Have I Been Flocked lets drivers search 242M Flock audit records

Why it matters

Have I Been Flocked turns fragmented public records into a searchable accountability layer for a nationwide policing product, while exposing how incomplete government disclosure limits oversight.

H.C. van Pelt's Have I Been Flocked? (@HIBFlocked) has assembled 241,961,192 audit records from Flock Safety systems into a searchable database, allowing drivers to check whether an operator queried their license plate.

As of August 16th, the database contained searches involving 4,684,253 plates. The project is promoting the lookup during the August 16th-22nd National Week of Action Against ALPRs, a campaign opposing automated license plate readers.

The project predates this week's campaign. Have I Been Flocked was already offering plate searches and long-term tracking analysis by November 2025. Its current scale, along with a growing set of reports covering protest monitoring, immigration enforcement and non-criminal searches, turns what began as a plate-checking utility into an independent audit layer for Flock's network.

Van Pelt describes Have I Been Flocked as a one-developer project supported by community donations. It is fiscally sponsored by the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, while remaining editorially independent, and says its hosting and infrastructure cost about $80 a month. Van Pelt also publishes investigations into Flock contracts, security practices and government use of the system.

A search engine for the audit layer

The distinction between a Flock camera sighting and a Flock database search is central to interpreting the results. Have I Been Flocked does not tell a driver every time a camera photographed a vehicle. It shows records indicating that a Flock user entered a plate into the system, along with fields that can include the operator, agency, stated reason, case number, search time and search type.

A result does not establish that the operator was a police officer, that the vehicle owner was suspected of a crime or that the query returned useful footage. Have I Been Flocked is searching the system's audit layer, rather than reproducing Flock's underlying store of vehicle images and location data.

The records come from local governments that released Flock audit logs through public-records requests or transparency portals. The project's guide to the records describes separate organization, network and public audit logs, each exposing different fields. Network logs may redact both the operator and plate, while records released through public portals can contain even less detail.

Flock markets its license plate readers as cameras that use AI software to turn plate numbers, vehicle descriptions, locations and timestamps into searchable evidence. Flock says its network serves more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, produces billions of monthly plate reads and includes audit trails and transparency portals. Those controls depend on agencies retaining, reviewing and releasing useful records.

That dependence creates the opening for Van Pelt's project. Audit files are usually scattered across municipal records systems, delivered as spreadsheets or PDFs and limited to one jurisdiction. Have I Been Flocked combines those releases so a driver can search across agencies instead of identifying every department that may have accessed the network.

A clean result proves little

The database has a hard disclosure ceiling. Have I Been Flocked says few governments provide easy access to their logs, records are frequently redacted and newly obtained files may document searches conducted months or years earlier. A plate that returns no result may still have been queried by an agency whose logs are absent, withheld, redacted or waiting to be processed.

The project also says it does not save the plate numbers or terms entered by visitors. Its privacy system attempts to remove Social Security numbers, birth dates, phone numbers, driver's license numbers and street addresses that officers placed in free-text search fields. Van Pelt says the redaction process combines pattern matching with transformer-based named-entity recognition, followed by manual intervention when needed.

That defensive work is necessary because audit logs can expose far more than plate numbers. Operator-supplied reasons may describe investigations, personal details or the activity that prompted a search. Have I Been Flocked uses those fields to build reports identifying searches related to protests, religious gatherings, journalists, political organizing, immigration enforcement, training exercises and low-level offenses.

Independent reviews of Flock audit data have shown why those fields matter. The Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzed more than 12 million searches from over 3,900 agencies and found hundreds linked to protest activity. The group separately documented searches using ethnic stereotypes and an abortion investigation in which deputies queried thousands of Flock camera networks.

Have I Been Flocked makes that oversight accessible at the level most likely to draw public attention: a person's own license plate. Its limits also show the underlying accountability problem. A searchable audit is only as complete as the records government agencies release, and the public cannot independently examine searches that never appear in those records.