TL;DR: On September 14, 2026, the EFF and 404 Media published parallel audits of Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) audit logs. The logs show officers at agencies across Ohio, Texas, Indiana, California, Illinois, Washington, Arizona, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Colorado entering jokes ("LMAO," "LOL," "Hehe"), admissions of ignorance ("idk," "blah"), insults, sexualized strings ("sexy"), and keyboard mashing ("asdfg," "hjknuilh," "gyghkkghghjkghjk") as the stated reason for plate searches. A single Goshen, Indiana Police Department search on May 7, 2025 reached 6,474 ALPR networks covering 82,413 cameras and listed "idk" in the reason field. A Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department "LMAO" search hit roughly 19,000 cameras across 1,558 cities and towns. EFF's prescription: rigid data-deletion deadlines and an ironclad warrant requirement.
What the Logs Actually Show
EFF attorneys Rindala Alajaji and Dave Maass obtained the audit logs through public records requests and published the analysis on EFF Deeplinks on September 14. 404 Media's Jason Koebler obtained the same corpus independently and published the same day. Both pieces arrive at the same conclusion: police treat a mass-surveillance system as a toy [1][2].
The reason field on a Flock search is what an officer types before the system fans the plate out across every networked camera. The audit log is what comes back. EFF's opening example is the cleanest: a Goshen, Indiana Police Department officer on May 7, 2025 searched 6,474 ALPR networks covering data from 82,413 cameras, and the stated reason was "idk" [1].
From there the pattern fans out by category. EFF groups the entries as jokes, admissions of ignorance, insults, and button-mashing. Barberton, Ohio Police Department searches between March 2024 and May 2026 listed "LOL" or "lol." Harris County, Texas Sheriff's Office searches in April and May 2026 did the same. Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department searches in July 2025 logged "LMAO." Richmond, California Police Department searches in November 2024 logged "Hehe." Riverside County, California Sheriff's Department searches in 2024 logged "Haha" [1].
Pasco, Washington Police Department employees left "robbery i don't remember the case number leave me alone" in the reason field for at least four searches. Fishers, Indiana Police Department searches in May 2025 logged "blah" [1].
More than 30 agencies ran more than 6,300 searches with "TBD" ("To Be Determined") as the reason. Priceville, Alabama Police Department alone logged 1,954 "TBD" searches. The Arizona Department of Public Safety, Manteca, California Police Department, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana Police Department were among the others [1].
Insults and sexualized strings sat alongside the jokes. Belton, Missouri Police Department searches in August and September 2024 listed a vulgar insult. Norton, Massachusetts Police Department searches in December 2024 listed "Sexy." Corona, California Police Department searches between 2023 and 2025 listed "weird" or "WEIRD KID." Columbus, Ohio Police Department searches in 2023 listed "idiot" [1].
The button-mashing entries are the most striking. Lake County, Ohio Sheriff's Department searched "asdfg" and "ghjkl." A second officer's entries devolved across a 17-step string from "Investigatafy" to "investigatafyfdlhjiy." Moore, Oklahoma Police Department searched "jhjhjkhj," "kjjkhjk," and "loiuiou." Kentucky State Police searched "mhghjk," "nbvcxcvbn," and "nmbvcbnm." Eatonton, Georgia Police Department searched "HJKNUILH" and "uiokjk.kuj" [1].
404 Media singled out the Lake County, Indiana "LMAO" search as a single query that hit roughly 19,000 cameras across 1,558 cities and towns, and EFF quoted the same dataset in its own piece. 404 Media described the audit corpus as covering "hundreds of thousands of searches" from 2023 through late 2025, the period before Flock replaced the free-text reason field with a dropdown of generic offense categories [2].
What the Departments Said When Asked
EFF and 404 Media both asked the named agencies to explain the entries. The responses track a recognizable pattern: "counseled," "investigated," or framed as a technology complaint.
Richmond, California Police Department told EFF the officers involved in "Hehe" and "idk" searches were "counseled." Corona, California Police Department said the employees who logged "WEIRD KID" were no longer with the department for unrelated reasons. Columbus, Ohio Police Department told EFF the inspector general's jurisdiction was limited to the last 90 days, meaning the 2023 "idiot" searcher fell outside the union contract window and escaped discipline. Belton, Missouri Police Department promised a "thorough investigation" of the vulgar-insult searches. Manteno, Illinois Police Department said it would "review the searches and the circumstances surrounding them thoroughly" [1].
Fishers, Indiana Police Department told both outlets the detective's "blah" entries happened "when he has issues with the technology" and "is used when he is actively using the technology to solve a criminal case, and the technology is not moving fast enough for him." Fishers said the detective had been told to use "test" in the future [1][2].
