Flock Safety, the vehicle surveillance company, has developed an AI tool for police that can identify and track individuals by their driving patterns, contradicting its long-standing public claim that its technology "cannot recognise, identify, or track individuals." WIRED discovered the code for the system, previously called Nightshift and now renamed OS Investigate, exposed on Flock's own website. It matters because it marks a shift from simply matching number plates against watchlists to proactively generating suspects from patterns of ordinary, lawful movement, raising fresh constitutional and privacy concerns just as Flock faces political scrutiny and public backlash, including camera vandalism, over its existing platform.

The tool draws on a camera network spanning over 6,000 communities and comes with 69 prewritten prompts, plus the ability for officers to write custom ones. It can identify potential witnesses by counting how often a vehicle passes a location, surface a driver's "associates" from cameras they are seen with, and cross-reference plates against police case files, 911 dispatch logs and commercial databases containing names, addresses, Social Security numbers and relatives. WIRED found more than 450 related files, describing 45 tools available to the AI, openly served on Flock's login pages. Flock says the product is still in testing with a small group of law enforcement partners and may change before wider release.