Since the launch of Flock Safety in 2017, the ACLU estimates the company installed some 100,000 automatic license plate readers throughout the United States. The dragnet comes with plenty of downsides to privacy and civil liberties: it’s ripe for abuse by crooked cops, powered by sweatshop labor, and nearly impossible to escape once it designates you a target.
But police officials insist it’s worth the trade off — because at it least it helps them catch the bad guys, right? Unfortunately, the reality isn’t quite that peachy.
Atlanta, Georgia has experienced far and away the largest influx of ALRPs in the country, with over 5,000 various Flock cameras now blanketing the city. Yet as bombshell data released by the FBI shows, the city’s massive web of surveillance has had virtually zero impact on the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to solve crime, with some clearance rates for offenses like homicide even experiencing a decline over the past few years as the cameras have proliferated.
First reported by the Atlanta Community Press Collective, the FBI data is a damning refutation of Flock’s primary claim: that ALPRs are necessary to help officers keep the public safe.
According to the ACPC, the rates at which the APD resolves crimes like homicide, robbery, miscellaneous larceny, and shoplifting have actually decreased between 2021 and 2025, when the city’s ALPR build-out hit its full stride.
For homicide, the numbers are especially embarrassing, with the FBI reporting case closures at just 48 percent in 2025, down from 53.4 percent in 2021. Meanwhile, rape remained flat year over year, holding steady at a pitiful 37.7 percent closure rate from 2021 to 2025, and dipping down to just 21.2 percent at its lowest point in that four-year span.
Though the APD actually did show improvement on some crime categories as Flock’s cameras sprouted all over the city, the changes from 2021 to 2025 amount to little more than rounding errors.
For example, case closures on crimes like aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft ticked up by just 0.2 and 0.3 percent, respectively. One would think motor vehicle theft solve rates would be an easy win for a technology designed to track cars, specifically. Yet in 2025, the APD was solving just one in tencases of auto theft, even with thousands of Flock ALPRs at its disposal.
Len Phillips, head of the anti-ALPR community group DeFlock Atlanta told ACPC that the “public has been asked to accept a significant expansion of surveillance based on the promise that it would dramatically improve public safety.”
In reality, Phillips continues, that tradeoff between safety and civil liberties “was just a one-way transaction.”
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