How an Atlanta Suburb Ended Up Sharing Flock Data With More Than 2,000 Organizations

Alpharetta, a prosperous suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, is home to about 67,000 people, served by about 120 local police officers . It also hosts several dozen cameras sold by Flock Safety, the increasingly controversial surveillance company that collects license plate data and other information and makes it searchable by police .

Data captured by those Flock cameras, WIRED has learned via public records requests, is accessible to more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, airports, and government agencies across the United States. These range from Morehouse College to Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission and include Medicare fraud investigators in Illinois, a drug task force focused on east-central Missouri, and the inspector general of a federal agency.

In return, Alpharetta receives Flock data from more than 1,300 entities, which span from the prosecutor’s office of Whitley County, Indiana, to the Metro Police Authority of Genesee County, Michigan.

The Alpharetta Police Department—which, as reported by WIRED , had an officer resign due to Flock misuse on August 5—also exchanges Flock data with several agencies that have been similarly rocked by recent incidents of officers misusing its technology, including Georgia’s Bibb County Sheriff’s Department , the Savannah Police Department , and the Dallas Police Department .

Alpharetta’s data-sharing network has expanded tremendously over the past year. Since June 2025, the number of entities receiving data from Alpharetta police has grown by about 42 percent, and the number of entities sending data to them has grown by about 125 percent. And, according to documents obtained via public records requests from several other cities around the country, Alpharetta is far from alone in having an expansive and complicated data-sharing system, providing a potent example of how pervasive Flock’s surveillance network has become.

One of Flock’s central selling points is its network of customers—mostly, though not entirely, law enforcement agencies. If a criminal suspect crosses city, county, or perhaps state lines, Flock tells its customers , a query can prevent them from falling through the cracks.

Data sharing across agencies is hardly novel. A police department can, for instance, share data from its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) with state-run fusion centers , which centralize resources from law enforcement agencies in particular regions. They could also share it with a regional High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program. (Alpharetta police agreed to do just that in 2025, according to a memorandum of understanding that WIRED obtained.)