Texas City police change Flock camera policies after misuse
The short version: Texas City admits two Flock camera misuse cases but keeps the system anyway, betting that new access rules will stop the next abuse before it happens.
Our Take
Credit to KHOU 11 for getting Texas City PD on record about something most departments would rather bury: officers misusing Flock Safety's ALPR network not once, but twice. The department's answer isn't to shut the system down — it's to tighten who gets to log in. That's the pattern we see nationwide. Misuse surfaces, a policy memo gets rewritten, and the cameras keep running. The underlying problem — a vast database of everyone's movements, sitting there waiting to be queried for the wrong reasons — never goes away.
"New safeguards" sound reassuring until you remember that the two cases we know about are almost certainly not the only ones. Flock's own audit tools can flag searches without a case number, but they rely on someone actually reviewing the logs and caring enough to act. Access policies are only as good as the people enforcing them, and departments have shown again and again that self-policing is a weak substitute for not building the surveillance tool in the first place.
If Texas City is on our camera map, this is exactly the kind of local accountability story residents should be bringing to city council meetings. Misuse admissions are a crack in the door — use our take-action resources to push your own city for real transparency before it takes a scandal to get it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KHOU 11, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.