Flock Safety’s database allows police in states that ban abortions to potentially search for women suspected of seeking “reproductive care” in other states, a company rep recently acknowledged on Long Island.
Trevor Chandler, the firm’s senior director of public affairs, made the stunning revelation during a presentation earlier this month to a group of Suffolk County pols and conceded the cameras can help “reconstruct” people’s movements, which would include under circumstances involving abortion.
But he noted that states can opt out of the searches, which New York does.
“Every agency that utilizes Flock in New York has our reproductive-health search filter turned on,” Chandler said as he was grilled by legislators on how the controversial tech works.
Suffolk County Legislature
“This prevents any searches related to reproductive health to make sure that no searches are made out of compliance with state law,” the representative insisted.
The company added in a statement, “Certain states have enacted laws restricting the use of [license-plate-reader] data in connection with immigration enforcement or reproductive health investigations.”
But otherwise, police departments in states that do not opt out can potentially pinpoint people seeking the procedure through a simple license-plate search.
And since departments can share Flock data with other police across the nation, officers in states with bans could potentially track women who cross state lines to get an abortion in states where it remains legal — and cops currently don’t need a warrant to look through Flock’s database.
Some states with abortion bans have tried to block female residents from crossing state lines to get abortions.
In June 2025, Flock Safety claimed that a report by 404 Media that a Texas sheriff’s office had searched the company’s sprawling database “to target people seeking reproductive healthcare” as “misleading” and false.
The Johnson County Sheriff’s office searched more than 83,000 automatic-license-plat- reader cameras while looking for a woman who had an abortion, including cameras in states where the act is legal such as Washington and Illinois, according to the outlet.
Both Flock Safety and the sheriff’s office called the claim “unequivocally false” and said the searches mainly stemmed from a missing persons investigation after the family of a woman reported she had self-administered an abortion and then disappeared.
