{
  "id": 8076189,
  "title": "‘Flock City PD:’ The Fake Flock-Owned ‘Police Department’ That Searched Real Cameras for Real People",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/17/flock-city-pd-the-fake-flock-owned-police-department-that-searched",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-17T18:07:20.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "404 Media",
    "slug": "404-media",
    "url": "https://www.404media.co/flock-city-pd-the-fake-flock-owned-police-department-that-searched-real-cameras-for-real-people/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "A company called Flock created a fake police department named \"Flock City PD\" to showcase its surveillance system's capabilities by allegedly searching real cameras in several U.S. cities during demonstrations. The audit logs shared with 404 Media revealed that Flock City PD searched cameras for various politically charged topics, such as \"coexist bumper sticker,\" \"Star of David,\" \"person wearing a mask,\" \"crowd,\" \"white truck with a Trump sticker,\" and \"don't tread on me flag.\" Some searches were blocked, while others displayed a warning prompt before proceeding. These searches have raised concerns about privacy and the use of private companies for law enforcement purposes. Flock has stated that these experiments were done to demonstrate the safeguards and moderation tools in place to prevent invasive searches and protect First Amendment rights.",
  "summary": "Flock ran searches for “coexist bumper sticker,” “white truck with a trump sticker,” and “Star of David,” apparently to demonstrate what cops shouldn't search for.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}