FLOCK ABUSE & SECRET CONNECTIONS? Two Sheriff’s Offices?? 📱

Our Take

Auditing Reno 911 is tracking a story that should worry anyone who's been told ALPR access is tightly controlled and logged: a Carson City Sheriff's deputy reportedly resigned amid allegations she used the Flock system to track people outside any legitimate law enforcement purpose, with the thread now reaching into Washoe County Sheriff's Office as well. We can't verify the specifics beyond what the channel and Reno Cop Watch have reported, but the pattern is one we've flagged before — these networks run on trust that individual officers won't abuse a tool that can reconstruct someone's daily movements in seconds.

Flock and its vendor partners love to tout audit logs as the safeguard against exactly this kind of misuse. But an audit log only matters if someone's actually reviewing it, and it means nothing after the fact to the person who was tracked without cause. A badge and a login shouldn't be a blank check to surveil an ex, a critic, or anyone else a deputy takes a personal interest in — yet that's the recurring allegation pattern nationwide. Credit to Auditing Reno 911 for pushing on cross-jurisdictional ties that agencies rarely explain voluntarily.

If there's an ALPR camera near you, you deserve to know it exists before a story like this one breaks in your own backyard. Check our camera map to see what's been documented nearby, and visit our take-action page if you want to push your local agency for real oversight instead of just a policy PDF nobody enforces.