Police Perspective on Alleged Flock Camera Misuse in Cheektowaga

Our Take

Credit to WGRZ-TV for digging into this one, because it's the kind of story that proves the point critics of Flock Safety have been making all along: the danger isn't just hypothetical hackers or ICE data-sharing agreements, it's the person sitting at the terminal. Three dispatchers in Cheektowaga allegedly used license plate reader lookups for reasons that had nothing to do with an active investigation, and they got suspended for it. That's the system working, barely, after the fact. The real question is how often this happens in departments that don't catch it, don't report it, or don't even audit for it in the first place.

Flock and police departments love to tout audit logs as the safeguard that makes mass plate scanning okay. But an audit log only matters if someone is actually reading it, and if the penalty for misuse is more than a slap on the wrist. A dispatcher can run a plate on an ex, a neighbor, a local reporter, or anyone else with zero criminal predicate, and unless a supervisor happens to notice, that search just sits in a database forever. This isn't a Cheektowaga problem. It's a structural problem with handing every cop and civilian employee access to a nationwide surveillance network with minimal real-time oversight.

If your town has these cameras, you deserve to know who's watching the watchers. Check our camera map to see what's been deployed near you, and head to our take-action page for ways to push your local council for real audit transparency before the next misuse story breaks somewhere near you.