While the Metro Police Department does not have license plate readers, Nashville International Airport’s police department does, and newly released data appears to show how police searched Flock’s nationwide network of surveillance devices since 2022.
Haveibeenflocked.com, which is critical of Flock, said it compiled a database of the airport police department’s searches through public records requests of audit logs from law enforcement agencies across the country. My understanding: every time airport police ping another department’s data, that department automatically documents the search on its audit log.
Here’s my analysis of the data, which appeared to document more than 5,000 searches, along with the airport’s response:
Theft-related investigations appear to account for more searches than any other category. More than 40% of the searches use the words “theft,” “stolen,” or “larceny” in the reason for the search. When I asked an airport spokesperson if they disputed this finding or any other, they did not directly answer and recommended that I reach out to haveibeenflocked.com.
All searches have a reason attached, including “other,” “susp activity,” “welfare check,” “wanted,” “investigation,” “human trafficking,” “homicide,” multiple terms for drug investigations, and more.
A case number isn’t attached to thousands of searches in the released data. In at least some cases, this could be a redaction. But there are multiple entries that don’t have a case number while others from the same audit log do. An airport spokesperson tells me a case number, along with an offense type and specific reason, is “the minimum and required data criteria” for a search. “Our policy prohibits searches outside criminal investigations,” the spokesperson said.
For transparency as you consider my findings: haveibeenflocked.com does not guarantee the accuracy of the data, noting “the dataset is incomplete; few governments provide easy access to these logs, and the records we obtain are often redacted.” Also, I used the artificial intelligence platform Claude to eliminate apparently duplicative entries that happened within the same minute since the database combines logs from agencies across the country, which reduced the number of entries from about 35,000 to about 5,000.
“The Flock ALPR serves as a secondary safety and security measure at the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority, utilized for investigative purposes and to provide safety, security, and protection measures for our 27 million annual passengers,” an airport spokesperson told me by email. You can read their full responses to my questions here.
Flock announced earlier this month that searches will “require case codes from all enforcement agencies by the end of year” after criticism of its surveillance network. However, it noted, “Agencies may bypass the requirement in emergencies, but every exigent search will be flagged for administrator review.”
Flock defended its technology as assisting “officers in more than one million crimes solved annually. In July alone, with your help, we detected over 1,000 missing people and over 20,000 stolen cars.” Meanwhile, the people behind haveibeenflocked.com argue, “We believe mass surveillance has no place in a free society, and this data should not be collected to begin with. If it is collected, warrants should be used, lookups should be rare and police and private parties, like Flock and HaveIBeenFlocked.com, should not be permitted to act without functional restraints or oversight.”