Cops Are Stalking Women With Flock Cameras
The short version: Dylan Schmidt's video spotlights a chilling pattern: officers misusing Flock ALPR data to track women, proving these networks are only as trustworthy as the humans who control them.
Our Take
Dylan Schmidt's video drags into the light something we've warned about for a while now: license plate reader networks aren't just vulnerable to outside hackers or data brokers, they're vulnerable to the people running them. When an officer can quietly query a Flock dashboard to find out where an ex-partner or a woman he's fixated on has been driving, the "public safety tool" has become a personal surveillance weapon. Thanks to Schmidt for compiling and surfacing these accounts.
This isn't a hypothetical edge case — it's the predictable result of building thousands of always-on cameras that log every passing plate, time-stamped and location-tagged, then handing broad access to agencies with little independent oversight. Flock's own audit logs are supposed to catch misuse after the fact, but after the fact doesn't undo the damage of someone learning their stalker knows their daily route. Systems built on blanket surveillance of the innocent will always be available for abuse by the few with access, and women are disproportionately on the receiving end.
If you want to know whether your neighborhood is wired up like this, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in your city, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting answers from local officials.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Dylan Schmidt, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.