What Troy's Flock audit logs show
Troy's police department produced its Flock audit logs under a records request. They record 26 cameras, 25 million vehicles photographed in five months, and 5,309 outside agencies searching the data — 12 of them federal.
On March 19, 2026 a Troy council committee asked Flock for two years of audit logs and a SOC 2 security report 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 — one for every 770 searches its own police department had run since the cameras went in, and one for roughly every half-million searches outside agencies had run against Troy’s data in the two years it was actually asking about.
What the council eventually got came in two parts, four months apart, and 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
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 for the documents naming which networks those were 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 60-day review
The ALPR policy the mayor and Council President Sue Steele announced on May 19, 2026 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, and 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 establish how many crimes were reported more than 48 hours after they happened — the number that decides whether a 48-hour retention limit would work. Troy currently holds the data for 30 days.
The report reached the council on July 29, 2026. Two days later Council Member Noreen McKee, who chairs the public safety committee, told the Times Union that 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.
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 for the documents defining the logs’ “Total Networks Searched” field, naming the networks included in searches of 200 or more networks, and showing which search capabilities were enabled drew this response:
A diligent search of City records returned no results relative to your request.
In the same response the department stated that statewide searching, National Lookup and geographic-radius searching were disabled during the review period, and that Troy has sharing relationships with commercial networks.
What the first audit left out
Sixty days. Troy’s own officers. No names, no cases, no outcomes.
The fuller logs that followed run back to April 1, 2024 — two years instead of two months — and they answer a question the first audit never raised: not what Troy police did with the cameras, but who else had been searching Troy’s data the whole time.
Who searches Troy’s data
The network audit logs run from April 1, 2024 to March 18, 2026. In that window they record 5,309 distinct outside agencies running searches against Troy’s data through Flock’s National Lookup tool: 5,143 out of state, 154 elsewhere in New York, and 12 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.
The federal agencies
62,259 searches in the logs were run by federal agencies. 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, Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, 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.
On March 19, 2026 the mayor told the council committee 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.
Who else is in the network
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 what the shared total covers is not settled by these records.
What the cameras collect
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 52,000
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. To report a vehicle’s make, colour and body type — which is what Flock sells — the camera has to photograph the vehicle, and everything around it in frame at that moment.
Of the vehicles that produced a hot list hit, nearly all were flagged for a lapsed registration rather than for being stolen or carrying a wanted person.
What Troy police searched
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
Five years of cameras, 25 million vehicles photographed in five months, and 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