What Troy's Flock audit logs show
Troy's police department handed over its Flock audit logs after a records request. They show 26 cameras that photographed 25 million vehicles in five months. They also show 5,309 outside agencies searching the data, 12 of them federal.
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- The first audit left out who ran each search
- The department’s review never gave the number the council asked for
- The full logs show who else was searching Troy’s data
- More than 5,000 outside agencies searched Troy’s data
- Twelve were federal, including ICE and Border Patrol
- Home Depot and Lowe’s share data with Troy police
- The cameras record about 58 million vehicles a year
- Troy police ran about 770 searches a month against millions of scans
- The department does not track whether any of it works
On March 19, 2026, a Troy council committee asked Flock for two years of audit logs and a SOC 2 security report. It asked for both before voting on a renewal. Neither arrived that night. What arrived, Council Member Dorenzo said on the record, was “25 random data points from the last six months.”
Twenty-five is worth holding onto, because the same records later showed what two years actually contained.
Records given to the council
25
March 19, 2026
Troy police searches in one 60-day stretch
824
May – July 2026
Troy police searches since 2021
19,241
The department's own logs
Outside-agency searches of Troy's data
12,222,023
The two years the council asked for
The council asked for two years. It was handed twenty-five records from six months. That is one record for every 770 searches its own police department had run since the cameras went in. It is also one for roughly every half-million searches outside agencies had run against Troy’s data. Those searches fall in the two years the council was actually asking about.
What the council eventually got came in two parts, four months apart. The difference between them is the point of this page. The first was sixty days of Troy police searching Troy’s cameras, with the identifying columns empty. The second went back two years and showed who else had been searching Troy’s data the whole time.
The events around all of it are covered separately, in Mayor Carmella Mantello supports Flock.
The first audit left out who ran each search
On July 29, 2026 the department handed the council what it had asked for. It was two spreadsheets and a table.
The spreadsheets list 824 searches between May 23 and July 23, 2026, one per row, with ten columns. Two of the ten — “Text Prompt” and “Moderation” — are empty on every row. The remaining eight give the date, a reason, the type of search, and a count of networks.
Searches listed
824
May 23 – Jul 23, 2026
Officers named
0
No user identifier of any kind
Case numbers
0
No search ties to a case
Outcomes
0
No column records what happened
Nothing in those 824 rows says who ran the search. There is no officer name, no badge number, no user ID, no case number, and no result. A reader can see that someone searched for a stolen vehicle on a Tuesday. Who, why, and what came of it are not in the file.
Alongside the spreadsheets came a separate table of 30 cases, this one with case numbers, incident types, and outcomes. Those 30 are the ones the department chose.
A records request asked for the documents naming which networks those were. It returned “no results relative to your request.” The department reports searching up to 280 networks at a time and holds no record of what they are.
The reasons officers gave range from homicide to parking. Fifteen searches are logged as “Traffic Infraction.”
The department’s review never gave the number the council asked for
On May 19, 2026, the mayor and Council President Sue Steele announced an ALPR policy. It set a 60-day working period. At the end of it, the department evaluated itself.
Over the 60-day evaluation period ALPR technology proved to be a controlled, high-yield asset… System access remains strictly regulated.
The review reports 826 searches across 81 unique queries. It states that 90.2% of search activity consisted of repeated follow-up queries on existing cases. It tracks 30 search series and reports that 7 resulted in direct arrests and 2 in arrest warrants.
The council had asked for something specific and did not get it. The 60-day pause existed so the department could find out how many crimes were reported more than 48 hours after they happened. That number decides whether a 48-hour limit on keeping the data would work. Troy currently holds the data for 30 days. The council’s Local Law 3, passed 6-0 on October 1, 2026, set the limit at 72 hours. The mayor vetoed it on October 15.
The report reached the council on July 29, 2026. Two days later, Council Member Noreen McKee, who chairs the public safety committee, spoke to the Times Union. She said complete data had been turned over for only 30 of the 81 cases in which police used camera information.
Without complete data for all 81 cases, it is impossible to determine how many were reported more than 48 hours after the crime occurred.
Council President Susan Steele agreed the data was incomplete. The mayor and Police Chief Daniel DeWolf said it was exactly what had been asked for. Her reply went out on the city’s own Facebook page. In it she said the council “received all 826 ALPR searches conducted during the audit period.” The spreadsheets the department produced list 824.
The information was available for review, but they were too lazy to review it in its entirety.
She also said the report “reflected exactly what was requested,” that there was “no attempt to conceal, omit, or withhold information,” and that the council “received all 826 [automated license plate readers] searches conducted during the audit period.”
McKee set a deadline of August 7 for the dispositions and case numbers she said were missing. The committee met on August 20 to take up what it had been given.
