The Courier & Press, on July 22, 2025, published an article about its town’s use of Flock and the data that Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office has been sharing with federal agencies (archive link). Evansville is located in southern Indiana and has a population of about 120,000.
Houston Harwood, the journalist at Courier & Press that wrote the article, found that officers in Florida, Texas, and other locations far from Evansville had “repeatedly queried the artificial intelligence-powered Flock Safety cameras operated by the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office for immigration-related investigations through a nationwide data-sharing program.”
Courier & Press contacted their sheriff’s department for comment before publishing the article, and were told that the department intends to continue sharing data with federal agencies for any purpose. Sgt. Patrick McDonald, who manages Evansville Police Department’s Flock network, “said that local police had no way to know if outside agencies queried Evansville’s cameras as part of immigration investigations and said the department had no way to refuse a specific search,” according to the article.
The journalist made a public records request for Evansville’s Flock data and compared the redacted data to earlier data from a national Flock network audit log to determine the nature of the search activities.
Houston Harwood’s article is excellent, covering multiple aspects of Flock systems and their local police agencies’ use of it. So far, here in Eugene, the only comparable reporting we’ve had has been from smaller, grassroots local journalists.
Harwood also provided a radio interview of his findings. The interview is very well balanced on matters of policing versus privacy in public: