What 569 Records
Requests Found
Every fact below is an agency’s own words or its own document
The Governor Called It
Out Of Control
On 26 August 2026 Governor DeSantis said of automated license plate readers, “I think it’s out of control,” called for the system to be “overhauled for sure,” and put the problem with “Police Departments and Sheriff’s Departments, by and large.”
Between 25 and 27 August 2026 we asked those departments directly. Chapter 119 requests went to 569 Florida agencies, out of 642 we identified: every county commission, sheriff, municipal police department, school district and relevant special district we could find. The remaining 73 publish no contact route that works. What follows is what came back. Nothing here is inferred, estimated, or taken from a press release.
Five Years Of Searches
With No Audit Trail
This is the finding that matters most, and it came from a department that volunteered it without being pushed.
Port St. Joe Police Department has twelve officers. It told us it operates 10 Flock plate readers, has done so since 2021, and runs roughly 30 searches a month. A written policy governing those searches was adopted in August 2026, this month.
“Although the Department has used Flock since 2021, we only recently began maintaining the audit records required under the new policy.”
Port St. Joe Police Department, August 2026
On their own figures that is about five years at thirty a month, on the order of 1,800 searches that no record survives of. Nobody can now say who ran them, on which plate, or why. Not the chief, not the city, not a court.
They disclosed this honestly and without pressure, which is the disturbing part. It reads like normal practice rather than a scandal. A retention limit on plate reads does not touch this problem: the reads are not the record that went missing, the searches are.
Vendor Staff Hold Criminal
Justice Data Access
Belleair Police Department produced a CJIS interagency agreement naming Panama City Beach Police Department as Lead Contract Agency for Flock Safety.
Under it, Panama City Beach PD maintains the roster of Flock Safety employees authorized to access Criminal Justice Information, including their fingerprint and security-screening status, and must notify contracting agencies when a Flock employee is denied access, terminated, or found to have engaged in disqualifying conduct.
Private company employees are inside the criminal justice data boundary, vetted and tracked by a police department that is not the one they are working for.
We have this agreement from Belleair. Whether Panama City Beach performs the same role for other Flock customers is exactly the question the agreement raises, and one we have asked them directly. Any oversight rule written to govern the agency misses the vendor’s staff entirely.
Face Recognition Against
Your Driver License Photo
Bradenton Beach Police Department produced, without argument, a Memorandum of Understanding with the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles for the Biometric Facial Analysis System. It grants access to “digital images of full-face Driver License Photographs… for purposes of biometric comparison.” Revision date 20 April 2026.
If you hold a Florida driver license, your photograph is in the database this MOU reaches into. You were not asked.
It is a standard form, which means it is a statewide program and FLHSMV holds a definitive list of every agency that signed one. One request to FLHSMV would establish the entire scope. We have found no place where participation is publicly disclosed.
Federal Biometric Hardware,
Pushed To Tiny Departments
Blountstown Police Department serves a city of about 2,400 people. It forwarded its entire vendor correspondence file, 34 emails, without being asked twice. In it was a message from BI2 Technologies headed:
“ICE is providing IRIS biometric identifcation to your agency.” [sic]
BI2 Technologies, in correspondence to Blountstown PD
The same file shows a Skydio drone at $22,199 reimbursed through the FDLE Drone Replacement Program under Rule 60GG-2.0075, F.A.C., and a US Department of Justice notice on using federal forfeiture money to buy drones.
None of that started with a city council deciding it wanted the equipment. Acquisition is being driven by federal offers and state grant money, which is exactly how it escapes the scrutiny a budget vote would have brought.
Confirmed By The
Agencies Themselves
Where an agency produced documents or stated numbers in writing:
| Agency | What they confirmed | How |
|---|---|---|
| Sumter County Sheriff | 14 Flock devices, Vigilant ESA | Their production |
| Port St. Joe PD | 10 Flock devices, ~30 searches a month, no audit records before Aug 2026 | Their statement |
| Belleair PD | Flock contract, invoices, CJIS agreement, FACES access | Their production |
| Bradenton Beach PD | FLHSMV biometric facial analysis MOU | Their production |
| Blountstown PD | Skydio drone, Axon, ICE iris offer | Their production |
| Wauchula PD | Plate readers and drones | Their statement |
| Union County Sheriff | Drone confirmed; plate reader records withheld as exempt | Their statement |
| Highlands County Schools | HALO sensors in student bathrooms | Their statement |
Independent research by the EFF Atlas of Surveillance additionally records Flock at Leesburg (10), Edgewater (14), Holly Hill (8), Daytona Beach (32), Daytona Beach Shores (6), Port Orange, and Gadsden County Sheriff (20), plus Fusus real-time crime centers at the Lake and Volusia County Sheriffs. Separately reported, and not from the Atlas: roughly 7,500 plate readers in Florida (WUFT) and at least 100 Florida agencies using Flock (GovTech).
The Right Of Access
Barely Functions
Article I, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution makes every government record yours by right. We identified 642 agencies and reached 569 of them; the other 73 publish no working contact route. Here is what happened to those 569 requests. Each agency is counted once, by the furthest its answer got, so the rows add up to 569.
| Outcome | Agencies |
|---|---|
| Produced records | 9 |
| Said they hold nothing | 54 |
| Said a charge would apply | 21 |
| Pointed at a different office | 48 |
| Acknowledged and nothing since | 145 |
| Answered in some other way | 56 |
| No response at all | 236 |
Two of those obstacles are structural rather than anyone’s decision:
Around 16 agencies can only be reached through a portal gated by an image CAPTCHA. A constitutional right of access should not require solving a puzzle, and those puzzles defeat screen readers outright. A blind Floridian cannot file with those agencies at all.
Two dozen agencies publish a records email address that their own mail server rejects. The official route does not work. A member of the public gets a bounce and no indication that anything else exists.
One department produced a vendor’s bank account and routing number unredacted, contrary to s. 119.071(5)(b), Fla. Stat.
We told them. They corrected it, asked us to delete our copy, and we did: the document, the images made from it, and the email that carried it. We record it here because it shows small departments handling these productions with no redaction support, and the next requester may not tell them.
Four Things
1. Mandatory audit logging of searches, recording who ran it, when, and under what case number, retained and independently auditable. Limits on how long plate reads are kept do not answer who went looking.
2. Public disclosure of participation in statewide programs: FLHSMV’s biometric system and the FDLE drone program, so the scope is knowable without filing 642 individual requests.
3. Accountability for vendor personnel who hold criminal justice data access, not just for the agencies that contract them.
4. A public contact route that works as a condition of operating the technology. An agency that cannot be reached cannot be held to account.
Every underlying record is available on request. Agency correspondence and per-agency status are published across this site.