Have I Been Flocked, a website that lets drivers check whether police ran their number plate through Flock Safety’s camera network, became the biggest US search trend on Friday, 14 August 2026.
The tool landed amid a US backlash against Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based surveillance startup whose cameras are being destroyed by people angry that they help US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carry out deportations, as reported by TechCrunch.
How the Have I Been Flocked website works
The site indexes Flock audit logs that local governments released under public records requests, some handed over directly and others via a transparency portal Flock provides.
Every time somebody with system access queries a plate, the software records it, and those records are searchable.
By its own count, the index covered 4 684 253 number plates seen across 241 961 192 recorded searches. A hit does not mean a car drove past a camera, it means somebody with access typed that plate into the system.
The person running that search is not necessarily a police officer, and many agencies apparently do not require a warrant or reasonable suspicion first.
The organisers said the tool does not store the plate numbers people type into it.
Two extra reports sit behind the lookup, which the organisers call First Amendment and immigration enforcement.
Both scan the reason an operator logged for each search and flag anything mentioning protests, religious gatherings, journalism, political organising or ICE and border activity.
Why the Have I Been Flocked tool struck a nerve
Broken and smashed Flock cameras have turned up in La Mesa, California, weeks after the city council voted to keep them despite most meeting attendees favouring a shutdown.
Vandalism has hit Connecticut, Illinois and Virginia too, and in Oregon a note left at six severed camera poles mocked the company.
Flock sells plate readers, camera-equipped drones, gunshot detection devices and software to more than 6 000 customers in every US state except Alaska. DeFlock, a group that maps the readers, counts close to 80 000 of its cameras nationally.
Flock has said it does not share data with ICE directly, though reports show local police have passed their own access to the cameras and databases to federal authorities.
Dozens of cities have rejected the cameras, and some departments blocked federal use.
Swisher Post has previously covered how Flock’s licence plate reader network operates and the controversy trailing it.
What changed is that the audit trail now points back at the people running searches rather than the drivers being scanned.
What the Flock camera fight looks like next
A Flock spokesperson did not say whether the company tracks how many cameras have been destroyed, and communities across the US are still lobbying their councils to end Flock contracts.
DeFlock’s running tally of installed readers keeps climbing regardless.
Every audit log a local government releases adds more rows to the lookup, and that is the part Flock cannot switch off.
The search tool grows each time a city answers a records request, whatever the company does about its hardware.
