When Your Ex Has a Badge: Police Are Using Flock Cameras to Track Their Exes
The short version: A badge shouldn't come with a backdoor into your location history — Flock's audit logs are a paper trail, not a force field.
Our Take
BurbNBougie: The Feral Feminist lays out a scenario that should make anyone's stomach turn: an officer with access to Flock Safety's ALPR network using that access to track an ex-partner's movements. This isn't hypothetical paranoia. Departments across the country have already had to discipline or fire officers for running plates on personal matters, and Flock's own marketing leans hard on "every search is logged" as the safeguard — as if an audit trail after the fact does anything for the person being surveilled in real time.
The uncomfortable truth is that these systems were sold to city councils as tools for catching stolen cars and violent fugitives, not as a way for anyone with a badge and a login to quietly map out where an ex lives, works, or drops their kids off. Once a network of cameras is blanketing a city, the technology doesn't care who's doing the searching or why. Abuse isn't a bug that slips through the cracks — it's the predictable result of giving law enforcement officers unsupervised access to a tool this powerful, with oversight that mostly amounts to trusting the honor system.
We appreciate this creator putting a human face on what's usually discussed in abstract policy terms. If you want to see how dense this surveillance net is where you live, check our camera map, and if your city is considering a Flock contract — or already has one with no real audit policy — our take-action page has steps for pushing back before the next abuse case becomes a headline.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of BurbNBougie: The Feral Feminist, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.