Police stalking: From coffee shops to crime scenes

Our Take

Every time Flock Safety or a police chief insists these camera networks are only used for serious crime, stories like the ones Mumford Law lays out here explain why that promise means nothing. A plate run 228 times with no case number attached isn't an investigation — it's obsession, powered by infrastructure your city council approved as a 'public safety' tool. Ottawa, Sedgwick, Joplin: different badges, same pattern. An officer gets curious about a woman, and instead of asking for her number, he queries a database that was never supposed to double as a dating app with subpoena power.

The uncomfortable truth is that audits catch almost none of this in real time. These cases surface because someone eventually complained, not because the system flagged the abuse itself. Flock's own transparency portals rely on agencies self-reporting reasons for searches, and 'running my ex' or 'running a woman I'm into' isn't a category anyone types in honestly. When the people holding the keys to a surveillance network are themselves the threat, 'trust us' policy language is worthless.

Credit to Mumford Law for pulling these incidents together instead of treating each one as an isolated bad-apple story — because it isn't. If there's a Flock camera near you, you can check our map to see what's already watching your street, and if you want to push back on how these systems get authorized and audited in your town, our take-action page has a starting point.