# Audit-System Policy Emails (Aug 2025 - Apr 2026) Three vendor-broadcast emails from Flock to Conway PD across an 8-month window that together document **Flock's evolving response to FOIA-driven public scrutiny of its audit-log system.** The 2025-12 announcement **resolves _overview.md Open question #4** (which audit-log column was dropped at the 12/17/2025 cutover): officer names, specific plates, and vehicle fingerprint information were stripped from the **Network Audit Logs** (inter-organizational view) — and Flock cited "those abusing our transparency" as the rationale. The April 2026 announcement of an "Audit Assistance" analytics tool comes with an explicit FOIA-exposure warning baked into Flock's own pitch language. ## What's inside ### 2025-08-20 — "Understanding Sharing, Search, and Audits in the Flock LPR System" **From:** Chris Colwell, SVP of Customer Experience, Flock Safety A proactive vendor-explainer to Burningham covering data-sharing options. Key claims, verbatim: - **Data ownership:** "Each LPR camera in your network captures vehicular evidence to help solve crime. That data belongs to you as the customer. As the system administrator, you have full control over whether and how your agency shares this information with others." - **National sharing tool:** "Access via the national lookup tool is limited—users can only see results if they perform a full plate search and a positive match exists within the network of participating, opt-in agencies." - **Configurable sharing options:** "Share with agencies in specific states only · Share with agencies with similar laws (for example, regarding immigration enforcement and data) · Share within your state only or within a certain distance · Share 1:1 (only with specific agencies) · Don't share at all." - **Cross-state legal compliance:** "In some states, sharing is automatically restricted as required by law, and searches with search terms that indicate a purpose prohibited by law have been disabled in our product. For example, in Virginia, out-of-state sharing is disabled and in Illinois, accessing data for certain purposes is not allowed. However, you are responsible for knowing your agency's laws and policies." - **Private-vs-LE separation:** "**Importantly, private customers never have access to law enforcement data.**" (This is contractually significant: it cuts the OTHER direction of the Home Depot relationship — see [[Home Depot Camera Sharing Series]] — Home Depot can share TO LE but cannot see LE's data.) ### 2025-12-12 — "Important Update to Flock Audit Logs to Protect Officer Safety & Active Investigations" **From:** "Chris at Flock Safety" (Chris Colwell, SVP of Customer Experience) The cutover-announcement email. Resolves the audit-log schema-change open question. **Stated rationale:** "We cannot let those abusing our transparency compromise officer safety and the safety of our community." **Effective the week of 2025-12-12 (the 2025-12-17 cutover):** **Network Audit Logs will NOW only include:** - A unique alphanumeric search identifier - Searching agency name - Date of search - Timeframe - Number of networks searched - Offense Type or free text search reasons **Network Audit Logs will NO LONGER include** (the three fields stripped): - **Officer names** - **Specific plates searched** - **Vehicle fingerprint information** **Stated preservation of capability:** "If agency B wants to understand more details in a Network Audit, they can simply contact the originating agency A and reference the unique alphanumeric search identifier to cross-reference the specific information they require." **Organization Audit Logs** (the agency's view of its own officers' searches): "Your Organization Audit Logs, the audit trail for your agency's own users, will remain unchanged. You will continue to have full access to all details you previously relied on." **Required Offense Type field rollout:** Flock is replacing the "free text search reason" field with a standardized **Offense Type** dropdown, rolling out to all customers in December 2025. "Once the required Offense Type drop-down is live for a customer, we will replace the Free Text search reason in the Network Audit with the Offense Type." **Vendor framing:** "But when transparency is weaponized to harm officers, derail investigations, and embolden criminal networks, we have a responsibility to act. These updates help us strike the right balance: maintaining clear, consistent auditability while ensuring no sensitive information can be exploited to jeopardize your work or your people." ### 2026-04-13 — "New: Free Audit Assistance Tool Now Available" **From:** Flock Support Announcement of an "Audit Assistance" analytics tool overlay on the Organization Audit data. Key passages: - **Purpose:** "Audit Assistance is an analytics tool that aggregates data already captured in your Organization Audit, surfacing it in a more actionable, streamlined view - making compliance reviews faster and easier for your team. **No new data is collected; it is a new interface for seeing the same data already logged in your Organization Audit.