Milwaukee police officer arrested for allegedly misusing Flock license plate readers

Our Take

Credit to TMJ4 News for reporting a story that should be a five-alarm fire for every city council still rubber-stamping Flock Safety contracts: a Milwaukee police officer is accused of misusing the department's ALPR network to track a person he was dating and that person's ex, running their plates dozens of times while on duty. This is exactly the scenario privacy advocates keep raising — not hypothetical foreign hackers, but a badge-holder with a login treating a mass surveillance dragnet like a personal stalking tool.

Flock and its police customers love to say the system has "audit trails" and "safeguards." Fine — those safeguards apparently caught this after the fact, once the damage was already done to the people being tracked. Audit logs are cold comfort to someone who didn't know they were being watched by a man with a badge and a grudge. The uncomfortable truth is that any database this powerful, this easy to query, and this loosely policed will get abused by someone on the inside eventually. It already has, repeatedly, in departments across the country — this is just the latest one that got caught.

Every camera added to this network is another point of failure, another opportunity for someone with access to misuse it for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety. If your city has Flock cameras, check our camera map to see where they are, and head to our take-action page to push your local officials for real audits, public logs, and hard limits on who can run a plate and why.