A New AI Police Tool Can Find You by How You Drive and What You Look Like

Flock Safety, a company that makes cameras for police, is testing a new AI tool called OS Investigate. The tool can identify individual drivers by their driving habits and find people based on physical descriptions, according to reporting by Wired and confirmed by Engadget on August 19, 2026.

OS Investigate uses a network of cameras placed across 6,000 communities to track the movements of drivers in those areas. The software was previously developed under the name Nightshift. It can help police find potential witnesses to a crime by looking at which vehicles were near a crime scene, then checking that information against police case files, 911 call logs, and commercial identity records. According to Wired, the tool can "search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description."

The software includes a chatbot — a program that responds to questions typed in everyday language. Officers can type requests in plain words, and OS Investigate comes with 69 ready-made search prompts. Flock says it is testing the tool with select law enforcement partners and that current capabilities "may not reflect" what it eventually ships commercially.

This reporting builds on a surveillance system that is already very large. Flock's cameras, known as automatic license plate readers, identify passing vehicles not only by license plates but also by bumper stickers, roof racks, and other physical features, according to Wired. The company uses machine learning — a type of AI that learns to recognize patterns in data — to automatically detect license plates, vehicles, and people, including the clothing they are wearing (Wired). Flock Safety's cameras log vehicle details and capture images of people, feeding all of that data into one searchable system operating across 49 states, CNN reported. PBS NewsHour has reported that U.S. law enforcement agencies use AI-powered cameras to scan billions of vehicles each month, often without drivers' awareness.

Flock's reach extends to major public events. Wired identified 1,181 Flock-manufactured cameras near U.S. World Cup stadiums. Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a CNN interview that the company's AI cameras assisted police in the case of the Brown suspect.

Flock had previously signaled its direction in AI-powered investigations. In a February 2025 blog post, the company described its FreeForm Search tool, which lets officers find vehicles using plain-language descriptions such as "blue SUV with racing stripe." OS Investigate appears to be a much more capable version of that approach, adding chatbot-style searching and the ability to cross-reference multiple databases on top of the existing camera network.

The reaction from law enforcement and civil liberties advocates has been divided. Noel Pichardo, a former police officer who reviewed the software and related prompts for Wired, said the tool sounds "completely insane" and argued that Flock literally tracks people. An anonymous current police officer told Wired that OS Investigate's witness-finding capability makes him "slightly uncomfortable" but that law enforcement needs to use every tool available. Chad Marlow, an attorney with the ACLU, said the lack of limitations on OS Investigate prompts could enable police to lead the AI toward particular outcomes, effectively shaping what the tool produces rather than receiving neutral analysis.

The concerns Marlow raises are structural, not just theoretical. A chatbot search tool with 69 ready-made prompts, running across a camera network in 6,000 communities and checking commercial identity databases, puts a lot of investigative power in the hands of whoever types the question. If an officer can draw a box on a map and search for people matching a physical description, the difference between a legitimate lead and a dragnet — a broad sweep of anyone who happened to be nearby — depends almost entirely on departmental policy and the officer's own judgment, not on any built-in limits in the software.

Flock's FAQ page states that its cameras use machine learning to capture and organize license plate data. The company has also described its Gunshot Detection feature as designed to recognize specific public safety events rather than conversations or speech, recording only short clips (Flock Safety blog).

What makes OS Investigate different from the camera system already in place is the way it combines separate sources of information. Plate readers that log vehicle locations across 49 states already exist at large scale. The new tool adds the ability to search that location history in plain language, combine it with 911 call logs and commercial identity records, and return the names of individuals who were physically near a given event. The investigative process shifts from searching a plate database after a suspect vehicle is identified to generating a list of people who were simply in the area, then working outward from there.

The broader question is whether that shift becomes a breakthrough for solving cases or an open door to mass surveillance, and the answer depends on guardrails that do not yet appear to exist in the software itself. Flock's own caveat that current capabilities "may not reflect" the final product leaves room for revision, but the system's design is visible, and the camera network feeding it is already deployed.