Thornton, Colorado Police Department told EFF it had audited the October 2025 "driving around being weird" searches and concluded they served "legitimate public safety purposes" [1].
Manteca, California Police Department told EFF that since the beginning of 2026, personnel had been directed that "TBD" is not an acceptable entry, and added: "The presence of 'TBD' in the reason field in prior searches should not, by itself, be interpreted to mean that the associated search was conducted without a legitimate law enforcement purpose or that reasonable suspicion was required." Cobb County, Georgia Police Department told EFF "'TBD' stood for 'To Be Determined' and is no longer an acceptable search reason"; the department said it now requires a criminal offense, a reason, and a case number [1].
San Diego County Sheriff's Department told EFF the "idk" searches in May 2025 had "an active investigation associated" with them, and that the reason field was optional at the time. California has required ALPR end-user documentation since 2015 under SB 34, the department noted, and the field is now mandatory with a dropdown [1].
The Dropdown Was the Fix. EFF Calls It a Loss for Transparency.
Flock Safety announced in late 2025 that it would replace the free-text reason field with a pre-populated dropdown of generic offense categories, with options like "Traffic infraction" or "Other." EFF's read on the change is sharp: "Replacing the requirement to articulate the reason for the search with one-click searches is a loss for transparency" [1].
The dropdown does what audit log reviews cannot. It removes the option to write "asdfg," but it also removes the option to write "investigating B&E on warehouse district" with the same precision. The dropdown normalizes the entries, and normalized entries are harder to challenge in a records request and easier to summarize in an annual transparency report. EFF's framing is that the product change traded specific accountability for specific unaccountability, and called the dropdown a step backward on the same day the LMAO logs came out [1].
This is the same Flock network that is being canceled by cities across the country, audited by LAPD with 161 innocent stops, and exposed by the recent drop in search-justification quality. The cancel wave and the LAPD audit and the LMAO logs are three different lenses on the same question of whether the system can be trusted to run unsupervised, and the dropdown answer from Flock is a unilateral decision that the question is now closed.
What EFF Wants Done About It
EFF's stated minimum remedy is "mandating rigid data deletion deadlines and an ironclad warrant requirement" [1].
EFF contrasts the current ALPR regime with the rule for cell phone location data, where police must obtain a warrant based on probable cause. EFF links to a 2025 Supreme Court opinion in its piece. The same constitutional logic that requires a warrant for cell phone location, EFF argues, requires a warrant for ALPR search across a national network of cameras. The legal hook on the state side is Colorado's SB 26-070, the warrant-requirement bill this site has tracked.
The Sept. 14 piece is also part of a thread EFF has been running. The September 9 companion piece on police training to withhold ALPR, Stingray, and facial recognition use from the public record documented policies instructing officers not to mention ALPR usage in reports. Read together, the LMAO logs are what officers do when they think no one is looking, and the no-mention policies are what departments tell officers to write in their reports when someone does look.
404 Media cited EFF's framing in the same way: EFF wrote that "Police are routinely searching the Flock database without providing any legitimate justification... tracking the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols." The closing line in EFF's piece: "Mass surveillance is incompatible with a free society... They should not be able to bypass the Constitution with a search for 'haha'" [1][2].
What to Watch
Flock dropdown public records response. Watch whether any agency issues a public statement committing to keep audit logs in searchable form after the dropdown change, or whether the dropdown doubles as a search-justification rewrite that cities will need to litigate against in records requests.
Colorado SB 26-070 movement. Watch whether the Colorado bill moves during the September legislative window and whether other states file companion warrant bills in the same window. The EFF analysis lands directly on the warrant-requirement argument.
EFF per-department disclosures. Watch whether EFF publishes the raw records behind the LMAO log analysis on a per-agency basis. The piece names agencies but does not always publish the underlying records in a sortable form.
Union contract discipline fights. Watch whether any agency moves to discipline an officer whose ALPR search reason falls inside the union contract window. The Columbus 90-day shielding pattern is the structural example.
Sources
- Electronic Frontier Foundation, Rindala Alajaji and Dave Maass: The High Crime of 'LMAO': How Cops Are Treating Mass Surveillance As a Joke (September 14, 2026). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/high-crime-lmao-how-cops-are-treating-mass-surveillance-joke
- 404 Media, Jason Koebler: Cops Search Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of 'LMAO,' 'IDK,' 'Hehe,' and 'asdfg' (September 14, 2026). https://www.404media.co/cops-search-thousands-of-flock-cameras-for-reasons-of-lmao-idk-hehe-and-asdfg/