Six traffic cameras installed in Elm Grove, a Waukesha County village of about 6,500 people 15 minutes from downtown Milwaukee, are being searched more than a million times most months — and local police account for only a small fraction of that activity, according to public records obtained by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
The cameras were purchased from Flock Group, Inc., a company that has sold more than 120,000 automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to police departments, schools, hospitals, malls and neighborhood associations across the country. The cameras capture far more than license plates: passing vehicles, pedestrians, backyards and, at times, the interior of cars. Flock’s AI builds a “vehicle fingerprint” for each car, logging scratches, dents, bumper stickers, roof racks and other identifying features, and stores it all in a nationwide location-history database that can reconstruct a vehicle’s movements over the past 30 days and estimate where it’s headed.
Elm Grove officers search their own department’s cameras only a few dozen times a month, typically for minor local matters like traffic infractions, according to audit logs reviewed by WILL. The rest of the traffic comes from outside agencies. Once any department runs a nationwide search on Flock’s network, the arrangement becomes reciprocal — meaning thousands of agencies across the country gain the ability to search Elm Grove’s cameras in return.
California’s Highway Patrol Leads the Searches
Records obtained from Elm Grove and five other Waukesha County agencies show that California Highway Patrol, under Gov. Gavin Newsom, is by far the most frequent outside searcher of Wisconsin’s Flock cameras, running roughly 50,000 nationwide searches a month across thousands of agencies’ camera networks. The FBI runs about 20,000 searches a month. Louisville Metro PD, the Hillsborough County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Michigan State Police each run between 13,000 and 16,000 nationwide searches a month.
Most of CHP’s searches are logged as traffic infractions, thefts or hit-and-runs, though the records do not explain why a California agency would need to check cameras in a Milwaukee suburb for incidents on the Pacific Coast Highway. Many other searches carry vague labels — “other,” “investigation” or “not applicable” — that offer little insight into what officers were actually looking for. Wisconsin cameras were pinged more than 50,000 times a month under those catch-all categories.
Some recorded searches were narrower but still notable: in July 2026 alone, agencies ran nationwide searches covering Elm Grove’s cameras tied to a cemetery burglary, an Outlaws motorcycle club funeral, and a case logged as a “concerned boyfriend.” Harrison County, Texas, ran 28 separate nationwide searches — checking thousands of agencies’ camera feeds — while looking for a stolen lawn mower. It wasn’t in Elm Grove.
A Fourth Amendment Fight
Flock CEO Garrett Langley has said the word he hears most often from police departments using the system is “addicted.” Most department policies governing the tool require only that searches serve “official use” or “law enforcement purposes” — a low bar that critics say does little to prevent misuse of a system capable of tracking anyone’s movements nationwide with a single click.
In June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that police access to Google’s Location History constitutes a Fourth Amendment “search” requiring a warrant, on the theory that Americans retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements even when that data is held by a private company. Whether that same standard applies to Flock’s camera network is now being tested in court. The Institute for Justice is litigating cases over Flock systems in Norfolk, Virginia, and San Jose, California, while the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has sued a dozen Waukesha County agencies over warrantless searches of the Flock database.
Police already need a warrant or a recognized exception, such as an emergency, to obtain cell-site data, app-location data or GPS tracking. Whether that requirement will be extended to Flock’s more powerful and precise nationwide camera network remains an open legal question — one that Elm Grove’s six cameras have now placed squarely in the national spotlight.
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