Flock Safety is scrapping an audio surveillance product that could flag gunshots, screams and other signs of “human distress,” after privacy advocates objected to putting that kind of listening system on public streets.
The company, best known for selling automated license plate readers to police agencies, disclosed the decision in a July 10 blog post. Flock said it would “remove” the feature after “community consultation.”
Flock said the system was built to spot possible violent incidents in places where other public safety tools were less useful. The company also said the feature had only been offered to a small group of customers in a limited trial and had not been widely released.
The part that drew scrutiny was not gunshot detection by itself. Flock’s Distress Detection feature was also designed to detect sounds associated with people in danger, including screaming. That pushed the product into a more sensitive category: microphones in public spaces listening for human vocalizations, even if the company says they were not recording or interpreting conversations.
Flock tried to make that boundary explicit in its post. The company said the system “cannot understand speech, analyze language, or identify voices,” and added that it does not do so now and has not done so before.
EFF says the risk was broader than speech recognition
The Electronic Frontier Foundation had raised alarms about the product after reporting on its existence in October 2025. In a July 17 blog post, EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia said the decision to end the rollout was a win for civil liberties.
Guariglia argued that the danger was not limited to whether Flock could transcribe speech or identify a particular speaker. He said the system raised civil liberties concerns, could send armed police to loud street encounters, and might violate eavesdropping laws in some states.
That is the basic fight over acoustic policing tools: vendors describe classifiers that convert sound patterns into alerts, while critics focus on where the microphones sit, who gets notified, and what happens when ordinary public noise is treated as a signal for police response.
Flock’s post does not say how many agencies tested the feature or identify the customers that had access to it. The company’s explanation also does not say whether any alerts from the limited trial led to police responses.
Flock faces broader pushback
The audio decision lands as Flock is already under pressure over its license plate reader business. Earlier in July, the Los Angeles Police Department said it would halt its contract with Flock, joining other law enforcement agencies that have moved away from the company.
LAPD officials have said they want stronger protections around how Flock-collected information is managed and stored. That dispute concerns vehicle-location data rather than audio, but it points to the same issue now surrounding Flock’s abandoned listening feature: public agencies are buying surveillance infrastructure faster than many communities have settled the rules for using it.
This story draws on original reporting from The Record.
