Flock's OS Investigate lets police track drivers by patterns
TL;DR
- OS Investigate lets police identify drivers and track vehicles from movement patterns alone, despite Flock's public claim its cameras cannot do so.
- The tool ships with 69 prewritten prompts; 19 focus on patterns and 14 require no plate, name or physical description at all.
- WIRED reporters reconstructed the software from files exposed through Flock's own login pages; it is being tested with a small group of agencies.
Flock Safety, which has told the public for years that its cameras "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals," has built an AI tool for police that does exactly that: identifying drivers and tracking vehicles by their patterns of movement alone. WIRED reporters Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron reconstructed the software, called OS Investigate and previously Nightshift, from files exposed through Flock's own login pages.
The system ships with 69 prewritten prompts that officers can select, review or edit before submitting to the AI. Of those, 19 focus on patterns and 14 require no plate, name or physical description at all. One prompt asks the system to surface likely witnesses by finding "vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days]"; another flags vehicles that visited three or more shops in three days. Beyond camera scans, the code shows OS Investigate can pull in police case files, arrest records, 911 dispatch logs, ballistics results and commercial identity databases.
Eleven of the experts on our radar had already posted the story.
"And I think the fact that they don't seem to have any limitations on the prompts enables the police to almost lead the AI in what it does," Chad Marlow, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, told WIRED. "The difference between a police officer saying, 'Do you see any criminal patterns' or 'Find me criminal patterns' is going to produce two different things."
The tool is currently being tested with a small group of law enforcement agencies.
Shared on Bluesky by 11 AI experts (top 5 by trust)
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NEW: Flock has said for years its cameras don’t identify or track people. We obtained the code for its police AI and rebuilt parts of it. The tool can find witnesses, surface associates, search people by race or physic…
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Katie Drummond @katie-drummond.bsky.social
Flock has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” The company has now built an AI system that does both. And @wired.com got the system's code -- allowing us to …
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Incredible scoop from @dmehro.bsky.social and @dell.bsky.social who were able to recreate Flock's new AI-powered tool that lets police officers ID drivers and track vehicles—capabilities the company has repeatedly said i…
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Originally reported by wired.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code