News: Wisconsin police use flock to track someone buying legal across state line
The short version: A Wisconsin sheriff's office reportedly used Flock's nationwide ALPR network to track someone's interstate trip for legal marijuana, per TheWiscoKid's reporting.
Our Take
This is the part of Flock's pitch that rarely makes the press release: the cameras don't stop at the county line, and neither does the data. TheWiscoKid's reporting shows Brown County deputies reaching into a nationwide lookup system to follow someone doing something perfectly legal in another state. That's not solving a crime — that's using a surveillance dragnet to monitor lawful behavior just because it crossed a jurisdictional line.
Flock has always marketed its network as a force multiplier for small departments, but 'nationwide' cuts both ways. A sheriff in Wisconsin can now pull plate history from cameras thousands of miles away, often with minimal oversight on what counts as a legitimate reason to search. When the justification is 'they bought legal weed somewhere else,' it's worth asking who approved that query, what policy governs it, and whether anyone outside the department will ever know it happened.
Cases like this are exactly why we track where these cameras live and who's watching. Check our camera map to see what's been deployed near you, and if your city council hasn't had a public debate about this kind of cross-state data sharing, now's the time to make them have one.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of TheWiscoKid, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.