What the contract lets Flock do with the data
Through August 2026, Wausau police told residents that “no data is sold to third parties,” but Section 4.3 of the contract gives Flock “a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right to use and distribute” so-called anonymized data from Wausau’s cameras in its other products. Only the footage is deleted after 30 days. The contract sets no time limit on the anonymized data, lets Flock train its software on it, and gives the city no report on it and no right to audit it.
Section 5.3 also lets Flock itself hand the city’s footage to police or other third parties for 30 days after it’s captured, without a warrant and without telling the city, whenever Flock believes in good faith that it’s reasonably necessary. That runs outside the sharing settings the police department controls.
Racine County’s sheriff tore his cameras down over this, calling it “not what we agreed to, and it is not what the public was led to believe.” In Sheboygan, a Flock sales representative offered to sell the city’s public works department up to five years of traffic data from the police department’s own cameras, and the council voted unanimously to terminate afterward.
A vehicle record with the plate removed still carries the make, color, and stickers, along with a pattern of times and places, and research on similar location records finds that a few times and places are often enough to single out one vehicle. Flock hasn’t published any method for how it anonymizes the data, and its own marketing advertises counts of unique vehicles, repeat visits, and how long cars stay, which it can only produce if it can tell one car from another. Whether Wausau’s data is in that product isn’t public. The Wausau Pilot & Review asked the chief in September and hasn’t reported an answer. Read the report on Flock’s anonymization
Waiting doesn’t fix this. The terms Flock offers new customers today, which it rewrote twice this year, let it use all camera data, not just anonymized data, and make Flock the owner of the analyses and models it builds. They allow leaving through the budget only at the end of a fiscal year, with amounts already incurred still owed, and they send disputes to private arbitration under Georgia law. The one improvement is that they no longer allow disclosure on Flock’s own judgment. Changing Wausau’s contract takes Flock’s signature, and it renews itself in 2028. Compare the two contracts
Who can search the cameras, and who checks
From 2023 until May 2026, Wausau’s cameras were part of Flock’s nationwide network, and a captain can switch that sharing back on. Even with it off, about 200 Wisconsin agencies can search Wausau’s cameras (205 by the Wausau Pilot & Review’s count in September, 188 on the department’s Flock portal on October 9), and any one of them can run a search on someone else’s behalf. A June 2023 FBI query that reached Wausau’s network listed immigration as its reason.
The check on all of this is the department’s annual audit, which samples 10 searches per six months out of more than 10,000 a year.
A Milwaukee officer searched two former partners’ plates 179 times while on duty. It came to light because a victim discovered it, not through an audit, and the detective assigned to investigate was later charged with similar conduct. The Institute for Justice counts 67 incidents nationally of officers using plate readers to track romantic interests.
Do the cameras reduce crime?
Fifteen years of controlled research, much of it funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, finds that plate readers recover more stolen cars but do little or nothing measurable for crime rates or arrests. The National Institute of Justice’s CrimeSolutions registry rates them “Ineffective” as a crime deterrent.
The Flock proposal in the council’s 2023 packet advertised a 60% “local crime reduction in Flock cities.” The Wausau Pilot & Review traced that figure to a Flock press release about a six-month pilot of 13 cameras in one police beat in Cobb County, Georgia. Thefts from cars and commercial burglaries fell by more than 60% from the year before, other crimes fell less, and the release described no comparison area without cameras. Johnny Nhan, a criminologist at Texas Christian University whom Flock asked for advice, told the Pilot he couldn’t link the company’s cameras to lower crime, because departments don’t record in any standard way whether Flock contributed to a case. Read the story
In Wausau, the department cites “over 30 cases” closed in three years but hasn’t published a count of arrests, charges, or convictions. That works out to roughly one closed case per 650 searches, and about $6,500 paid to Flock for each one.
An Institute for Justice review counted at least 27 wrongful stops of innocent drivers since 2018 involving plate readers, and officers drew guns in nearly two thirds of them.
Legal risk to the city
Wisconsin has no statute on plate readers, so nothing in state law limits retention, requires a warrant, or restricts sharing. If something goes wrong, the liability is the city’s. The contract caps Flock’s liability at one year’s fees and disclaims “incomplete, corrupt, or inaccurate data.” Aurora, Colorado paid $1.9 million after one wrongful stop.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2026 decision in Chatrie v. United States reopened the Fourth Amendment question, and in September a conservative law firm sued Waukesha County and 11 municipalities over Flock. In October, the ACLU of Wisconsin and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for the Wisconsin Council of Churches and a Green Bay pastor, asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to require warrants for plate reader searches, naming Green Bay, Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha. The court first has to decide whether to take the case. FOX 11 Separately, Wisconsin’s public records law makes every image and search log a record the city must be prepared to produce.