Cop Uses Flock Cameras to Track Her Boyfriend’s Ex-Wife

Our Take

Crime Weekly's reporting on this North Carolina case lands on exactly the nightmare scenario critics of Flock Safety have been warning about for years: a system built for public safety becomes a personal surveillance tool the moment someone with a badge decides to abuse it. If the allegations hold up, an officer allegedly ran dozens of searches on a private citizen's plate — not for a case, not for a warrant, but to feed a personal vendetta tied to her boyfriend's divorce. That's not an edge case. That's the predictable outcome of handing thousands of officers unsupervised access to a nationwide tracking grid with audit logs that only matter if someone actually bothers to check them.

Flock and its police partners love to point to "audit trails" as the safeguard that makes all this surveillance acceptable. But an audit trail only catches misuse after the fact — after someone's movements have already been tracked, after the chilling effect has already done its damage. Departments rarely proactively review these logs, and it often takes a victim's complaint, a lawsuit, or a nosy journalist to surface abuse like this. One confirmed case always implies a dark number of unconfirmed ones sitting quietly in a database somewhere.

This is why we keep pushing people to find out whether these cameras are watching their own neighborhoods. Credit to Crime Weekly for digging into a story that most local outlets would let die in a one-paragraph brief. Check our camera map to see what's near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in your city or county, our take-action page has concrete steps to get started.