Look up a license plate in Flock search logs

Every search of Flock’s system is recorded for auditing: Flock’s policy says the record keeps the searcher’s username, the date and time, the stated purpose, and the plate searched for.¹ Those audit logs are public records in many places. Some agencies release them in response to public records requests, and some publish their search activity on a Flock transparency portal.²

The lookup searches a collection of released logs kept by Have I Been Flocked?, an independent project that gathers audit logs obtained through public records requests. As of September 27, 2026, the project counted more than 4.6 million plates across more than 243 million Flock searches. Finding Flock is not affiliated with it. The records are the project’s rather than our reporting, and this page shows only part of each one.

A match is a record of a search. It means someone with access to Flock searched for those characters and an agency’s log recorded it. It does not show whether, or when, the car passed a camera. Flock’s customers are not only police, so the searcher is not necessarily an officer, and a search does not mean anyone was stopped or investigated. The reason is whatever the searcher entered: a lead worth asking about, not a finding.

The state is not recorded. Flock’s description of a search record includes the plate but not the state that issued it,¹ so a match can be a car from another state with the same characters.

Look-alike matches. Plates are entered by hand, and O and 0, or I and 1, are easy to confuse, so the lookup also checks versions of the plate with those characters swapped. A look-alike match may be your plate entered differently, or a different plate; each result says which kind it is. Matching is done on a short fingerprint of each plate, so very rarely a record for an unrelated plate can match as well.

No match does not mean no search. The collection holds only the logs that have been released, and the project notes that they can arrive months or years after the searches they record. Since December 2025, Flock has masked sensitive fields in the network audits that show one agency searching another’s cameras,³ so such a search turns up only if the searching agency’s own log is released. And the camera reads themselves, the photos of a passing car, are not in these logs at all: at Flock’s default they are deleted after seven days,² while its policy sets no deletion date for search records.¹ How long Flock cameras keep data covers both.

See the cameras near you. The map and the camera index by state and city show where volunteers have documented license plate readers.

Check the agency’s transparency portal. Flock says more than 1,500 agencies publish one, showing their policy, retention period, sharing partners, and search activity.² Our guide to finding an agency’s retention period covers what else to look for.

Request the audit logs. For the details of a particular search, ask the agency that ran it for its Flock audit logs through a public records request. Our reporting on how to check your own agency covers which logs to ask for and what to expect.

Take it to the people who decide. Retention, sharing, and the contract itself are local decisions. Our tracker of cities that dropped Flock records where councils ended their programs, and license plate reader laws, state by state sets out what each state requires.

The plate you type stays in your browser. The page tidies it, adds the look-alike versions, and computes a SHA-256 hash of each; only the first eight characters of those hashes are sent to this site’s server, which passes them to Have I Been Flocked? and returns the matching records. A hash prefix is not anonymous, since anyone with a list of plates can compute the same one, so nothing about a lookup is stored or logged here, and the plate never appears in the page address or in analytics.

The lookup runs the same invisible Vercel check as our contact form, and limits how many lookups one visitor can run in a few minutes. After a lookup, a button can open Have I Been Flocked? with your plate filled in; that sends the plate from your browser straight to that site, under its own privacy policy. To have a plate’s records hidden from this lookup, use the contact form and choose the plate lookup as the topic. The privacy notice has the details.