TEXAS CITY PD FLOCK MISUSE

Our Take

Credit to Jaewon Jung for surfacing this one, because it's exactly the kind of story Flock Safety and its police partners would rather you never hear. An assistant chief admitting, on camera, that an internal audit found a dispatcher ran 42 searches on the license plate reader system for personal reasons isn't a hypothetical civil liberties concern — it's the thing we keep warning about actually happening.

Every time a department rolls out Flock cameras, the pitch is the same: it's only used for serious crimes, access is restricted, and abuse will be caught. Fine — but notice how we only know about this because of an audit, not because the system stopped the misuse in real time. Dispatchers, officers, and anyone else with a login can search plates tied to exes, neighbors, coworkers, or anyone else they're curious about, and the only backstop is someone eventually reviewing the logs. That's a thin line between 'accountable surveillance tool' and 'personal stalking database with a badge attached.'

This is why we keep pushing for public records requests, audit transparency, and local pushback before these networks get installed, not after. If your town has Flock cameras, check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and head to our take-action page to find out how to demand real oversight from your city council before the next 'audit revealed' story is about your plate.