How long do Flock cameras keep data?

Seven days, if the police department, homeowners association, or business that owns the camera has accepted Flock Safety’s current default. Flock’s published policy for its automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, says plate data is “hard deleted on a rolling 7-day basis by default; this may be increased or decreased on a case-by-case basis if a different schedule is required by a customer’s law or policy.”¹ The clock runs separately for each record: the company’s evidence policy puts its standard period at seven calendar days from the date of capture.²

That default is a starting point, and a recent one. Until August 13, 2026, it was 30 days, and when Flock cut it the company said existing customers would keep the retention periods they already had.³ Each customer sets its own window within whatever its state allows, so a Flock camera you pass today may erase its photograph of your car after a week, after two weeks, after a month, or later. Flock’s own suggestion for a resident who wants to know which is to ask the chief, sheriff, city manager, or HOA board.⁴

Deletion also has edges. A record that an investigator downloads, preserves as evidence, or places under a legal hold can outlive the window, sometimes by years, and the log of who searched the system, including the plates they searched for, is a separate record with no published deletion date. The sections below cover each piece, ending with how to find the window for the cameras near you.

Flock set its first default when the company launched. In an August 13, 2026 announcement, chief executive Garrett Langley wrote that when the company started nine years earlier, it set the default ALPR retention period to 30 days, “unless state or local policy decided on a shorter or longer period.” The same post said Flock was “updating our recommendation and default to a 7-day retention,” and gave usage as the reason: the company’s analysis found that more than 90 percent of searches run without a full plate number happen within a week.³

Two parts of that announcement decide what the change means on the ground. It did not reach backward: “Existing customers will keep their current, democratically approved retention periods.” And it came with a new feature, Evidence Mode, which Flock said would roll out in the coming weeks and would let detectives preserve specific plate data “as evidence for an active investigation in cold storage.” Customers that adopt the seven-day recommendation get Evidence Mode at no cost.³ In late September, The Hill, reporting on a September 8 letter from Flock to Sen. Josh Hawley, said the company had since rolled it out.⁵

Longer windows are still available, with a condition attached. Flock’s evidence policy says the company will respect retention laws that differ from seven days, and that where a customer wants a longer period its jurisdiction’s law does not already require, Flock “will offer an extended retention for up to one year,” but only after the agency obtains “approval from an elected official and/or a governing body.”²

Not everyone considers seven days short. The ACLU recommends a rule like New Hampshire’s, under which reads that do not match a watch list are deleted within three minutes, or failing that a limit of no more than 48 hours.⁶ Its response to the announcement said the proposal “may be a step in the right direction,” with the verdict depending on how Evidence Mode works in practice.⁷

Flock is explicit that it is not the party choosing. Its policy says plate data gathered “on behalf of Flock Safety customers is owned by the customer,”¹ and its guide to deletion says that “the retention window is set by your contract and local rules, not by Flock.” The order form, the contract document listing what a customer bought, is in the company’s words “the authoritative source for what’s actually configured for your agency — 7 days, less, or more.”⁴ Flock’s customer terms define the retention period as the time footage and its metadata are stored “as specified in the applicable Order Form.”⁸

Since the change, the result has been a patchwork. In northern Illinois, Shaw Local found the Will County Sheriff’s Office planning to keep “all Flock in unincorporated Will County at 30 days.” The police chief in DeKalb, Illinois wrote that his department “will continue to have a 30-day retention window,” while Wauconda’s police department was moving to seven.⁹ In Clayton, Missouri, the police chief told the city council in September that the department had shortened its window from 30 days to seven.¹⁰

Boulder, Colorado chose neither number. On September 10, 2026, the city said it would implement new Flock safeguards, “including reducing data storage from 28 days to 14,” and would ask the district attorney whether a shorter period is possible.¹¹ Its police department’s page now reads: “License plate data is retained for 14 days, after which it is automatically deleted from the system.”¹²

Private customers work the same way. A homeowners association or business that buys Flock cameras makes the same choice under the same kind of contract, and Flock lists HOA boards alongside police chiefs and sheriffs as the people to ask.⁴ Whether state law limits that choice depends on the state, and some of the statutes below bind only government agencies.

