FreeForm

FreeForm lets police type a sentence like a witness statement — say, "a man in a red hoodie" — and an AI searches footage from cameras placed around the city to find people matching that description. Unlike the old system, which only looked up license plates from a fixed list of fields, FreeForm's key feature is that it takes a written sentence itself as the search query, not a set of preset options.

The catch is that this free text isn't filtered the same way across categories. Sentences containing terms related to race or religion get automatically blocked by the AI, but political or social terms only trigger a one-time warning message — once an officer checks a confirmation box, the search goes through anyway. It's a bit like confiscating dangerous items at a checkpoint while letting through items that might be just as sensitive, with nothing more than a "handle with care" sign.

The article explains that "person searches take no filters at all — only typed sentences — and Flock has been selling this as FreeForm for years." A common misconception is that FreeForm censors all terms equally; in reality, of the eight sensitive categories, only political, social, and cultural terms pass through with just a warning instead of an outright block.