Alpharetta police’s Flock camera data now circulates among 2,000+ agencies

Investigations using public-records requests show that Alpharetta, a wealthy Atlanta suburb, operates dozens of Flock Safety cameras that capture license-plate data and feed it into a sprawling network accessed by more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, airports and government agencies across the United States. The city’s police automatically grant data requests from any law-enforcement agency within 500 miles, while still manually reviewing out-of-state requests, and it both sends and receives data with entities ranging from a prosecutor’s office in Whitley County, Indiana to the inspector general of a federal agency.

Since June 2025, outbound sharing has risen about 42 % and inbound sharing about 125 %, illustrating rapid expansion of the surveillance web. Similar expansive arrangements have been documented in other municipalities, highlighting how Flock’s default settings and its Nationwide Lookup tool can unintentionally link local departments into a national data-exchange grid. Missteps with the system prompted an Alpharetta officer to resign on August 5 after alleged misuse. Flock has recently announced tighter retention limits and an audit-assistance feature, which Alpharetta activated in July.