Some states cap retention by statute. Of the 20 states whose ALPR laws our state-by-state reference tracks, 16 set a maximum period for keeping plate data that is not tied to an investigation, a preservation request, or a court order. From shortest to longest:

1. New Hampshire: 3 minutes
2. Connecticut: 21 days
3. Maine: 21 days
4. Virginia: 21 days
5. Washington: 21 days
6. Oregon: 30 days
7. Minnesota: 60 days
8. Kentucky: 90 days
9. Montana: 90 days
10. North Carolina: 90 days
11. Tennessee: 90 days
12. Arkansas: 150 days
13. Nebraska: 180 days
14. Utah: 9 months
15. Vermont: 18 months
16. Georgia: 30 months

Measured against Flock’s defaults, only New Hampshire requires deletion sooner than the new seven-day default, while five states (New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine, Virginia, and Washington) set caps shorter than the 30-day default that applied before August 2026. A cap is a ceiling, not a setting: an agency can always choose less, and most of these statutes let data connected to an investigation, a preservation request, or a warrant be kept longer. The reference page has each state’s exceptions and a link to the statute. The other four states in it (California, Illinois, Maryland, and New Mexico) have ALPR laws that set no general retention cap and regulate use or sharing instead.

Missouri has acted by executive order rather than statute, so it does not appear above. On September 16, 2026, Governor Mike Kehoe signed Executive Order 26-18, directing state agencies and state-funded local law enforcement entities that use ALPRs to ensure “the permanent deletion of all captured license plate and vehicle images within 30 days of collection,” with exceptions for active criminal investigations, life-safety emergencies such as missing persons, and court orders. When those agencies sign ALPR contracts, they must require the vendor to certify in writing that imagery will be deleted on that schedule. The order applies “to the greatest extent permissible by applicable law” and stays in effect until a later order or legislation amends, supersedes, or rescinds it.¹³ The governor’s office framed compliance by local agencies more loosely: they are “encouraged to voluntarily commit to adhering to these best practices, where possible under existing contracts and law.”¹⁴

What the schedule deletes is what Flock’s policy calls LPR data: the plate and vehicle images, vehicle characteristics such as color and make, the plate number and state, and the date, time, and camera location. That data sits briefly on the camera before moving to Amazon Web Services’ government cloud,¹ and is removed from the camera once it has uploaded.² Flock says deletion is handled by “an automated AWS S3 Lifecycle Policy that runs continuously and irreversibly,” and that “once an object is permanently deleted, it cannot be recovered — not by the customer, not by Flock, not by AWS.” It also says deletion events are logged in AWS CloudTrail and that independent auditors test the control each year as part of its SOC 2 Type II examination.⁴ Nor can the company retrieve old reads for investigators: Flock says it “cannot restore LPR data in response to legal requests once it has been deleted.”²

That schedule governs the copy in Flock’s cloud. Flock’s own documents describe what it does not reach:

