Cops Keep Using Flock Cameras to Stalk Their Exes

Our Take

Credit to Good Noise for stitching together a pattern that Flock Safety and its police partners would rather you treat as isolated incidents. When an officer runs a plate search hundreds of times to track an ex, that's not a glitch in the system — it's the system working exactly as designed, just pointed at a target the designers didn't bother to anticipate: the cop's own household. Flock markets these cameras as a tool against stranger danger and stolen cars, but the database doesn't know the difference between a detective chasing a carjacker and a detective chasing his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend.

This matters because the entire pitch for ALPR networks rests on trust — trust that access logs get audited, that "officer misuse" gets punished rather than quietly resolved with a reassignment, and that a tool capable of reconstructing anyone's daily movements won't become a jealous-boyfriend app with a badge attached. Case after case shows that trust is misplaced. Audit trails exist on paper far more often than they exist in practice, and even when they're reviewed, the consequences for abuse are frequently a slap on the wrist. A technology with zero meaningful oversight will always get used for the smallest, pettiest reasons the moment nobody's watching — stalking an ex is just the most grotesque, well-documented example.

If there's a Flock camera on your route to work, check our map to see where it is, and if your city council is debating a new contract, our take-action page has the questions to put them on record before the cameras go up, not after someone's already been tracked by the person who's supposed to be protecting them.