A Washington Post investigation published in early August 2026 found that at least 50 law enforcement officers across the United States have been charged with or accused of misusing Flock’s automated license plate reader network, most often to track women they knew personally.
In Mooresville, North Carolina, Officer Elizabeth Snowman was arrested and charged on August 5, 2026 with accessing computers after allegedly using Flock cameras to track her boyfriend’s ex-wife. According to the police chief, Snowman logged most of the 31 trackings as motor vehicle infractions to justify the searches. The department says it is reviewing 10 additional potential misuse cases.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, CMPD Officer Seth Elliott was arrested on July 29, 2026 for improperly accessing the Flock system. The State Bureau of Investigation discovered the access during an unrelated case.
In Milwaukee, Detective Tehrangi Chapman was charged with misconduct in public office and misuse of a GPS device after admitting he used the department’s Flock system 20 times to track two people. He is the second Milwaukee officer charged with misusing the system.
In Riverside County, California, former Sheriff’s Deputy Alexander Vanny was convicted on 10 charges, including stalking and unauthorized access to electronic data, after using Flock as part of a monthslong campaign against his former fiancée. He was sentenced in February 2026 to six years in prison.
In Georgia alone, the Institute for Justice and Reason.com have documented 18 officer arrests across multiple counties for Flock database misuse, including five Albany police officers arrested and fired on July 6, 2026 after an internal audit found repeated non-law-enforcement use of the system.
These are not edge cases. According to a Newsweek review published in July 2026, officers in 12 states have faced allegations of misusing Flock’s surveillance system to track romantic partners, family members, and personal acquaintances. Pennsylvania is one of those 12 states. The specific case has not been publicly identified.
That raises a question most people in this region have never thought to ask: how many Flock cameras are operating in Northeast Pennsylvania right now?
The answer, for most of NEPA, is that nobody knows.
What Flock Is
Flock Safety is a private surveillance company based in Atlanta, founded in 2017 and currently valued at $8.4 billion. It operates roughly 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras across 49 states. The cameras photograph every plate that passes, along with the vehicle’s make, model, color, and distinguishing features like bumper stickers, roof racks, and body damage. That data uploads to a shared national database that any subscribing law enforcement agency can search.
The company reports more than 20 billion plate scans per month.
Municipalities do not own the cameras. Flock does. Local governments pay a subscription fee, typically $2,400 to $3,650 per camera per year, for the hardware, software, maintenance, and access to the network.
But police departments are not the only customers. Businesses, HOAs, and property management companies can purchase Flock cameras independently and opt to share the data with law enforcement. That private-camera layer feeds into the same national database. It does not appear in any municipal budget, contract, or public record.
What We Know About NEPA
According to DeFlock data queried through the Overpass API, there are 223 mapped ALPRs across the six counties that make up the Poconos: Monroe, Wayne, Pike, Lackawanna, Carbon, and Luzerne. That sounds like a number. It is not.
Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, which include Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, account for the bulk of that total. Those are urban cores where residents are aware of the cameras and reporting them. Strip those two counties out and the number drops to a handful spread across 2,400 square miles of the rural Poconos.
The Stroudsburg-to-Honesdale corridor, over 30 miles of Route 6 and 191 connecting two of the region’s more populated towns, has a single documented camera.
Lowe’s and Home Depot are confirmed Flock users nationally. Neither chain has a single reported camera in the rural Poconos on DeFlock’s map.
Millions of visitors pass through this region every year on I-80, I-84, Route 611, and Route 940. They are driving through a surveillance infrastructure that nobody is documenting.
The question is whether the cameras are not there or whether people are simply not reporting them. The data points to the latter. We ran the same Overpass query against six NYC metro feeder counties (Westchester, Rockland, and Orange in New York; Passaic, Morris, and Bergen in New Jersey) and the mapped ALPR counts came back similar or lower. These are dense, affluent, heavily trafficked suburban counties. If their numbers look like the Poconos, the problem is not that rural areas have fewer cameras. The problem is that rural areas have fewer people looking.
