St. Charles County police discontinue Flock cameras after data misuse

Our Take

Credit to FOX 2 St. Louis for digging into this one: a St. Charles County police employee reportedly abused access to Flock Safety's license plate reader data, and the department has now pulled the plug on its camera network. This is exactly the scenario privacy advocates have been warning about for years — not hypothetical hacking from some outside threat, but an insider with legitimate credentials deciding to use a mass surveillance tool for something it was never supposed to be used for.

Flock and other ALPR vendors love to talk about audit trails and oversight policies, but an audit only catches misuse after the fact, after someone's movements have already been tracked, searched, or shared without a lawful reason. The person on the other end of that query has no idea it happened, no way to object, and often no recourse once it's uncovered. St. Charles County deserves some credit for actually discontinuing the program rather than issuing a statement and moving on, but it shouldn't take a scandal for departments to reckon with what they've built.

This is why we keep pushing people to find out whether these cameras are watching their own streets — check our map to see what's nearby — and why we point folks toward concrete ways to push back at city council meetings and in local police commission hearings. Audits are not oversight. Discontinuing a program after the damage is done is not accountability. The only real fix is fewer of these cameras, tighter restrictions on who can query them, and real consequences before misuse happens, not after.