Flock cut its default data retention to seven days and will require a case number for every search
Garrett Langley announced a set of changes on 13 August. The default retention period for plate data drops from 30 days to seven. Officers will have to enter a case code for every search by the end of 2026, emergency searches get flagged for administrative review automatically, and the Audit Assistance feature becomes mandatory for all law enforcement customers by the same deadline, with automatic lockouts when a user's activity meets abnormal-behaviour criteria. Agencies also gain control over which investigation types other departments can pursue using their cameras. Langley said abuse of the technology at any level is unacceptable. Two caveats belong with this. Existing customers keep their currently approved retention periods, so the seven-day default applies to new deployments rather than the network as it stands today, and the case-number requirement is a year-end commitment rather than something already in force. The changes follow the Washington Post investigation into officers using the system to track partners and ex-partners, and a year in which more than 50 agencies or communities cancelled, deactivated or rejected Flock. The case-code requirement addresses a real and documented failure: Columbus's released audit logs show its officers used 7,774 different free-text search reasons, the most common of which were "45", "Stolen", "50a", "43" and "LE".
From the reporting
- Announced 13 August 2026 by chief executive Garrett Langley.
- Default retention falls from 30 days to seven. Existing customers keep their currently approved periods.
- A new Evidence Mode preserves specific records for active investigations at no extra cost.
- Officers must enter a case code for every search by the end of 2026. Emergency searches are automatically flagged for administrative review.
- Audit Assistance becomes mandatory for all law enforcement customers by the end of 2026, and will suspend accounts automatically rather than only flagging them.
- Agencies can decide which investigation types other departments may pursue using their camera data.
- Langley: "Abuse of Flock technology, at any level, is unacceptable."
- For scale on the retention question: the California Police Chiefs Association opposed even a 30-day limit at legislative hearings in April.
- Civil liberties groups including the ACLU have publicly questioned whether the changes are substantive or defensive.
- Filed as ONGOING. Most of this takes effect at the end of 2026 and none of it can be verified yet.
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