Kunle Falayi

Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO

Surveillance network data obtained by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO shows how widely outside law enforcement agencies searched Flock Safety systems in Virginia for immigration-related offenses.

VCIJ at WHRO’s analysis of network data from Flock Safety’s Automatic License Plate Reader systems in Virginia was queried by more than 4,000 agencies across the U.S. About 3,000 of the searches conducted by those agencies appear related to immigration enforcement. – despite local agencies promising not to share or use the data for that purpose.

The audit data from the small town of Bridgewater and rural Mecklenburg County give an expansive view of the use of Flock’s ALPR system in immigration enforcement throughout the state. At least 29 law enforcement agencies in Virginia have Flock systems.

Neither Bridgewater nor Mecklenburg County conducted an immigration-related search in their Flock system, according to VCIJ at WHRO’s analysis. But because the data was linked to a broad network, other agencies were able to access and search ALPR data for immigration enforcement.

VCIJ at WHRO filed multiple records requests for audit logs from Flock license plate readers in June, asking every Virginia agency using the technology to identify who searched the data between June 2024 and June 2025. The requests also sought each user’s jurisdiction, reason for searching, and the time of each query.

VCIJ did not request or receive personal data, such as license plate or vehicle information.

The commonwealth’s new ALPR law, which took effect in July, has limited access to the ALPR data to only Virginia law enforcement agencies. The law has also exempted the network audit data from public records.

Search the data we received before the law took effect.

Reach Kunle Falayi at kunle.falayi@vcij.org and at kunle.falayi@whro.org or @kingart.32 on Signal.