Thornton Police officer cleared in Flock search investigation
The short version: Thornton PD claims an officer's Flock searches were overcounted — but even the 'corrected' 10,318 searches in 26 months is still roughly 13 a day.
Our Take
Next 9NEWS deserves credit for digging into this story and getting the department to walk back its own number — from an alarming 19,194 searches down to a still-alarming 10,318. But notice what actually happened here: the police investigated themselves, found a smaller number, and called it exoneration. That's not accountability, that's arithmetic.
Do the math on the "cleared" figure. Roughly 10,000 searches over 26 months works out to around 13 queries a day, every day, including weekends and holidays. Whether that officer was chasing real leads or just curious, the public still has no idea what justified that volume, because Flock audits like this one are built to answer "was the number right?" not "was the search legal, logged, or necessary?" Departments love to frame a revised tally as good news. It isn't — it's proof the system can produce tens of thousands of plate lookups with almost no friction and only a loose paper trail to check them against.
This is exactly the kind of story that gets buried once the headline number shrinks. Don't let it. Check whether your own town is running these cameras on our map, and if you want to push for real audit requirements instead of self-graded homework, see what you can do on our take-action page.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Next 9NEWS, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.