Milwaukee police chief defends Flock cameras after 2nd officer charged with misuse

Our Take

Credit to TMJ4 News for staying on this story, because it's the one Flock Safety and its police partners never want told twice: a second Milwaukee officer now facing charges for misusing these cameras isn't a fluke, it's a pattern. Every time a department rolls out ALPRs, the pitch is the same — stolen cars, Amber Alerts, violent fugitives. Nobody mentions that the same database can just as easily be used to track an ex, a rival, or anyone an officer with login access takes a personal interest in.

What's notable here is the chief's response. Not a pause on the program, not an independent audit, just reassurance that the system basically works and these are isolated incidents. That's the pattern across the country — misuse gets treated as a personnel problem rather than evidence that the surveillance infrastructure itself is too easy to abuse and too lightly supervised. A tool that logs every car's movements, available to hundreds of officers with minimal oversight, will get misused again. The only question is whether departments admit that before or after the next headline.

If you want to know whether these cameras are already watching your street, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your city not have this problem at all, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.