The most documented deployment in NEPA is Hazleton. The city operates 60 Flock cameras and 164 Raven gunshot detection units. In a single 30-day period in 2023, those cameras logged more than five million plate reads. Chief Brian Schoonmaker has called the system a game changer. Hazleton was the first community in the tri-state area to deploy Flock at a citywide scale, and the system has since expanded to West Hazleton, Hazle Township, and Weatherly in Carbon County.
The adoption was driven by the June 2021 hit-and-run death of 15-year-old Hector Padilla on South Poplar Street. Investigators spent over a month identifying a white pickup truck because no camera in the area captured a plate.
Statewide, DeFlock counts roughly 3,250 ALPRs in Pennsylvania and the surrounding area. Fifty-nine percent are Flock cameras.
Monroe County has a single camera documented on DeFlock’s map, in Stroudsburg. Pike County and Wayne County have zero. No transparency portals exist for any of them. Pocono Mountain Regional Police, Stroud Area Regional Police, and every borough in the region have made no public disclosure on the subject.
Pennsylvania has no state law governing ALPR data retention, access, or sharing. PennDOT bars the installation of new ALPR structures in state rights-of-way, which pushes deployment onto private property like retail parking lots, HOA gates, and business entrances where public records requests do not apply.
What DeFlock Is
DeFlock is a free, open-source project that crowdsources the locations of surveillance cameras, including Flock and other brands, and maps them on OpenStreetMap. It was started by Will Freeman, who began noticing the cameras on a cross-country drive from Washington state to Alabama.
As of mid-2026, DeFlock has mapped more than 336,000 ALPR nodes worldwide. The project collects no user data, runs no ads, and tracks no analytics. Users submit camera locations with metadata including brand, direction, and operator. The result is a searchable, public map of surveillance infrastructure that would otherwise remain invisible.
DeFlock also tracks 562 known Flock customer transparency portals and aggregates camera counts, search totals, and inter-agency sharing data.
To learn more about what ALPRs are and how they work, visit deflock.org/what-is-an-alpr.
Where to Look First
Lowe’s and Home Depot are both documented Flock users. Records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed law enforcement access to Flock cameras at 173 Lowe’s locations nationwide. In Pennsylvania, Millcreek Township in Erie County signed a data-sharing MOU specifically to access a local Lowe’s camera feed. It passed unanimously with no public discussion.
None of the Poconos-area Lowe’s or Home Depot locations appear on DeFlock’s map.
Look for a thin black pole with a solar panel near the parking lot entrance. If you see one, submit it.
How to Submit a Camera to DeFlock
Download the app:
- iPhone: App Store
- Android: Google Play
Set up your account: The app will prompt you to create a free OpenStreetMap account if you do not already have one. Grant location permission so the map can follow you in real time. Turn on notifications if you want alerts when you approach a known camera.
When you find a camera:
- Open the app and tap “New Node.”
- Position the pin on the map at the camera’s location.
- Set the direction the camera faces.
- Select a profile that matches the device. The app has pre-built profiles for Flock and other common brands.
- Add an operator if you know who runs it.
- Tap Submit.
The data syncs to OpenStreetMap automatically. It can take up to an hour for the node to appear on the map. Do not resubmit if it seems slow — check your changesets on OpenStreetMap first.
A passenger can submit while driving. You do not need to stop. If you are unsure whether something is a Flock camera, photograph it and check against DeFlock’s identification guide at deflock.org/report. For a full walkthrough with screenshots, DeFlock maintains a detailed mobile guide at blog.deflock.me/deflock-mobile-guide.
Coverage in rural NEPA and the Poconos is thin. Every submission fills a gap.
Tips on ALPR cameras in Northeast Pennsylvania can be sent to tips@poconoreview.com.