Police Officers Accused of Using Flock Cameras to Secretly Track Exes, Coworkers and Citizens
The short version: A YouTuber named Lala spotlights allegations that officers abused Flock ALPR access to stalk exes and coworkers, exposing the system's lack of real guardrails.
Our Take
Credit to Lala for putting a human face on what we've been warning about for a while: license plate readers don't just watch criminals, they watch everyone, and that data is only as safe as the person with the login. When officers are accused of running plates on exes or coworkers for personal reasons, it's not a glitch in the system — it's the system working exactly as designed, just pointed at the wrong target. Flock's pitch has always been about public safety, but public safety doesn't require giving every patrol officer a searchable log of where your car has been for the last month.
What makes these stories so unsettling is how little friction there is between 'authorized access' and 'personal vendetta.' Most Flock audit trails rely on self-reported reasons for searches, which means abuse often only surfaces after someone complains, gets fired, or sues — not because the system caught it. That's not oversight, that's an honor system wrapped in a surveillance network, and it's exactly why departments keep getting caught after the fact instead of before.
If you want to know whether this kind of tracking infrastructure is sitting on your own streets, check our camera map to see what's nearby, and if you think your town shouldn't be writing blank checks for this kind of exposure, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Lala, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.