A free online tool now lets Illinois residents look up whether their license plates have been photographed and searched by Flock Safety's automated plate reader cameras, the same technology Park Ridge renewed in a contentious 5-1 vote on July 20.
The "Have I Been Flocked" website (haveibeenflocked.com/pd) uses audit logs obtained through public records requests to show how often a law enforcement agency searched the Flock system, what reasons officers gave and whether a specific plate appeared in the data, Patch reported on Aug. 5.
Cook County Sheriff ran nearly 150,000 searches
The tool's data shows the Cook County Sheriff's Office made 149,990 ALPR searches between Jan. 25, 2023, and July 1, 2026, flagging 49 plates. By comparison, the Chicago Police Department ran 405,508 searches and captured 7,874 plates during the same period, with peak activity at 4 p.m. on Wednesdays.
Park Ridge falls within Cook County, meaning residents' vehicles could appear in the sheriff's office searches even if the city's own cameras weren't involved. Whether Park Ridge Police Department-specific data is available on the tool has not been confirmed.
Park Ridge's $24,000 contract and camera vandalism
The City Council voted 5-1 on July 20 to extend its one-year Flock contract at a cost of $24,000, with Mayor Marty Maloney casting the deciding vote. Police Chief Bob Kampwirth told aldermen the cameras were useful crime-fighting tools that did not violate privacy, according to Journal Topics.
That vote came after a wave of vandalism that destroyed about half of the city's Flock cameras in June, according to a July 30 Patch report. The Park Ridge police incident reports document at least seven attacks between June 5 and June 18: camera poles sawed down at Manor Lane and Northwest Highway, Touhy Avenue and Wisner Street, and Dempster Street and Dee Road; cameras spray-painted red at Cumberland Avenue and Glenlake Avenue; and one struck with a baseball bat. At the Touhy and Wisner location, someone spray-painted "FLOCK SPIES ON YOU" on the sidewalk.
Privacy concerns and national pushback
Civil liberties groups including the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have called for warrants before searches, tighter limits on data sharing, shorter retention periods and regular audits.
"The longer you retain the data, the more troubling it becomes because it can reveal patterns of life," ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow told CNN in a July 26 report on Flock surveillance nationally. "You can start to figure out what doctor's offices a person goes to, what religious institutions, what political meetings, even where they sleep at night."
Flock says its cameras capture vehicles only at fixed public locations and that data is deleted after a default 30 days. CEO Garrett Langley told CNN on July 26 that the company launched an "audit assistance tool" that flags abnormal officer searches. Nationally, 82 Flock contracts have been terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those coming in the first five months of 2026 alone.
Anti-surveillance activists have designated Aug. 16–22 a "National Week of Action Against ALPRs."
How to check
Residents can visit haveibeenflocked.com/pd, select Illinois and search by jurisdiction. The open-source DeFlock project (deflock.org) maintains a crowdsourced map of reported camera locations statewide.