• Holds and legal obligations. “Data may be retained longer when required by law, subject to a legal hold, or when a customer has a contractual or regulatory obligation to preserve specific records.”⁴
• Evidence Mode. Data preserved for an active investigation goes to cold storage instead of expiring.³ Flock’s descriptions of how much the feature keeps have differed in emphasis. A Flock statement quoted by the ACLU said that “when a search is tied to a case number, that data is preserved,” and the ACLU asked whether the feature would keep only records police identify as evidence or any data that is searched.⁷ On the day of the announcement, Flock told Gizmodo that Evidence Mode “only retains hit result data that law enforcement agencies determine may be evidence in an active investigation.”¹⁵
• Downloads. During the retention period, a customer’s authorized users can access and download data through Flock’s web interface.⁸ A downloaded file is outside the system that does the deleting; Flock’s evidence policy even offers a tool for validating images “outside of the retention period that have already been downloaded and stored.”² How long those copies last is set by the agency’s own records rules. New York City’s police department, to take one published example, says plate data can be downloaded and kept in its computer or case management systems, where a case investigation record’s retention period depends on its classification and on how the case ends, such as what an arrestee is convicted of or pleads to.¹⁶
• Search logs. Flock’s policy says “all queries of the LPR system are stored for auditing purposes,” including the username, date, time, stated purpose, and the plate searched for.¹ The policy gives those logs no deletion date, and the evidence policy directs customers who want audit logs covering “a period greater than one year” to its legal request system.² A record that someone looked up a plate can therefore outlast the plate reads the search returned.
• The end of a contract. Flock’s terms say that on termination, at the customer’s request, its confidential information, a category that includes customer data, “will be deleted within 90 days,” but that Flock need not delete data it must keep under “an applicable legal obligation or policy (e.g., inter-agency audit log integrity or metadata held for evidentiary authentication).”⁸ Our cancellation tracker follows what has happened when cities ended their contracts.
• Product improvement. The same terms grant Flock a “perpetual” license to use customer data “to support and improve Flock’s products and services,”⁸ which the company’s plain-English guide says covers work such as improving read accuracy and training the system to recognize new plate designs.¹⁷ Flock’s LPR policy adds that the company uses “a fraction of LPR images (less than one percent), which are stripped of all metadata and identifying information, solely for the purpose of improving Flock Services through machine learning.”¹ None of the three documents says whether data kept for that purpose is deleted on the customer’s schedule.

Two competitors the ACLU singles out, Axon and Motorola Solutions, also leave the number to the customer.⁶ Axon’s product guide for its Fleet 3 in-car reader says that “hit and read record retention is agency configurable. The default retention period is 30 days, after which records are deleted and cannot be retrieved,” and that reads saved as evidence are “subject to your agency’s evidence retention policy.”¹⁸

Motorola, whose Vigilant Solutions unit runs a nationwide plate-sharing system for police,⁶ tells customers their data “is held according to the retention policy set forth by you,” with separate policies possible for “detections” and “hits” (reads that match a watch list), and says it keeps no record of data after deletion unless the agency asks for metadata to be archived. The same document describes a separate commercial database of plate reads “collected by repossession vehicles,” which Motorola offers to its law enforcement and enterprise customers.¹⁹

The difference is the ceiling. The ACLU notes that Motorola and Axon let customers keep data as long as they want, while Flock “only hard-caps retention at a year,” and it points to the New York Police Department, a Motorola customer, as an example of what an uncapped choice can look like.⁶ That department’s published policy says “data collected through NYPD’s LPRs is retained for five (5) years.”¹⁶

Start with the Transparency Portal. Flock says more than 1,500 agencies have published one, and that it gives a community a view of the agency’s “policy, retention period, sharing partners, and search activity.”³ The portals are hosted on transparency.flocksafety.com, and Boulder’s police page, for one, links to its own.¹² Publishing a portal is the agency’s choice, not a default: Flock’s announcement asked agencies without one to “please, turn it on.”³ Our guide to opting out of Flock cameras covers what the portals show and what to do when there isn’t one.

Read the written policy. Some agencies state the period on their own websites, as Boulder does. In California it has to be written down: the state’s ALPR law requires ALPR operators, a definition that reaches businesses and associations as well as public agencies, to adopt a usage and privacy policy stating “the length of time ALPR information will be retained,” make it available to the public in writing, and post it conspicuously on its website if it has one.²⁰

Ask for the contract. Flock calls the order form the authoritative record of what is configured.⁴ For a public agency, that document, the agency’s ALPR policy, and its search audit logs are all things a public records request can ask for, though what each state will release varies. For a camera run by a homeowners association or business, the board or management is the place to ask.

Move quickly if you want the reads themselves. At seven days, plate images can expire while a records request is still being handled. Flock’s guidance to customers on public records requests tells them to file an emergency request with the company if the data’s retention period “is set to expire within 48 hours or over the weekend.”²¹ In some states the reads are closed to the general public: several of the statutes in our state law table make plate data confidential or exempt it from public records law, some with an exception for the vehicle’s owner.

For what a camera records in the first place, see what a Flock camera is; to see where readers have been documented near you, browse the camera index or the national map.