In just the first 6 months of 2025, law enforcement officers and officials across the nation searched the database containing license plates scanned in Spokane County a staggering 2,301,239 times.
Only 110,067 of those searches originated from local jurisdictions like the Spokane Police, Spokane Sheriff and Spokane Tribal Police.
Over 95% came from jurisdictions outside Spokane, like Texas and Alabama, where abortion is illegal and where state officials have said they are actively trying to prosecute women who cross state lines to get one and even the doctors that provide them.
Those searches also came from right across the border in Idaho and as far away as Florida and Iowa. In Washington, state law explicitly prohibits local authorities and law enforcement from working with immigration officials to enforce federal immigration laws. There is no such prohibition in Idaho and Florida.
Officials like Kootenai County Sheriff Robert Norris have said they are actively working with the federal government to support the Trump administration’s goal of deporting as many people as possible.
The technology is not new: red light camera systems have been around since the mid-1960s and came to Spokane in 2008.
But unlike those traditional cameras, which generally only take a photo when a vehicle is believed to have been caught in an infraction like running a red light, Flock cameras are always on, recording license plates and other details of everyone who passes by all day, every day.
This omnipresence, together with the networked, searchable Flock database spreading rapidly throughout law enforcement jurisdictions, represents a quantum leap in the surveillance power available to governments of all sizes — from the feds to even small jurisdictions — to track their citizens regardless of where they are in the United States and, increasingly the rest of the world.
It’s that profound power that led us to spend over five months digging into the impacts of this network on our neighbors in the Inland Northwest, including creating a data-sharing agreement with the University of Washington, who have been researching the impacts of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology like Flock since 2022.
Today we are publishing the first in a series of deeply reported stories on the use of Flock camera data collected in Spokane County and then used by jurisdictions across the United States.
This series will show, in detail, how — even in a state where reproductive rights are protected and local law enforcement is prevented from actively coordinating with ICE — a powerful and largely unregulated technology allows anyone with access to circumvent the will of voters and the will of legislators to spy on the private lives of Spokanites and those visiting our area.
The right to privacy has never been a partisan issue, and should not be here.
Privacy concerns created by new technologies were a problem before either Trump administration and will continue after he leaves office.
Nor is this a new concern. Limiting state power and specifically preventing unwarranted surveillance was of primary importance to the people before the founding of the US itself, evidenced by court proceedings from the 1760s.
They then wrote protections against general warrants and unfettered surveillance into our founding documents.
We believe it’s all of our duty to demand the preservation of those freedoms, and that starts by understanding where and precisely how those freedoms are being violated, so we can understand how to fight back.
Read on: ‘Had an abortion, search for female.’ Texas deputy searched Spokane County Flock cameras
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