What Is Have I Been Flocked? The Flock Audit Log Search Tool

By State of Surveillance Published: 2026-08-17

The Short Version

  • Have I Been Flocked is an independent website that searches released Flock Safety audit logs, which are records of searches run inside the Flock system, for a specific license plate.[1][2]
  • A match means someone with access to the Flock system typed that plate into it. It does not mean the vehicle was photographed, and the site states that a search does not imply the person was stopped or investigated.[2]
  • No match means the plate is absent from the logs this one site has collected, which is not the same as no search having happened. The site calls its own dataset incomplete.[2]
  • The records come from public records releases, usually obtained by citizens who file requests and then pass the files on.[2][5]
  • It is not a live monitoring tool. The site says the delay between a search happening and appearing on the site can run to months or years.[2]
  • DeFlock maps where cameras are. Have I Been Flocked covers searches made in the Flock system. They are separate projects.[9]
  • State of Surveillance does not run this tool and does not host a license plate database.

Has a police officer looked up my plate?

That is the question the tool is built around, and the honest answer it can give is narrower than most people expect. Have I Been Flocked checks whether a plate appears in the audit logs it has managed to collect. Its own homepage frames the tool as a way to search Flock Safety audit logs for a license plate, under the heading "Have police looked up your travel history?"[1]

Those logs are not camera photographs and not plate reads. They are query records: entries showing that an operator with access to the Flock system searched a particular plate, together with details such as the stated reason for the search and, depending on the log type, the operator's name and a case number.[2][3]

As observed on 17 August 2026, the homepage invited visitors to "Enter your license plate to see if it's one of the 4,684,253 plates seen in the 241,961,192 Flock searches we know about."[1] Both of those are live counters on the page rather than fixed totals: the first counts distinct plates appearing in the collected searches, the second counts the searches themselves. They move as more logs are released and imported.

State of Surveillance is not connected to the project. It does not operate the tool and does not hold a plate database of any kind. Have I Been Flocked describes itself as an independent project that answers to no backers, built by one developer and fiscally sponsored by the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.[8]

What happens when you type in a plate

The interaction is a single lookup against the site's imported database. As for the plate you enter, the FAQ states that the site "does not save, store, or log the license plate numbers or search terms you enter", and that the search is performed and the data immediately discarded by the application itself.[2]

Where the data actually comes from

The FAQ describes the underlying material as audit logs tracking searches made within the Flock system. Some local governments release those logs to the public on request, and others publish heavily redacted versions on a Flock-provided transparency portal. The site aggregates logs released through open records requests, and says directly that "The dataset is incomplete", that few governments provide easy access, and that the records obtained are often redacted.[2]

The privacy policy sets out the chain in four steps: a citizen obtains search logs from police, that citizen posts the logs online or sends them to the site, the site imports them into a private searchable database, and visitors search that database.[5] Contributors are asked to send files exactly as received, without re-saving, merging spreadsheets, deleting columns or renaming files, and the submission page states that "A person reviews every submission by hand."[4]

Three kinds of log reach the database, and they carry very different amounts of detail[3]:

  • Organization audit log. Searches performed by an agency's own operators. This is the most detailed type, including operator names, license plates searched and case numbers.
  • Network audit log. Searches run by other agencies that reached the data through network sharing agreements. Operator names and license plates are redacted with asterisks.
  • Portal or public audit log. Heavily redacted, containing only user UUIDs rather than officer names, plus search dates, camera counts and reasons.

That distinction matters for anyone searching a plate, because a plate can only be matched where the plate field survived redaction. Where an agency released a network log, the site states the licence plate column is redacted, so those records cannot produce a plate-level hit. Portal logs are described as heavily redacted with agency-configured fields, which means what they contain varies from one agency to the next.[3] The site then applies redaction of its own before publishing, attempting to strip Social Security numbers, last names, birth dates, phone numbers, driver's licence numbers and specific street addresses using pattern matching supplemented with transformer-based named-entity recognition. It says the system "largely errs on the side of over-redacting" while also noting that no system is perfect.[6]

What a result does and does not mean

This is the part worth reading twice. The FAQ is explicit: "A search result means an operator on the Flock system queried the database for your license plate using the Flock application/website. This user is not necessarily a police officer, and a search does not imply you were stopped or investigated."[2]

Nor is a hit evidence that a camera saw the vehicle. The same page notes that results do not show when or if a vehicle passed one of Flock's estimated 120,000-plus cameras and connected devices, or what those devices returned.[2] That camera estimate is a figure the site gives for the size of Flock's network, not a description of the site's own dataset.

