Updated
Updated · WIRED · Aug 19
Flock Safety Built AI Tool With 69 Police Prompts to Identify Drivers and Track Vehicles
Updated
Updated · WIRED · Aug 19

Flock Safety Built AI Tool With 69 Police Prompts to Identify Drivers and Track Vehicles

3 articles · Updated · WIRED · Aug 19

Summary

  • WIRED found Flock Safety has built OS Investigate, an AI police tool that can identify drivers, map vehicle movements, and surface associates or witnesses across cameras in more than 6,000 communities.
  • 69 prewritten prompts and 45 linked tools let officers start with a place, time window, behavior pattern, or physical description—not necessarily a plate, name, or known crime—and pull names, addresses, relatives, arrest records, and dispatch data.
  • 14 prompts require no plate, name, or description, while others flag cars visiting multiple banks, gas stations, or retail sites, or rank a target vehicle’s top associates by repeated co-appearances at cameras.
  • Flock said the product is a separate, still-developing system being tested with a small group of law-enforcement partners, and said its capabilities and workflows may change before broader release.
  • Privacy experts said the tool goes beyond license-plate lookup into warrantless pattern-based surveillance, intensifying scrutiny of a company already facing misuse scandals as it logs 20 billion plate scans a month.

Insights

How does an AI tool tracking your driving habits turn a simple grocery trip into a full police dossier without a warrant?
With cities banning this technology, will new AI movement-tracking systems become the ultimate crime solver or the end of public anonymity?
If a surveillance AI incorrectly flags your car as a criminal associate based on movement patterns, how can you prove your innocence?