A records request asked for the documents defining the logs’ “Total Networks Searched” field. It also asked for the documents naming the networks included in searches of 200 or more networks, and those showing which search capabilities were enabled. The request drew this response:
A diligent search of City records returned no results relative to your request.
In the same response, the department said that statewide searching, National Lookup, and geographic-radius searching were turned off during the review period. It also said that Troy has sharing relationships with commercial networks.
The full logs show who else was searching Troy’s data
Sixty days. Troy’s own officers. No names, no cases, no outcomes.
The fuller logs that followed run back to April 1, 2024, which is two years instead of two months. They answer a question the first audit never raised. It is not what Troy police did with the cameras, but who else had been searching Troy’s data the whole time.
More than 5,000 outside agencies searched Troy’s data
The network audit logs run from April 1, 2024 to March 18, 2026. In that window, they record 5,309 different outside agencies searching Troy’s data through Flock’s National Lookup tool. Of those, 5,143 were out of state, 154 were elsewhere in New York, and 12 were federal. Between them, those agencies ran 12,222,023 searches.
A separate snapshot covering April 2026 names 90 agencies that searched Troy’s data that month, and gives their distance from Troy.
Twelve were federal, including ICE and Border Patrol
Federal agencies ran 62,259 of the searches in the logs. The logs name them.
| Agency | Searches | Status in the logs |
|---|---|---|
| US Postal Inspection Service | 49,909 | Active |
| ATF Nashville TN | 6,340 | Marked inactive |
| US Border Patrol (CBP component) | 2,714 | Marked inactive |
| ATF Louisville KY | 1,719 | Marked inactive |
| Naval Criminal Investigative Service | 629 | Marked deactivated |
| Homeland Security Investigations (ICE) | 531 | Marked inactive |
| Six others, combined | 417 | — |
The six others are Langley VA Air Force Base, the US GSA Office of Inspector General, and Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. They also include Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada, the Roudebush VA Medical Center police in Indiana, and the US Park Police at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.
Homeland Security Investigations is ICE.
The mayor spoke to the council committee on March 19, 2026. She told it that Flock “does not share our data with outside agencies including the federal government including ICE.” The window these logs cover ends March 18, 2026, the day before.
Home Depot and Lowe’s share data with Troy police
Seven entities in Troy’s sharing network are not law enforcement agencies. The logs name Home Depot, with 101 store networks shared with the department, and Lowe’s, with 99. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute also shares data with the department.
The department reports sharing with 137 networks. Individual searches in the logs record between 231 and 281 networks queried at once. So these records do not settle what the shared total covers.
The cameras record about 58 million vehicles a year
Cameras
26
Up from 11 in 2021
Vehicles photographed
25,367,366
Jan 1 – Jun 8, 2026
Vehicles per day
159,543
Troy's population is about 51,000
Hot list hit rate
1.32%
1,538,562 hits, Apr 2024 – Mar 2026
Annualized, the Flock cameras alone record about 58,233,262 vehicles a year. Adding the department’s Axon body and dashboard cameras brings the estimate to 84,806,073.
The logs count these as plate scans, but a plate is not what the camera sees. Flock sells reports of a vehicle’s make, color, and body type. To make them, the camera has to photograph the vehicle, and everything around it in frame at that moment.
Nearly all the vehicles that produced a hot list hit were flagged for a lapsed registration, not for being stolen or carrying a wanted person.
Troy police ran about 770 searches a month against millions of scans
Against 25 million scans in five months, the department ran 19,241 searches of its own in the whole period since installation.
The department averaged 772.5 searches a month across the first four months of 2026. In the same period the cameras averaged 4,856,494 scans a month.
The department does not track whether any of it works
The cameras have run for five years and photographed 25 million vehicles in five months. The department’s own review states that outcome data — arrests, cases advanced, recoveries — is not tracked or retained. It has never measured whether the cameras solve crimes.
Records requests for its Flock policies and procedures before May 19, 2026 returned “no records could be located.” There were none to produce.
Sources
- Troy Police Department Flock network and organization audit logs, April 2024 – June 2026 (obtained by records request)
- Troy Police Department Flock search audit spreadsheets, May 23 – July 23, 2026
- Troy Police Department ALPR Tracking, May 23 – July 23, 2026
- Troy Police Department 60-day ALPR evaluation (obtained by records request)
- City Council Subcommittee Meetings and Finance Meeting 03/19/2026
- City Officials Announce Updated Flock Safety ALPR Policy Enhancements
- Troy City Council calls 60-day Flock data incomplete
- Mayor Mantello statement on the Flock 60-day ALPR audit, as a City email (obtained by records request)
- Troy City Council votes to regulate Flock cameras
- Troy mayor vetoes regulations on automated license plate readers