The plates and the search reasons in the logs are whatever an operator manually entered into the system, so a reason field reflects what was typed at the time rather than any verified account of an investigation.[2] And because the collection is incomplete by the site's own description, an empty result says only that the plate does not appear in the logs the project currently holds.[2]

The reports: what the collected logs look like in aggregate

Alongside the plate lookup, the site publishes themed reports that slice the collected records by the reasons operators gave. Counts observed on 17 August 2026 included 973.2K records under "Searches related to non-criminal activities such as testing, training, civil matters, code enforcement, and traffic planning", 304.0K under "Searches for minor infractions and civil violations", 127.1K under "Records related to profiling", 82.7K under "Records related to probable cause development", 64.3K under "Records related to immigration enforcement and border patrol activities", 26.6K under "Searches with keywords related to First Amendment activities", and 19.5K covering "FreeForm and AI moderation decisions on searches". These counters are refreshed as new logs are imported, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a fixed total.[7]

Two larger views sit alongside them: 2.9M records flagged as having name, organization, reason or timeframe mismatches, and 18.6M records described as searches by non-California agencies in California agency audit files. The First Amendment report is keyword based, grouping searches that touch constitutionally protected activity such as protests, religious gatherings and political organizing in order to surface possible surveillance of lawful civic engagement.[7]

How it differs from DeFlock

The two projects get conflated constantly, and the distinction is simple. DeFlock describes itself as an open-source project that maps license plate readers across the US.[9] It answers where the cameras are. Have I Been Flocked answers a different question entirely: which plates show up in searches made inside the Flock system. There is a fuller explainer on the mapping project at what DeFlock is.

The confirmed point of contact between them is one report. The Scanner Map on Have I Been Flocked shows reported scanner density by county, and the page states that the underlying data is sourced from deflock.org.[7] If the practical question is where cameras sit on a particular route, the camera-location material is covered in the guide on finding and avoiding Flock cameras, and the wider picture is collected in the Flock ALPR surveillance hub.

The limits, and why they matter

The freshness limit is the one most likely to mislead. The site attributes its currency entirely to when audit logs arrive from records requests or transparency portals, describes a significant delay of months or even years between a search happening and appearing on the site, and states plainly that this is not a real-time monitoring tool.[2] A clean result today can therefore say nothing about recent months.

Coverage is the second limit. Because the pipeline depends on individual public records releases, the dataset reflects which agencies released logs and in what form, and the site does not present it as a complete picture.[2] It has grown substantially: 404 Media reported in January 2026 that the site said it had data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of Flock searches, a figure well below the counters observed in August 2026.[11][1] Growth of that kind shows records continuing to arrive, not gaps closing.

The project has also drawn attention from the company whose logs it publishes. Its funding page states: "Flock has already tried to take this site down twice. One attempt failed, one is pending (as of January 15, 2026)."[8] Newsweek reported on 16 August 2026 that the tool lets users enter a plate and search a database of publicly obtained Flock audit logs, and that on 13 August, Flock Safety announced several changes aimed at strengthening privacy protections, transparency and oversight across its platform.[10]

Used within those bounds, the tool is genuinely useful. It turns spreadsheets released to individual requesters into something a person can query about their own plate, and it shows in aggregate what plate searches are being run for. What it cannot do is confirm that a vehicle was seen, tracked, stopped or investigated, and no result from it should be read that way.[2]

Sources

  1. Have I Been Flocked?, "Have I Been Flocked? – Search Flock ALPR Audit Logs". No publication date given; retrieved 17 August 2026.
  2. Have I Been Flocked?, "FAQ". No publication date given; retrieved 17 August 2026.
  3. Have I Been Flocked?, "Audit Logs". No publication date given; retrieved 17 August 2026.
  4. Have I Been Flocked?, "Submit Audit Logs". No publication date given; retrieved 17 August 2026.
  5. Have I Been Flocked?, "Privacy Policy". No publication date given; retrieved 17 August 2026.
  6. Have I Been Flocked?, "Privacy". No publication date given; retrieved 17 August 2026.
  7. Have I Been Flocked?, "Reports". No publication date given; retrieved 17 August 2026.
  8. Have I Been Flocked?, "Funding". No publication date given; retrieved 17 August 2026.
  9. DeFlock, "DeFlock" (homepage). No publication date given; retrieved 17 August 2026.
  10. Newsweek, "'Have I Been Flocked?' Tool Launched as Flock Unveils New Privacy Rules". Published 16 August 2026.
  11. 404 Media, "Police Unmask Millions of Surveillance Targets Because of Flock Redaction Error". Published 13 January 2026.