Law enforcement agencies have embraced them. So have many cities across the United States, large and small.

But the proliferation of Flock cameras, a brand of automated license plate readers that employ artificial intelligence to identify and track vehicles, has divided the public and rattled civil liberties watchdogs.

Some say the cameras are a valuable tool to help catch criminals, while critics argue that they are an invasion of privacy, and that the information they collect can be misused by the government or rogue law enforcement officers.

Here’s what to know:

What are Flock cameras?

Flock Safety is a private company based in Atlanta that supplies many of the license plate-reading cameras used by law enforcement offices across the nation.

The company was valued at $8.4 billion as of April 2026, less than a decade after it was started by three graduates of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

More than 7,000 organizations in the United States have contracts with Flock Safety, according to the company.