Find Flock cameras, check your plate and get your city's audit logs

Map the plate cameras near you, check your plate in public Flock logs, request your city's audit logs, and limit and encrypt Ring video.

This guide gets you real answers about Flock in your own area: the cameras near you, searches of your plate, your police department's audit logs, your doorbell camera's sharing, and what to tell your council. The quick checks take about 30 minutes. A records request takes 15 minutes to send and a few weeks to come back.

Why bother

Flock says it runs more than 120,000 cameras in more than 6,000 communities and reads about 20 billion plates a month. Every car that passes gets logged, not just suspects. A Washington Post review found at least 50 officers charged or accused of misusing license plate readers, 46 of them on Flock, many for tracking partners or exes. The EFF analysed over 12 million searches and found searches tied to protests, slurs aimed at Romani people, and an abortion investigation logged as a "missing person" case. Stores such as Lowe's have shared their cameras with police in other states. Searches generally don't need a warrant, so check your local system yourself.

Before you start

Time: about 30 minutes for Steps 1 to 3, 5 and 6, plus 15 minutes to send the request in Step 4.
You need: your own license plate number, the name of your city and county, an email address you're comfortable putting on a public record, and a phone with the DeFlock app if you want camera alerts.
Checked on: 16 October 2026, against DeFlock, Ring's US help pages, haveibeenflocked.com and Flock's policy pages.
Backup: nothing in this guide deletes data, but save the Step 6 recovery passphrase or encrypted clips can't be opened. Steps 5 and 6 turn off Ring features, which you can turn back on later.

Steps

1 Find the license plate cameras near you

DeFlock is a crowdsourced map of license plate readers built on OpenStreetMap.

On a computer, go to deflock.me and open the map. On a phone, install DeFlock from the App Store (iPhone) or Google Play (Android) and allow location access.
Search for your home address, then zoom in on the roads you use every day: your street, school or work routes, shopping centres and highway ramps.
Tap any marker to see details such as the maker (Flock Safety, Motorola/Vigilant, Genetec and others) and which way the camera faces.
Optional: in Settings > Advanced, turn on suspected locations (orange question marks). They come from utility permit data and aren't confirmed.
Optional: go to Settings > Proximity Alerts and choose a distance between 25 and 200 metres to get a notification when you get near a mapped camera.

You should see: markers on your map. If your area looks empty, zoom in further. Coverage is uneven, and an empty map doesn't mean there are no cameras.

2 Check whether your plate has been searched

Go to haveibeenflocked.com and click Plate Lookup.
Under "Check Your License Plate", type your plate number and click Search.

You should see: either matching searches, with whatever agency and reason the logs recorded, or no match. The site says it doesn't store the plates you enter.

Read the results with care:

A match means someone typed your plate into Flock. It doesn't mean you were stopped, and it doesn't show where your car was.
No match does not prove nobody searched for you. The data is often redacted and can be months or years old.
If a search looks wrong, take a dated screenshot for Steps 4 and 8.