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 case every ALPR critic has been warning about since these cameras started going up on every corner. A patrol officer allegedly typed "drug investigation" into a search box over two thousand times to track the mother of his child, including 241 searches while a protective order was active. That's not a hypothetical misuse scenario anymore — that's a documented pattern that went unnoticed for five months in a system that's supposed to have guardrails.

The part that should worry you isn't that an officer abused the system. People abuse systems. The part that should worry you is how it got caught: not by a supervisor, not by an audit policy, not by a court order, but by Flock's own AI flagging an anomaly in the log data. In other words, the company that sells the surveillance tool is also the one deciding when to tell you it's being misused against you. That's a thin line standing between "routine law enforcement tool" and "stalker's database," and it just happened to work this time.

Shively is now promising a policy overhaul, which is the same promise departments make every time one of these stories breaks. The actual fix is fewer cameras, less data retention, and real independent audits — not a vendor's goodwill. Check our camera map to see what's tracking you in your own town, and head to take action if you want to push back before your local department becomes the next headline.