Flock Safety develops AI tool enabling police to track drivers by movement patterns
Flock Safety has developed an AI tool called OS Investigate that enables police to identify drivers and track vehicles by movement patterns alone, drawing on a network of cameras and linking to police records and commercial identity databases. Privacy experts warn the tool raises constitutional concerns by allowing officers to generate suspects based on behavior without a license plate, name, or evidence of crime.
What happened
Flock Safety has developed an AI tool called OS Investigate (formerly Nightshift) that identifies drivers and tracks vehicles by movement patterns alone, according to an investigation by WIRED. The tool draws on a network of cameras logging movements in over 6,000 communities and includes 69 prewritten prompts officers can select, review, or edit, with access to 45 tools including plate scans, camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases containing Social Security numbers, addresses, and relatives.
The tool can search for people in an area based on physical description alone, identify potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, surface a driver's 'associates' from shared camera encounters, and return names, home addresses, and relatives from license plates. Flock previously stated its technology 'cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals,' but has now built a system that does both.
Reported impact
Privacy and legal experts say the tool raises serious constitutional concerns by giving police broad, often warrantless access to vast movement records. ACLU attorney Chad Marlow told WIRED the danger was that officers could go fishing for crimes, and that the wording of prompts shapes results, allowing police to 'lead the AI.'
A former officer who reviewed the software said it showed Flock 'literally tracks people.' Critics noted that 19 of the examined prompts focus on patterns, with 14 requiring no license plate, name, or physical description—only a place, period, and behavior—allowing the tool to generate suspects from inferred links between vehicles and repeated movements that do not constitute evidence of crime.
Index analysis
The tool inverts Flock's original business model: rather than checking a plate against a list of wanted vehicles, OS Investigate allows officers to supply a place, time period, and driving pattern to identify individuals, turning the camera network into an engine for generating suspects based on behavior alone.
Governance controls
Flock said the tool is still being tested with a small group of law enforcement partners and remains in development, with capabilities that may not reflect what it eventually sells. The code and prompts were exposed through Flock's own login pages, though the investigation did not reveal the model's underlying instructions or checks applied on Flock's servers.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.