Instead, a patchwork already familiar to American policing will result, where policies and practices diverge across local and political boundaries. 美国似乎不太可能在州一级禁止 ALPR，更不用说在国家一级了。相反，美国警务中已经熟悉的那种拼凑局面将会出现，即政策和实践在地方和政治边界之间产生分歧。

Nor would the cameras actually disappear, even in towns where governments restrict their use and cancel contracts. The already-mentioned Fourth Amendment only applies to the government, not to private enterprise. Police departments may dismantle their networks but homeowners associations concerned about vehicle theft can buy their own network of Flock cameras, as many already do. The people harmed the most will be the residents of the average small town whose police departments cannot afford helicopters, drones or enough police officers to watch every road themselves.即使在政府限制其使用并取消合同的城镇，摄像头也不会真正消失。前面提到的第四修正案仅适用于政府，而不适用于私营企业。警察部门可能会拆除他们的网络，但担心车辆盗窃的业主协会可以购买他们自己的 Flock 摄像头网络，许多人已经这样做了。受害最深的人将是普通小镇的居民，因为他们的警察部门买不起直升机、无人机，也没有足够的警员亲自监视每一条道路。

I can remember policing without ALPR. A circulation would go out over the radio to look for a silver Volkswagen Golf, no license plate seen, and so for the rest of the night every single silver Golf we saw got stopped. There was no audit trail of our mistakes because there was no software. 我记得没有 ALPR 的警务工作。无线电中会发出通告，要求寻找一辆银色大众高尔夫，没看清车牌，于是那天晚上剩下的时间里，我们看到的每一辆银色高尔夫都被拦了下来。因为没有软件，所以我们的错误没有审计追踪。

Even when ALPR was introduced, we relied on a complex system that would send alerts through multiple layers of human filtering before finally being sent out to officers – often five to ten minutes after the car had been detected – and so was usually long gone by the time we turned up. With Flock, I can get a notification on my phone and can set my patrol car up to intercept it as it approaches.即使在引入 ALPR 后，我们也依赖于一个复杂的系统，它需要通过多层人工过滤才能将警报发送给警员——通常是在车辆被检测到 5 到 10 分钟后——所以当我们赶到时，车通常早就没影了。有了 Flock，我的手机就能收到通知，我可以设置我的巡逻车，在它靠近时进行拦截。

Flock’s critics have the important point right: we should want the police to invade law-abiding citizens’ lives as little as possible. But they are mistaken about what Flock actually does. Flock allows us to be more surgical and precise, avoiding pulling over innocent people with all of the risks that involves. More than anything, Flock allows me to leave you alone.Flock 的批评者有一点说得很对：我们应该希望警察尽可能少地侵扰守法公民的生活。但他们对 Flock 的实际作用存在误解。Flock 使我们能够更加精准和有针对性，避免拦下无辜民众，从而规避了随之而来的所有风险。最重要的是，Flock 让我可以不去打扰你。