A "Public Safety-as-a-Service" Industry
A small number of private vendors now provide most of the interlocking surveillance infrastructure used by American police departments: license plate recognition, gunshot detection, body camera evidence management, biometric facial recognition, and real-time crime center software. These systems are increasingly built to talk to each other. Confirmed
Flock & Axon — From Partners to Rivals
Axon Enterprise made an early minority investment in Flock in 2020, integrating Flock's plate data directly into Axon's Evidence.com platform so officers could cross-reference mobile and fixed camera captures automatically. Axon acquired Fusus, a competing real-time crime center platform, in February 2024, putting the two companies in increasingly direct competition. The data-sharing partnership formally ended around January 2025, with Axon cutting off new mutual customers that July. Flock responded by opening its own API to other dispatch and CAD platforms like Motorola, Mark43, and Tyler Technologies. Confirmed
Palantir
Palantir's Gotham and Foundry platforms aggregate multi-agency datasets for federal clients including the FBI, DEA, ATF, and ICE's case management system — reportedly totaling $687 million in federal contracts in a single quarter of 2026. Confirmed Flock Safety has publicly stated it has no formal relationship, integration, or shared infrastructure with Palantir. Self-Reported by Flock We found no independent evidence contradicting that specific claim — the connection between the two companies in this ecosystem is structural (both feed into the same regional fusion centers and federal databases) rather than a direct corporate integration.
Clearview AI & Facial Recognition
Clearview AI has compiled a facial recognition database that surpassed 40 billion images by late 2025 — roughly double its size from less than two years earlier — scraped from the public internet without consent. Flock states its own cameras do not perform on-device facial recognition. Self-Reported by Flock The risk isn't that Flock does this directly — it's that once vehicle tracking data lands in a shared regional system, it can be paired with facial recognition and cell-site data from other vendors, letting agencies move from "where has this car been" to "who, specifically, was driving it." Confirmed
For a closer look at Clearview, Palantir, Axon, and SoundThinking individually — including specific contract figures — see The Surveillance Conglomerate.
Fusion Centers
Since shortly after September 11, DHS has funded a network of roughly 79–80 regional "fusion centers" designed to share intelligence horizontally between local police, state troopers, and federal agencies. ALPR data is one of the most valuable inputs these centers ingest, since it lets them run pattern analysis across jurisdictions that would otherwise never share data directly. Confirmed
Cleveland: A Case Study in Consolidation
In 2026, Cleveland approved a $2,026,500, three-year contract to replace its SoundThinking ShotSpotter gunshot detection system with Flock's competing audio detection product — after a Cleveland State University study found ShotSpotter generated low operational value (only 10% of alerts resulted in an official report). Consolidating onto one vendor lets the city route audio alerts, plate detections, and video into a single dashboard. Confirmed This is the direction the industry is heading: fewer vendors, more integrated systems, more data flowing into the same place.
International Comparison
The EU's GDPR framework imposes meaningfully stricter constraints on automatic number plate recognition than current US law does in most states — requiring documented legal basis, retention limits, and data subject rights that simply don't exist federally in the US. Confirmed The state laws covered in our Legal page are, in effect, US states individually building toward something closer to that baseline.