The Joplin Police Department notified the public of misuse of the department’s Flock license plate reading camera system earlier this month. They say they’ve let go of the employee responsible and referred any potential investigation to the Missouri Highway Patrol.
Organizers of a grass roots effort to better understand the city’s use of Flock, believe their questions and records request prompted JPD’s actions.
Michael Williams is an organizer with the group Deflock Joplin, he said the group “wanted to make sure that accountability did take place.” Williams explained, “what happened here is an example of nobody's watching the watchers. And we wanted to do that.”
He said he and other organizers were not aware of the department’s use of Flock until this past September.
As they read more about the system and its use across the country, they wanted to better understand how police were using it in their community.
“The mission was primarily informational,” Williams said. “And to really demonstrate, how this system worked and the critical flaws with it and the accountability problems with it.”
Williams said they quickly found a database of Flock data online at haveibeenflocked.com. They also found a trove of Flock records that were part of a public records request in Washington. Those datasets corroborated each other, and he says when they looked at Joplin’s data, there were almost immediate concerns.
“There was obviously a problem going on,” Williams said, “we sorted by one key feature, which was like you could look at span, which is how long the tracking has been going on, or you can look at the count, which is how many, how many searches has been have been done on a single plate. And both of these metrics were extremely concerning for a couple plates and like jumped out at us right away. And that's what really made us feel like, okay, we got to do something about this in particular.”
Deflock Joplin anonymized all information that was not already anonymous and published their discoveries online in what they describe as an audit. Their findings, which have been tentatively confirmed by KSMU, show one user with the Joplin Police Department was responsible for almost a quarter of the department’s searches in Flock, which occurred over the course of 2025. In their public records data from Washington Deflock Joplin found that user searched one license plate almost 400 times, and another license plate almost 150 times. They chose to follow up with a request for information from JPD.
“Our first records process was a very generic,” Williams said, “but then when it felt like they were messing with us, we filed a second one about the officer's exact name and the plates they were searching.”
KSMU reached out to Joplin Police Chief Richard Pearson for comment and confirmation of Deflock Joplin’s account. We’ve not heard back.
In a statement Saturday, January 10 JPD said it became aware of a possible policy violation in December, 2025.
Williams said Deflock Joplin still has questions, about the city’s purchase of its Flock account, about the security of the system and about how Flock may be violating camera data sharing laws in California and Illinois. He says they have sympathy for the cases JPD has helped resolve with the use of Flock, but there must be a balancing act.
“I and others think that Flock itself is a deeply flawed company,” he explained, “and I'm not sure the Flock system itself can be saved at this point. However, I would suggest that if an LPR system like Flock were to exist, there are a lot of safeguards that can be implemented.
Those suggested safeguards include two-factor identification, a cloud for data that is secure from the company and assurances that the system itself is secure from bad actors.
“A lot of it comes down to more accountability, better cybersecurity controls and better engineering,” Williams said.
The Flock license plate reader system allows departments to track license plates across jurisdictions using a network of AI empowered cameras. They are in use across the country and the Ozarks. The company and the use of its services have faced public backlash elsewhere. There have been multiple cases of officers across the US allegedly misusing Flock in stalking scenarios.
A typical appropriate use case use might be searching for plates to a vehicle that has left the scene of a crime to see where its been seen since. JPD says it has also used it to locate missing juveniles.
In their statement January 10, the Joplin Police Department said Flock provides critical information to keep felons of the street. They’ll continue to use it, with additional safeguards, which include but are not limited to “updating the current license plate reader policy governing license plate readers, monthly audits of the system and individual users, and continued oversight of activities related to all license plate reader investigations by the Office of Internal Affairs.”