Flock Safety’s database allows police in states that ban abortions to potentially search for women suspected of seeking “reproductive care” in other states, a company rep recently acknowledged on Long Island.
Trevor Chandler, the firm’s senior director of public affairs, made the stunning revelation during a presentation earlier this month to a group of Suffolk County pols and conceded the cameras can help “reconstruct” people’s movements, which would include under circumstances involving abortion.
But he noted that states can opt out of the searches, which New York does.
“Every agency that utilizes Flock in New York has our reproductive-health search filter turned on,” Chandler said as he was grilled by legislators on how the controversial tech works.
“This prevents any searches related to reproductive health to make sure that no searches are made out of compliance with state law,” the representative insisted.
The company added in a statement, “Certain states have enacted laws restricting the use of [license-plate-reader] data in connection with immigration enforcement or reproductive health investigations.”
But otherwise, police departments in states that do not opt out can potentially pinpoint people seeking the procedure through a simple license-plate search.
And since departments can share Flock data with other police across the nation, officers in states with bans could potentially track women who cross state lines to get an abortion in states where it remains legal — and cops currently don’t need a warrant to look through Flock’s database.
Some states with abortion bans have tried to block female residents from crossing state lines to get abortions.
In June 2025, Flock Safety claimed that a report by 404 Media that a Texas sheriff’s office had searched the company’s sprawling database “to target people seeking reproductive healthcare” as “misleading” and false.
The Johnson County Sheriff’s office searched more than 83,000 automatic-license-plat- reader cameras while looking for a woman who had an abortion, including cameras in states where the act is legal such as Washington and Illinois, according to the outlet.
Both Flock Safety and the sheriff’s office called the claim “unequivocally false” and said the searches mainly stemmed from a missing persons investigation after the family of a woman reported she had self-administered an abortion and then disappeared.
But Flock’s admission that the system is capable of making searches regarding “reproductive health,” along with court documents and police records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation — a California-based digital privacy watchdog — may contradict that account, activists said.
In a sworn affidavit, the lead detective on the case described it as a “death investigation” of a “non-viable fetus,” according to EFF.
Deputies collected photos of the abortion and the envelope the pills arrived in, reviewed the woman’s text messages and asked the local district attorney whether she could be charged for her actions, records show. She ultimately faced no charges.
The Texas case set off national backlash, starting with Illinois’ secretary of state urging the state’s attorney general to investigate, followed by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee opening a probe into Flock’s role into what they described as invasive surveillance.
Johnson County Sheriff Adam King has since been indicted on felony charges in an unrelated case, including aggravated perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury, according to EFF.
A rep from Flock Safety confirmed police in states with abortion restrictions can make these searches, but told The Post that the filter acts more as a logged reason for the police searc, and that the system does not flag or automatically track people it believes may have sought an abortion.
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