Flock Safety Just Got Caught: A Cop Used It 717 Times to Stalk His Wife #technews #ai #technology
The short version: A Florida officer allegedly ran 717 unauthorized Flock searches on his estranged wife's plate, exposing how easily ALPR access can become a personal stalking tool with little real oversight.
Our Take
Credit to The Blueprint for surfacing this one, because it's exactly the nightmare scenario critics of Flock Safety have been warning about for years. An officer in Haines City, Florida allegedly used the department's ALPR network 717 times over 21 months to track his estranged wife's car. Not for a warrant, not for an active investigation — just to know where she was. That's not a hypothetical "what if someone abuses this" argument anymore. That's the affidavit.
Flock and police departments love to tout audit logs and "every search is tracked" as the safety net that prevents exactly this kind of misuse. But an audit log only matters if someone is actually reading it in real time, and 717 queries apparently went unnoticed long enough to rack up that number before anyone flagged it. The tool worked exactly as designed — it just wasn't the person driving the abuse that got caught by the system, it was the target who eventually noticed and complained. That's a policy failure dressed up as an accountability feature.
This is the same pattern we keep documenting nationwide: a network built and sold as a public-safety tool that quietly hands enormous, low-friction tracking power to whoever has a login, with the honor system doing most of the actual oversight work. If you want to see how many of these cameras are already watching roads near you, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR access in your own city, our take-action page is a good place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The blueprint, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.