Flock showed police how to watch a protest, a parade and a bike race — from one screen
A recorded company webinar walks officers through monitoring a No Kings protest, 4th of July fireworks and a bike race using cameras, drones and social media posts. Flock's software now runs in more than 4,800 cities.
Imagine a screen where someone can see live video of a march moving through a park, the traffic backing up around it, the floor plans of the buildings nearby, and camera feeds from inside local businesses. Not a movie. A sales webinar, taught by the company that sells the cameras.
404 Media published the recording on September 3, 2026. In it, Flock's director of market management Caity Peak explains how police surveillance centers can be used for emergencies — and also for what she calls "established events": parades, bike races, Mardi Gras, 4th of July fireworks displays, and protests. "Imagine that you're an incident commander, and you're working this No Kings Protest," she says, as a dashboard covers the city of Denver in surveillance layers.
Flock's public line is that its license plate cameras are mild stuff: a still photo of a car at one spot at one moment, used to solve serious crime. The webinar sells something else entirely — FlockOS, software that pulls license plate readers, drones, gunshot detectors, 911 data and other people's cameras into what Peak calls a "single pane of glass." One screen. Everything at once.
And here's the part that changes how you read it: watching a peaceful march isn't an accident or a rogue officer. It's the demo. It's in the training. The company teaches it.
Flock says on its website that more than 4,800 cities around the country are running FlockOS.
The webinar also shows how ordinary this gets. Peak describes monitoring a car sideshow near Sacramento with drones, cameras, plate readers and social media posts, with a list of "THINGS TO LOOK FOR": mismatched front and rear wheels, car club stickers, covered license plates. Then she demos Flock Nova, which she compares to a Google search — it ties plate data to "person data, IP data, email data, sex offender data" and open-source intelligence. A screenshot shows a "street racing suspect" with his name, address, email, social accounts, phone number and affiliations. Her point: with that pulled up, "I have the justification I need to actually tow the car for 90 days instead of just issuing a citation."
Anyone who has ever stood in a crowd on purpose — a protest, a parade, a Pride march, a bike race, fireworks on the 4th. Peak's own words: police can watch a protest without officers on the ground "making it worse, getting attention." You'd never know it was happening. It also touches the 20-something who thinks none of this applies because they don't own a car: the webinar's deeper tool is built to marry plates with emails, IP addresses, phone numbers and social media accounts. And it touches anyone who films their weekend on Instagram — in the sideshow example, police decided an event was "likely to turn into nefarious activity based on who was promoting the car show." The promoter's posts were the evidence.
Two things worth watching. First, whether that 4,800-city number on Flock's website keeps climbing — it's the company's own count, and it's public. Second, where the footage travels: after the Bourbon Street attack that killed 14 people on Jan. 1, 2025, New Orleans police recreated the attacker's movements through the city's camera and plate reader network, and Flock's Matt Patin says 7 terabytes went to the fusion center, Homeland Security, HSI and the FBI. Flock has not announced any change to the webinar or the training, and no deadline, hearing or review is named in the reporting. What happens next, nobody has said.
Peak used to be a cop, and she remembers the old problem: you only had a few cameras, so you had to guess which intersection an event would happen in front of. "I hoped that if an event happened in front of a camera, it's one that's in an intersection where I chose to put [the ALPR]." That guessing game is over. That's the whole product.
Sources: 404 Media, "Flock Taught Cops How to Surveil No Kings Protesters" by Jason Koebler, September 3, 2026.
Записанный вебинар компании показывает, что слежка за мирными демонстрациями, парадами и велогонками — не сбой, а функция, которой Flock прямо обучает полицию, и её софт уже работает в 4800 городах.
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