🚨 What happens when powerful surveillance tools are used for personal reasons?

Our Take

The Chicago Justice Project's clip with John McCray Jones of the ACLU of Wisconsin cuts through the marketing pitch every ALPR vendor loves to make. Flock and its competitors sell these networks as neutral crime-fighting infrastructure, but a database is only as trustworthy as the person with the login. When officers or even police leadership have allegedly used vehicle-tracking systems to monitor exes, love interests, or people they simply have a grudge against, that's not a hypothetical edge case — it's the predictable result of building a mass surveillance tool with weak internal controls.

This is the part of the ALPR debate that rarely makes it into city council presentations: audit logs that go unchecked, "reasonable suspicion" standards that are unenforceable in practice, and disciplinary processes that let misuse slide with a slap on the wrist. Once a camera network exists, it doesn't stay confined to the sales pitch use case. It becomes available for whatever the person with access wants to look up, and history shows that includes personal obsession, harassment, and intimidation, not just solving crimes.

If your town has quietly added Flock cameras to intersections, you deserve to know who can query them and what's stopping abuse. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your neighborhood, and visit our take-action page if you want to push your local officials for real accountability instead of just trusting the badge.