Internal affairs report says Revere officer used Flock cameras to track former girlfriend

Our Take

This is the nightmare scenario critics of Flock Safety have been warning about since day one, and now it has a name, a badge number, and an internal affairs file. A Revere police officer allegedly used the city's license plate reader network — sold to the public as a tool to catch car thieves and find missing kids — to track down a former girlfriend and her family. The punishment for turning a mass surveillance grid into a personal stalking tool? Three days without pay. Credit to WCVB Channel 5 Boston for digging into the report and putting a real face on what 'misuse' looks like in practice.

Flock and police departments love to talk about audit logs and 'reason for search' fields as if paperwork alone prevents abuse. But an audit trail only catches you after the fact — it does nothing to stop an officer with a badge and a login from pulling up someone's daily movements in the first place. These systems weren't built with meaningful technical limits on who can be searched or why; they were built to be searched, fast and often, and the guardrails are whatever an agency's internal policy says they are. A three-day suspension for weaponizing a citywide tracking network against a private citizen tells you exactly how seriously that guardrail is being enforced.

Every one of these cameras logs where you drive, when, and how often, and that data doesn't care whether the person pulling it has a warrant, a hunch, or a grudge. If your town has Flock cameras, check our map to see where, and use our take-action resources to push your city council for real audits, real consequences, and real limits before your local network becomes someone else's stalking tool.