Judge keeps bond at $80,000 for police officer accused of using Flock cameras to track ex-girlfriend

Our Take

This case, reported by WPBF 25 News, is exactly the nightmare scenario privacy advocates keep flagging and Flock Safety keeps downplaying: a badge and a login are all it takes to turn a 'public safety tool' into a personal stalking device. Flock's pitch has always been that audit trails and internal policies will catch misuse. Here, the misuse allegedly came from someone who had the keys to the system in the first place.

The uncomfortable truth is that ALPR networks don't just watch the public — they hand enormous unilateral power to whoever has access, with little outside oversight of how often that access gets checked. Departments routinely tout 'audit logs' as the safeguard, but logs only matter if someone is actually looking at them before the harm happens, not after an ex-girlfriend already feels like she's being hunted. A judge keeping bond at $80,000 signals how seriously this particular case is being treated, but it shouldn't take a criminal complaint to expose how easily these systems can be weaponized by insiders.

Every camera added to this network is another node that someone, somewhere, can query for reasons that have nothing to do with solving crime. If you want to see how dense this surveillance grid has gotten near you, check our camera map, and if you think your city council should be asking harder questions about access controls and audits, our take-action page has tools to help you push back.