Officer Tracks Ex-Boyfriend's Wife Using Police Cameras #shorts

Our Take

This is the nightmare scenario every ALPR skeptic warns about, not some hypothetical. According to the short from Revenge Of The Cis, a police officer allegedly used her department's Flock camera network to track her ex-boyfriend's wife — three dozen-plus log entries of someone pulling location data on a private citizen for personal, not public safety, reasons. That's not a policy failure on paper. That's a person with a badge and a login turning a surveillance dragnet into a stalking tool.

Departments keep selling these systems on the promise of 'audit logs' and 'policy safeguards,' but logs only matter if someone's actually reviewing them, and policies only matter if violating them carries real consequences. Most of these abuse cases surface because a victim got suspicious or a coworker talked, not because the system caught itself. That's the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: the technology works exactly as designed, and the designed use includes zero friction against misuse by the people running it.

If there's a camera reading plates in your town, you deserve to know who's watching and why. Check our camera map to see what's near you, and hit up our take-action page if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR access where you live.