DeFlock Joplin

What Are We Doing and Why?

Flock Safety's system enables warrantless tracking of people nationwide without accountability using Automated License Plate Readers or ALPRs. Despite this company's young age, this system has already been used to stalk, wrongly accuse, and incorrectly arrest people around the country in just a few short years.

Flock's cameras and systems have been demonstrated to have security flaws, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations. The company sends our surveillance data overseas to be used to train their AI. The ACLU has also reported that Flock's AI will be used to report suspicious location patterns to police. Flock refuses to allow their terms and conditions to be archived by archive.org and changes them surreptitiously. Flock has tried and recently failed to silence a valuable resource in our fight, HaveIBeenFlocked.com, by abusing takedown mechanisms. Without HaveIBeenFlocked, DeFlock Joplin would not have been created. Without HaveIBeenFlocked, we would not have found and then investigated the abuses of Plate 1 and Plate 2 in our partial audit.

This is a surface level overview of a few of the issues with the company our City has entered into business with.

The Joplin Police Department has no publicly available policies about this system. The only possibly related policy is for mobile license plate readers. This policy does not address the issues inherent with Flock's system. Our request for this policy has again been ignored in the latest production on 1/09/2026.

Every Flock contract also has the option to activate a transparency portal for free. If JPD has activated this portal, we cannot locate it. Our records request for this portal address continues to not be addressed as of 01/09/2026, but for some reason the city is now responding to a "request" we did not make about "analytics" which we find very interesting.

The Joplin Police Department also shares our location data with agencies geographically dispersed across the nation, even if they are not returning the favor. Our records request for the sharing agreement that JPD requires other agencies to conform was initially not addressed, but the City has finally admitted on 1/09/2026 that they have no standard for sharing with other cities or for holding other cities accountable for their searches of our location data.

We’re focusing on transparency, public record requests, and community dialogue with local officials. We currently have received partial records from Joplin and are awaiting records from other nearby cities. We intend to share findings from this data once we analyze it and make it easily readable.

Joplin's cameras are a small piece of a massive surveillance network built without our consent or knowledge. Watch this space for sources, events, and organizing information.

Learn more about the issues in our Resources section.