Police officer accused of using Flock cameras to track boyfriend’s ex-wife

Our Take

Credit to ABC News for putting a face on the abuse case that Flock's marketing team would rather you not think about. Every time a city council debates installing these cameras, the company insists that misuse is rare and that audit trails will catch bad actors. Here we have an actual officer allegedly using her department's own network to run plates on a private citizen for personal reasons that had nothing to do with public safety. That's not a hypothetical civil-liberties talking point anymore — it's an arrest.

The uncomfortable truth is that any system built to log where you drive, when, and how often is a system that can be turned against you by whoever has the login, whether that's a jealous partner, a stalker with a badge, or a department with loose access policies. 'Trust us' has never been a security model, and this case is a reminder that the people watching the cameras are just as fallible — and sometimes just as dangerous — as anyone else with access to a surveillance dragnet.

If you want to know whether your own neighborhood already has this kind of infrastructure watching your daily movements, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for the next abuse case to make the news, see what you can do locally at take action.