Two SC police officers fired for misusing Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit to WCNC for digging into this one: two South Carolina police officers got fired after misusing Flock Safety's license plate readers. We don't know every detail of what they did, but the outcome tells you everything you need to know about how these systems actually work in practice. Flock and local police departments love to promise that access is logged, audited, and restricted to legitimate investigations. Then a case like this surfaces and reminds everyone that the only thing standing between 'legitimate use' and flat-out abuse is an officer's personal judgment — until someone finally gets caught.

This isn't an isolated glitch. It's the predictable result of handing a nationwide, searchable database of everyone's movements to thousands of departments with uneven training, inconsistent policies, and little outside oversight. When the guardrails are mostly internal, the public only finds out about misuse after the fact, after the damage to someone's privacy is already done. Firing two officers doesn't undo whoever got tracked without cause, and it does nothing to prevent the next department from having the same blind spot.

Cases like this are exactly why we keep pushing people to see what's actually watching their own neighborhoods. Check our camera map to find Flock installations near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in your city or county, head over to take action for tools to get involved.