**" - **FOIA-exposure warning baked into Flock's own pitch:** "If your agency is in a state with broad public records laws, **we'd recommend evaluating how a data-aggregation view like Audit Assistance is treated under those laws.**" - **Opt-in mechanism:** "those with admin privileges can navigate to your organization settings in Flock and 'Opt in' to Audit Assistance." ## Key takeaways - **The December 17 cutover is a vendor-side response to FOIA-driven public scrutiny.** Flock explicitly cites "those abusing our transparency" as the motivation. The three stripped fields (officer names, plates, vehicle fingerprint information) are precisely the fields that, when surfaced via FOIA productions, enable journalists / researchers / activists to reconstruct who searched what and when. Stripping them from Network Audit Logs reduces what a FOIA requester to an OTHER agency (agency B) can learn about Conway PD's officer searches against agency B's data. This is the **vendor protecting agencies' downstream FOIA exposure**. - **The change applies to Network Audit Logs, not Organization Audit Logs.** Per Flock's promise, the Conway-officer-internal logs (the [[Conway PD Audit Logs Series]]) should be unchanged. But the [[Conway PD Audit Logs Series]] post-cutover files show 13 columns vs. the pre-cutover 14 — meaning ONE column was nevertheless dropped from the agency-internal series. An open follow-up: compare pre- vs. post-cutover column headers directly to identify which Organization-Audit-Log field was dropped despite Flock's "remain unchanged" promise. - **The new "Offense Type" required field is structurally significant.** Replacing free-text "Reason" with a dropdown: 1. Strengthens consistency (analysis of Conway's audit logs can categorize searches by offense type). 2. Limits free-text discretion (officers can no longer write idiosyncratic reasons like "Inv" or "Other"). 3. Standardizes data exposure across agencies (a Federal Searches CSV from any agency will now use the same Offense Type vocabulary). - **"Private customers never have access to law enforcement data."** This is Flock's explicit framing on the asymmetry of private-business-into-LE camera sharing. The Home Depot rollout flows TO Conway PD; Conway PD's audit logs are not accessible to Home Depot. The asymmetry is what makes the private-business rollout policy-neutral from the vendor's perspective. - **The Audit Assistance tool comes with a FOIA-exposure warning.** Flock proactively tells customers: this analytics layer may be FOIA-discoverable in your jurisdiction; evaluate before opting in. This is unusual vendor behavior — a vendor disclaiming responsibility for downstream public-records exposure on a new feature. It's also a signal Flock has formal internal awareness that aggregation views may be FOIA-exposable as their own records (separate from the underlying logs). ## People and orgs mentioned - **Chris Colwell** — SVP of Customer Experience, Flock Safety. Author of both the Aug 2025 explainer and the Dec 2025 cutover announcement. - [[Lt. Andrew Burningham]] — recipient (he was the named Flock admin contact; both broadcast emails were addressed to him). - [[Flock Safety, Inc.]] - [[Conway Police Department]] ## Concepts invoked - [[Flock Audit Logs and Retention]] - [[Flock Network Sharing - Hot Lists]] - [[Federal LE Data-Sharing Pipeline]] - [[Private-Business Camera Sharing into LE Networks]] — the "private customers never have access" assertion - [[Surveillance Data Sharing — Default-On Posture]] ## Events documented - [[2025-12-17 Flock Platform Cutover]] — this is the announcement email that documents the rationale. - *2026-04 Audit Assistance tool launch* — Flock rolls out the analytics overlay. ## Cross-references - [[Conway PD Audit Logs Series]] — the audit-log CSVs that show the schema change at 12/17/2025. - [[Federal Searches CSV]] — the post-cutover Network Audit Log export (officer names and plates already redacted as `***`). - [[Flock Cameras Apr 2026 City Council QA Thread]] — the April 2026 Council Q&A that uses Flock's preferred talking points (some of which trace to the Aug 2025 explainer here). ## Open questions / follow-ups 1. **Organization Audit Log schema change (despite "remain unchanged" promise).** Identify the specific column dropped from the agency-internal series at 12/17/2025; Flock's email says these shouldn't have changed but they did. Open follow-up: compare the column headers directly. 2. **Offense Type vocabulary.** What dropdown values does the new Offense Type field offer? Whether the standardized vocabulary captures all the use cases the prior free-text "Reason" field allowed is testable from any post-rollout audit-log export. 3. **Has Conway PD opted into Audit Assistance?** Burningham could opt in via Flock's admin UI. If so, the data-aggregation view itself becomes a separately FOIA-discoverable record. 4. **Cross-state legal compliance assertions.** Flock claims sharing is "automatically restricted as required by law" in Virginia and Illinois. Is similar restriction in place for Arkansas? Arkansas's specific legal posture on ALPR sharing remains an open research question.