Rogue Cops Use Flock Cams #stalk #wrongfullyconvicted jail #innocent

Our Take

Creator Dana Rachele is putting a number on something we've been saying for years: the people with access to Flock Safety's ALPR network don't always use it for the reasons the sales pitch promises. Fifty officers reportedly caught misusing the system to track people in their personal lives isn't a glitch in the model — it's the model working exactly as the incentives allow. Give anyone with a badge and a login a searchable, retroactive map of where you and your car have been, and some meaningful percentage of them will eventually use it to look up an ex, a neighbor, or someone they're interested in for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety.

This is the part Flock Safety and its police partners don't put in the press releases: audit logs only catch what gets flagged, and most departments aren't proactively reviewing who's searching whom. 'Trust the officer' isn't an oversight policy, it's an admission that there isn't one. When a system is built to track everyone by default, the abuse cases aren't outliers — they're the predictable cost of normalizing mass surveillance infrastructure and hoping the people running it behave.

Credit to Dana Rachele for keeping this in front of people, especially folks already caught up in the criminal justice system who have the most to lose when this tech gets pointed at them instead of for them. If you want to see how far this network reaches into your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on it locally, our take-action resources are a good place to start.