2,055 Plate Searches, Logged as 'City Planning' 🦊🚔 #Flock #Surveillance

Our Take

Credit to Sly Decodes for digging this one up: a sheriff's deputy allegedly typed the same bogus justification into Flock's search field over two thousand times and the system just... let him. 'City Planning/Traffic Analysis' isn't a real duty code, it's a phrase that happened to work, and it worked 2,055 times in a row because nothing on the back end checks whether the words you type match the badge you're wearing or the case you're working.

This is the part Flock's marketing never leads with. The company loves to point to the mandatory 'reason' field as proof of accountability, but a text box isn't an audit — it's a suggestion. The only reason this surfaced at all is that Jackson County ran its own internal review and didn't like what it found. Most departments don't bother, and most of the country has no state law forcing them to. That's the gap between 'the system technically has a log' and 'anyone is actually reading it.'

Every one of those 2,055 queries pulled real-time location data on a private citizen who wasn't suspected of any crime — she was just someone's girlfriend. That's the actual product Flock sells: a searchable history of where your car has been, available to whoever can type a plausible lie. If your town has these cameras, or you're trying to find out, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on how your local department uses this network, our take action page has next steps.