NEW YORK — The NYPD is reviewing hundreds of instances in which officers used Flock Safety, a controversial nationwide license plate reader network that uses artificial intelligence, the department said Tuesday.

The department has also enacted new rules about officers using outside vendors without approval, but a department spokesman said the guidelines are unrelated to a recent disclosure by two advocacy groups that at least two dozen officers used Flock’s database 1,710 times — even though the department doesn’t have a contract with the company.

“The current administration wanted to create a single centralized process for vendor engagement,” a department spokesman said about the updated rules, which were enacted in June and now include an NYPD supervisor needing the approval of First Deputy Commissioner Tania Kinsella “for planned meetings with vendors.”

The new rules also update “the ethical guidelines that members of the service must follow in all interactions with vendors,” the NYPD spokesman said.

The NYPD has never had a contract with Flock, nor does it share any data with the company, a department spokesman said.

There is no indication that officers violated any department rules by using Flock, the department spokesman said. It was not clear how many uses of Flock have so far been reviewed.

It is also unclear why the department has not previously established the guidelines about outside vendors, which ended a long-standing practice of allowing officers to sample new technologies on a pilot basis without department approval.

Flock, which declined to comment, uses artificial intelligence to identify vehicles being sought by law enforcement and track them. About 7,000 law enforcement agencies have contracts with Flock and turn to the company’s database as they look for suspects. The company has about 120,000 cameras nationwide.

Nearly all the NYPD searches using Flock are believed to involve suspects who have fled the city.

The NYPD in October told Flock it was not interested in entering into a contract, in part because the department already works with another firm, Vigilant Solutions and has its own license plate reader system.

Currently, Flock has a small presence in the city and is used by a few private companies and corporate-owned chains such as Home Depot.

Civil rights organizations like LatinoJustice determined that NYPD officers used Flock 1,710 times between March 2023 and last December, noting that in 614 of the license plate searches, officers either did not say what the search was for — such as a murder investigation or to find a stolen car — or listed numerical codes or shorthand that didn’t explain the reason.

“We just don’t know what so many of these searches are for,” said Andrew Case, a LatinoJustice lawyer. “And you have to wonder what else have (the NYPD) been using, off-market, without any guidelines.”

“The idea that a vendor could walk up to a sergeant or a detective and say, ‘I’ll give you free access to our database and no one in the Police Department knows you’re using the tool is troubling,” Case said.

Eleni Manis, research director for Surveillance Oversight Technology Project, or S.T.O.P., said she hopes the Freedom of Information Law request her group and LatinoJustice have filed will shed more light on the NYPD’s use of Flock.

“It’s at least 24 officers who used Flock, but there’s an awful lot of blanks,” she said, referring to the spreadsheet made public Sept. 17. “There are 418 searches, with no officer name, conducted by who knows who for the NYPD.”

Civil libertarians have blasted Flock, viewing it as more evidence that American life is under more surveillance than ever. Flock cameras have been spray-painted, vandalized, even cut down.

Some police forces have been criticized for not establishing rules about its use, with one Texas cop caught using Flock more than 10,000 times to track his ex-girlfriend’s license plate.

The NYPD said its contract with Vigilant routinely aids in investigations and leads to arrests. The department’s own license plate reader system helped make arrests in a case last week involving three men who drove off after trespassing in the sewer system and popping out of a Park Ave. manhole near where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu typically stays during the United Nations General Assembly.

Two of the suspects have been charged, while the third is still being sought.

LatinoJustice and S.T.O.P. learned of the NYPD officers using Flock from Have I Been Flocked, a website which tracks responses to people who ask if their license plates were searched.

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