Lt Ruben Carter And Lt Kevin Smalls Fired After Flock Camera Audit

Our Take

Credit to OhDangReally for digging into a story that should be a five-alarm fire in every county running Flock cameras, not just Colleton County, South Carolina. Two lieutenants, fired eleven days apart, for the same abuse: using the license plate reader network as a personal lookup tool. One logged over 2,700 searches on 14 people — himself, fellow deputies, former associates — with zero cases attached. The other ran 62 searches over six months, including on vehicles belonging to his own spouse. The department's own language was 'personal reasons.' That's not a glitch. That's a surveillance system working exactly as designed, just pointed at the wrong targets by the wrong people, and only caught because someone finally looked.

This is the part Flock's sales pitch always glosses over: the technology doesn't stop abuse, auditing does, and auditing is only as good as the agency's will to actually do it. The video notes these searches went undetected for who knows how long because oversight was manual and limited before this year. That means the only reason we know about any of this is that someone tightened the process after the fact — not because the system has guardrails baked in. Multiply two lieutenants in one small county by the thousands of agencies nationwide running Flock with minimal transparency, and ask yourself how many more Rubens and Kevins are out there right now, un-audited.

Every one of these stories is a reminder that a camera network built to track 'everyone, all the time' will eventually get turned on exes, rivals, and spouses — because that's what surveillance infrastructure does when accountability is an afterthought. If there's a Flock camera near you, you deserve to know it's there and who can query it. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your town.