Asad Zahir Police Officer Tracked His Ex 2048 Times With License Plate Cameras

Our Take

Credit to OhDangReally for digging into this one, because it's the nightmare scenario critics of ALPR networks have been warning about for years, playing out exactly as predicted. A Shively, Kentucky officer allegedly used his department's Flock Safety access to run the same woman's license plate over two thousand times in five months, logging "drug investigation" as the justification every single time with no actual investigation on record. Two hundred forty-one of those searches reportedly happened while she had an active protective order against him. This isn't a hypothetical about what could go wrong with mass plate surveillance. It's a documented case of a badge being used as a stalking tool.

The part that should give every city council member pause is how this got caught: not by a supervisor reviewing logs, not by a citizen complaint that triggered an audit, but by Flock's own AI-driven anomaly detection flagging the pattern. That's the industry's best-case defense of this technology, and it still means one woman was tracked thousands of times before anyone noticed. For every case where the system catches the abuse, how many go undetected because the search volume looks routine, or because no one bothered to check? Audit logs only work if someone is actually reading them, and "drug investigation" as a catch-all excuse clearly wasn't being questioned by anyone with authority to stop it.

This is exactly why we track where these camera networks are deployed and push for real guardrails on who can query them and why. If your town has Flock cameras, check our camera map to see what's watching your streets, and head to our take-action page if you want to push your local government for actual audit transparency before your city becomes the next case study.