Flock Holding Closed Police Conference, Requires Police Consent for Marketing
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PUBLIC - This article does not require an IPVM subscription. Feel free to share.Flock is turning a who's who of American policing into a captive commercial asset, shielded from outside scrutiny, through its closed law enforcement conference that blocks the public and press and requires every attendee to sign a mandatory marketing consent form as a condition of registration.Flock Forward, scheduled August 18-20, 2026, in Atlanta, bills itself as "where leaders come together to shape the future of safety." The only non-law-enforcement voices in the room are, per the conference page, "invited commercial partners," meaning Flock's paying business partners. The public is excluded. So is the press.What the Consent Form RequiresTo register, attendees must check a mandatory box agreeing to Flock's Photo and Video Consent Form.The checkbox cannot be skipped. There is no opt-out.The form is a binding commercial agreement, not a courtesy notice. Attendees consent to be "interviewed, recorded, photographed, videotaped or filmed" for "marketing, publication, display or broadcast (print, web, digital display and all other forms of media and marketing)." All content becomes "the property of Flock Group Inc." Signatories "relinquish any present or future claim for compensation or reimbursement."In plain terms: an officer who attends signs over their image, words, and professional affiliation to Flock's marketing operation, permanently and without compensation, before they walk in the door. There is no defensible justification for requiring this of public officials as a condition of attending a conference. It should be removed.A Private Corporation Shaping Public Safety, Without the PublicThe conference tagline: "where leaders come together to shape the future of safety," raises an obvious question: why is the public excluded from shaping the future of their own safety?If a government agency held a closed law enforcement conference, it would at least be subject to FOIA requests, public records laws, and oversight mechanisms. Flock is not a government agency. It is a private corporation, valued at $8.4 billion, that derives virtually all of its revenue from public contracts funded by taxpayers. It operates a national surveillance network tracking the movements of ordinary Americans, tens of billions of times a month, across 5,000 law enforcement agencies.
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The people whose tax dollars fund those agencies, and whose vehicles are tracked by that network, are not invited. The only outside voices in the room are companies that profit alongside Flock.The $350 registration fee is a token contribution, not a price. Flock is subsidizing the real cost of the event because the return is not ticket revenue: it is the relationships, content, and marketing material extracted from the room under a mandatory consent agreement every officer signed before arriving.Last year's Flock Forward drew more than 650 guests, including Chiefs of Police and city leaders. Their marketing video shows going to a baseball game and sitting in a premium indoor club seating:
The math makes this plain. The conference page advertises $350 for "all sessions, meals, and experiences" across three days in Atlanta. Their marketing video shows attendees in premium indoor club seating at a Braves game: tickets that run $250 to $800 per person on their own. A three-day conference at that scale costs many multiples of $350 per person to run.The Revolving Door Runs Into the Conference RoomThis is not the first Flock Forward, and the conference is part of a documented pattern of Flock using law enforcement relationships as a commercial engine. We documented how two Elk Grove PD officials marketed Flock extensively before taking jobs at the company, finding at least eight public occasions where they promoted Flock less than a year before joining it. A former San Diego police captain who oversaw that city's Flock deployment joined Flock months after retiring, prompting a city councilmember to call the relationship "totally inappropriate." A former DC Metropolitan Police CIO joined Flock as Strategic Relations Manager after spearheading that city's Real-Time Crime Center. Flock has also privately offered to draft pro-LPR op-eds for city prosecutors and offered its top attorneys to provide courtroom testimony defending cities that use its systems. The conference is the logical extension of it all: a private, subsidized gathering where Flock deepens its grip on the law enforcement officials who decide whether to buy, keep, or expand its contracts, while the public that funds those contracts waits outside.The Protest OpportunityFlock can keep the press and public out of the conference itself. What it cannot do is keep them off the street outside.Opposition to Flock has been escalating in form, not just volume.
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City council appearances gave way to confronting installers in the field, which in turn led to 50+ demonstrators gathering outside Flock's Atlanta HQ. More than 60 cities have now moved to terminate or pause their Flock contracts. A closed-door gathering of law enforcement chiefs and city officials in Atlanta at a known venue on known dates is the most concentrated and visible target the opposition has yet had.There is also a certain irony in Flock's consent strategy. Flock has secured the legal right to use likenesses of police officials in its own marketing. What it cannot control is what happens on a public sidewalk. Any law enforcement official walking into a Flock-subsidized conference — at a company that has been found to violate state privacy laws, and that the ACLU has called "authoritarian tracking" — is walking in public.Protesters with cameras have the same rights that Flock required those officers to sign away.